Andrew Leigh

Last Friday, I ran my regular social entrepreneurs' roundtable with a group of inspiring young Canberrans working to build a stronger voluntary sector.

This week, I spoke in parliament about a barbecue for the homeless at the Canberra Early Morning Centre.

Homelessness BBQ, 5 December 2013

On 26 November 2013 it was my pleasure with Team Leigh volunteers to put on a barbecue at the Canberra Early Morning Centre, as part of Social Inclusion Week. Social Inclusion Week, created by Jonathon Welch, aims to ensure that all Australians feel included and valued. It is about connecting local communities, workmates, family and friends and addressing isolation, loneliness and homelessness.

About 40 people attended the barbecue at the Early Morning Centre, a service hub under the auspices of the Canberra City Uniting Church. The Early Morning Centre provides office facilities such as desks, phones, a computer with internet access, a post office box address and safe mail collection point for mail, and laundry and shower facilities for people in Canberra who are homeless. It provides a free breakfast each day, and support and referral services. The Early Morning Centre is a place of support and community for Canberrans doing it tough, where they can catch up with friends, get help with day-to-day business and enjoy a meal.

Other groups supported the barbecue on the day, including Supportive Tenancy Services, Lifeline Canberra, St Vincent de Paul Street to Home, Partners in Recovery and Red Cross Roadhouse Services. I would like to thank the Early Morning Centre Team: Chris Stokman, John McDonald, board members, Margaret Watt and Terry Birtles, and the Friends of the Early Morning Centre patron Tim Gavel, as well as my friend Bronwyn Fagan. The barbecue was Margaret Watts's idea and I would like to thank her connecting us with the Early Morning Centre in this regard. I want to thank the onion cutters, the salad preparers and the snag turners from Team Leigh—Rob and Robin Eakin, Rod Holesgrove, Meredith Hinchliffe, Adrian Rumore, Joan Costanzo and Matthew Walker. The great Aussie barbecue is a terrific tradition which encapsulates so many great Australian values: mateship, the fair go, egalitarianism, and—with vegetarian and halal sausages—multiculturalism.

I am deeply concerned about the drop in community spirit that has occurred in Australia over the past few generations. I wrote about this in Disconnected, and it is an issue of great concern to me. It is a pleasure to be able to work with great Canberra community organisations like the Early Morning Centre, which are reaching out to some of the most vulnerable Canberrans, and making sure that they are part of our great city and the community spirit contained within it. Working together we can deal with social isolation, build a stronger community and make sure that Australians are better connected.

My short review of Ross Garnaut's new book appears in this month's AFR Boss magazine.

Review of Ross Garnaut, Dog Days: Australia After the Boom, Australian Financial Review, Boss Magazine, 6 December 2013


When judging a batsman in cricket, we often forget to account for the ground. We all know the Adelaide Oval has even bounce and short square boundaries compared to the MCG. But we still mistakenly think a batsman is doing better when he’s wielding the willow in Adelaide.

The same goes for economic policymakers. In the ‘salad days’ of the early-2000s, argues Ross Garnaut, ordinary policy looked celestial. In the ‘dog days’ of the post-GFC era, celestial economic policy could look ordinary. Poor decision-making in Mining Boom Mark I went unnoticed. In Mining Boom Mark II, everyone was a critic.

Ross Garnaut has been a major feature in Australia’s public life for over two decades (which helps explain the fact that his writings account for one-fifth of the reference list). Dog Days catalogues a plethora of concerns. Garnaut is troubled by the dominant role of bank economists in macroeconomic debates, shamelessly partisan newspapers, sluggish productivity in the utilities sector, and a fall in hours worked per person. On climate change, he warns that non-market approaches ‘would cost much more to meet the same targets’.

Garnaut notes that the beneficiaries of reform are diffuse and may not even exist at the time of the change. His suggested solutions include a negative income tax to raise participation rates, a state-federal mining profit tax, a cut in official interest rates, and the promotion of greater competition policy. But even with a new reform era, Garnaut believes, living standards will fall. Dog Days indeed.

Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and the Federal Member for Fraser, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

Today during Question Time today my colleague Justine Elliot reminded the House of what the Prime Minister said in August – “There will be no change to the GST, full stop, end of story.” She asked, 'Why then is the Government now considering applying the GST to relocatable home parks – the complete opposite of what the Prime Minister promised?’

Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh

MEDIA RELEASE

TONY ABBOTT ON GST HIKES: "THINGS HAPPEN"

Asked in Question Time today about the impact of putting the GST onto relocatable homes, the best the Prime Minister could do was to say "things happen".

"Before the election, Tony Abbott made a promise: that a Coalition Government would make no changes to the GST," said Shadow Assistant Treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh.

"But after the election, he's ducking and weaving like a true featherweight.

"Thousands of Australians living in relocatable homes are worried by the prospect of paying GST on their site fees.

"Yet the best Tony Abbott can say is 'things happen'," Dr Leigh said.

“When questioned in Parliament today about the draft ATO ruling, Mr Abbott’s response was ‘in the administration of tax law, various things happen’.”

Dr Leigh said, “The Abbott Government’s posturing that the ‘adults are now in charge’ is mere rhetoric.”

“Mr Abbott’s response squibbed the issue and shows us that this isn’t the government Australians were promised.”

“Many owners of relocatable homes are pensioners priced out of conventional housing. If the ATO draft ruling becomes law they will be hit hard.”

THURSDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2013

My Chronicle column this week celebrates the community spirit of the Canberra northside.

Celebrate the Spirit of Community, The Chronicle, 3 December 2013


Former Labor Senator Bob Carr once said that to truly be grounded in your community, you need to know something about its history and its geography. You need to know the stories of the people who’ve lived in your neighbourhood, and how their lives have been shaped by the physical nature of the place you love.

One of the delightful features of this year’s Canberra Centenary program has been ‘Parties at the Shops’ – a chance for local communities to celebrate the things that are special about their suburb. You might need road signs to find the local shops in Canberra, but our suburban communities are something to be proud of.

I’ve enjoyed participating in many local community celebrations, including the 50^th anniversaries of Hackett (in September) and Watson (in November). Both are 1963 suburbs, and the celebrations gave a chance for some of the original residents to share their stories.

The Hackett celebration featured a bevy of local performers and a reminiscing corner with early photographs, including from now closed Hackett School. As long-time Hackett resident James Walker told a Chronicle reporter, ‘so many people were ripped from their previous lives and moved here and had to sort of band together. A tradition has grown up that you know your neighbours and are aware of things happening.’

At the Watson celebration, organiser Julie Smith and her team were inspired by the fact that the streets of Watson are named after lawyers. So they asked lapsed lawyers Gary Humphries and me to debate the topic: ‘That Federation is a Failure, Canberra is a Catastrophe and Lawyers are Laughable’. I drew the short straw getting the affirmative case, so employed the old debating trick of entirely redefining the topic.

Both Hackett and Watson are fortunate to have strong community groups doing innovative things for their suburbs. Hackett’s Music in the Park organised by John and Christy Murray brings together local bands in the Bragg Street Park. Watson Community Association has prepared a brochure on Watson and its history, discussing its Ngunnawal heritage and the role of the CSIRO Dickson Experimental Station for agricultural research.

One of the great things about civic life is that community engagement begets more community engagement. So it’s probably no accident that postcode 2602, in which both Hackett and Watson are located, was recently revealed to be the most generous postcode in Australia according to tax donation statistics.

In 2010, I wrote a book titled Disconnected, which documented the decline in community life since the 1960s. I still believe the basic argument of that book is right: data on churchgoing, political party membership, union membership, civic associations and sporting participation show that Australia has experienced a decline in civic engagement.

And yet the strength of many Canberra communities gives me hope that Australia can achieve a broad-based renewal of social capital. Canberrans are better connected with our neighbours than people in any other state or territory in Australia. It’s one of the many reasons why I am so proud to represent my neighbours in the federal parliament.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

This evening I spoke on ABC RN Drive with Arthur Sinodinos and Waleed Aly. We discussed debt, school funding and standards and consistency in politics. Here's a podcast. And, below is the full transcript.

WALEED ALY: It seems though the Coalition and the Greens have reached a deal on getting rid of the debt ceiling. There’s some strange bedfellows in politics. We have the strangest coupling I suppose you can, although the new Senate may throw up some new challenges to that… To discuss this I am joined by our knights in shining armour, Assistant Treasurer, Arthur Sinodinos, and Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh. Thank you very much for coming in.

ARTHUR SINODINOS: Hello Waleed.

ANDREW LEIGH: G'day Waleed. G’day Arthur.

SINODINOS: G'day.

ALY: It's the Greens, we love the Greens is it? Is that what's going on Arthur?

SINODINOS: I think our love has fluctuated from time to time, but at the moment…

ALY: I don't recall a fluctuation, I have to say. It's been fairly consistent.

SINODINOS: In all seriousness I want to thank them for the fact that they've approached this debate in a very constructive way. I was the President of Senate Estimates when this issue of the debt ceiling got quite an airing. The Secretary of the Treasury was being interrogated by senators and the Greens, in that context, raised this proposition around the debt limit and whether in fact it was better to move to a more transparent process of debating the uses and abuses of debt and being transparent about what they are used for, as opposed to having just an argy bargy over the fact that there was a limit and it needed to be raised every so often. So I think what we come to is actually something which will improve the transparency of the budget process. It also incorporates things like more references to climate change, intergenerational report and the like. So these are quite significant things.

ALY: Right so just to clarify, the deal is we get rid of the debt ceiling all together, the legislation that's there at the moment that imposes this, we just do away with it all together?

SINODINOS: We repeal that part of the Act.

ALY: We don't have an argument now about needing to raise the debt ceiling like we've had in America. We don't it anymore, but in exchange the Greens get a statement that has to come from the Government?

SINODINOS: Well every time the debt increases by about 50 billion, depending on when that is, the Treasurer within I think three days, would make a statement about why that is the case and with a statement…

ALY: And where it's going…

SINODINOS: Yeah, that would be debated and also there would be more augmentation of the budget documentation. Now we all know there is a lot of information in the budget, but the sort of information that we're now talking about, it will give people a better picture of the composition of debt, the trends in debt and I think also importantly it will help to clarify this debate we're having about good versus bad debt. And I think that's something that is quite constructive in this context, because we do get a lot of debate about the role of debt in financing, for example infrastructure. I think this will help to clarify the circumstances in which it's useful to have debt for that purpose.

ALY: The analogy Christine Milne used is, it's about separating the debt on the credit card from the debt on the mortgage. We're actually buying an asset, we're actually building something. Andrew Leigh this is actually one of the most interesting ideas in the election campaign that came from Jeff Kennet, I think it was at the time. Sounds like an eminently sensible idea, why did the Labor Party not strike this deal?

LEIGH: Well Waleed every now and then in politics I think you're entitled to look at the consistency of your opponents and to look at what they say before an election and what they do after the election. And I suspect if Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott had said back in August that what they were planning to do was to remove the debt limit entirely and that they would do so through negotiation with the Greens, people might have responded a little differently to them at the ballot box.

ALY: Which people? The Australian people?

LEIGH: I think so. Yes. I mean let's face it, what we were actually hearing from the Coalition pre-election was that if debt was the problem then more debt wasn't the solution. We heard some very cross words from Tony Abbott about the last increase to the debt cap and in fact the Coalition voted against past increases in the debt cap. So to suddenly move from voting against an increase to the debt cap to doing away with the debt cap altogether is a backflip of historic proportions.

ALY: Okay, well there are consistency arguments and I take them and we can explore those questions. But when you run a consistency argument it does suggest that there is not a substantive argument available to you to be run here and that actually the idea of having this debt limit that was imposed by your government, the Labor Government, the previous Labor Government in 2008 that introduced a bizarre sort of artificial barrier that we dare not cross.  But then it would be crisis if we did and so you could never invoke this legislation, we have to keep amending it in order to keep raising the debt ceiling. That was all a bit of a farce as we've seen in America and now we've gotten rid of it. That's good isn't it?

LEIGH: Well of course we have the inconsistency argument and you know we can talk about whether Joe Hockey should or shouldn't be eating his greens, but then there is also the substantive argument and Labor has always said that on the current budget papers debt is set to peak at, gross debt is set to peak at $370 billion in 2016, so it was perfectly reasonable for Parliament, given that projection, to improve an increase in the debt limit to $400 billion. And our argument was that if Mr Hockey thought that debt would peak at a higher level, then he should release the budget update as Labor did every year in either October or November and then Australians could clearly see the extent of the deterioration under Mr Hockey's watch, and for example the impact of the $9 billion to the Reserve Bank, the $17 billion tax cut to mining magnates, to carbon polluters.

ALY: Ok well I still don't see what's wrong with it?

LEIGH: Well the argument that Labor made, was that if you want an increase in the debt limit you need to justify it. Just as Australians, if they were looking for an increase in their mortgage, would be asked by a bank ‘why do you need the higher mortgage?’.

ALY: And now they do have to justify it. They just have to make that statement.

SINODINOS: Well we have to make that statement whenever debt increases in $50 billion increments, or close to that. And I think that does create a capacity for the Senate, the House to have that debate. It's a separate issue about whether this is a licence to go out and spend, you know, beyond limits or anything. It's not. We have concrete commitments about getting the budget under control, getting the debt under control. That's a separate set of arguments to this. This was about exactly what you said, something that Labor imposed in 2008. They made a virtue of the fact that look debt will not go above 50 billion. And then we got into this argy bargy every time that was surpassed. So they created a rod for their own backs and I think we've actually ended up, almost by accident, in a much better place as a result.

ALY: Now I want to pick up the accident, because of course the accident was not remotely of your side's making Arthur Sinodinos. This is exactly what you were opposed to until it seems very recently. That is the consistency question that Andrew Leigh raises. Why the radically different approach to debt suddenly from the Government?

SINODINOS: No, I think that we were always, and when we were in Government we were of this view, that we didn't need to have a so called debt limit. It was something that happened under Labor and you saw the argy bargy that occurred. But what happened is, that from a piece of lateral thinking, when everybody was talking: well should the limit be 400 billion or 500 billion? There is this considered discussion in the context of Senate Estimates and everybody is sitting there, talking about the situation, how it's different from the US in this regard. And Christine Milne was very keen to make that point. Almost out of that came this idea, well yeah actually maybe we should contemplate getting rid of the limit. But the point is, the conditions that the Greens have put on this are quite rational conditions, which relate to actually creating opportunities to debate the substantive issue, which is the debt and what it's being used for, as opposed to the argy bargy over the fact that there is a limit and it's been surpassed.

ALY: Sure, but the point that the Opposition makes, is a fair point, isn't it? And that is a few months ago you were countenancing not raising the debt ceiling when you were in Opposition and if the Government did that would be a statement of failure on its part and that any increase in debt was merely a statement of continued failure.?

SINODINOS: I don't think in Opposition we made a statement that we would not increase the debt limit.

ALY: No, no you said that you were open to that.

SINODINOS: The point we were making in Opposition was every time the debt limit had to be raised this was a reflection of Labor's economic management and we stand by that critique.

ALY: Was it a reflection now that you sought to raise it?

SINODINOS: Well Joe Hockey's whole strategy around the Budget is that he will use the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook to say this is essentially the fiscal outlook that we inherited, this was what it was looking like. And the Budget, which will also have the benefit of the work of the Commission of Audit, will be the opportunity to show how the new budget settings will apply, what the medium term budget strategy will look like and then there will be that comparison that we can make.

LEIGH: My concern I guess Waleed is that I don't think there is anyone in Australia who believes that if Labor had proposed this from Government, that Tony Abbott would have voted for it. There is no possibility that he would have done anything other than drive his debt truck around the country talking about how outrageous it was. And you know, I am concerned frankly that there’s an attempt to engage in what AFL fans call tanking, which is to try and dump problems into the 2013-14 Budget and then blame that Budget on Chris Bowen and Wayne Swan. We've seen this with the $9 billion to the Reserve Bank, which is I think an attempt to try and get greater dividends out in subsequent years and we're also seeing it with a range of other Government decisions which are worsening the public finances.

ALY: Well including additional spending on education, we don't know where that will come from and perhaps the Budget will fill us in on that…

SINODINOS: Well that Budget spending on education, which you raise and quite validly, that will be offset from within the portfolio. It will have to be.

ALY: What does that mean? Can I ask what that means exactly?

SINODINOS: That means other programs will have to be pared back to pay for it.

ALY: What sort of programs?

SINODINOS: Well that's a matter for the Education Minister.

ALY: Can you help me conceive of what…

LEIGH: Must be caps to university places.

SINODINOS: Well the cuts to universities are already factored in, unless you go ahead with your threat not to support them Andrew. But what I'm saying is, it's up to the Minister now to come forward with a package that will offset, through savings, the measures that he's had to introduce.

ALY: You can't help me with an example of what it might, we will never hold you to it..

SINODINOS: Well I don't want to pre-empt the Minister.

ALY: No, but I just can't think what it would be that doesn't worsen education outcomes.

SINODINOS: Well it's a big portfolio, so watch this space, it's a reprioritisation. We’ll watch Christopher Pyne's space, because he is the one who will explain that.

ALY: Is there excessive use of Comcars going on we could save money on? I don't know, I just can't, I can't think of…

SINODINOS: Well that would be more parliamentary than education.

LEIGH: This is a whole University we're talking about Arthur. I mean a typical university does have funding of about, you know $1.2 billion so you just, I mean you close a university, that would get it for you.

SINODINOS: Christopher Pyne will make the hard decisions necessary to pay for this.

ALY: I look forward to Christopher Pyne's receipt of your (inaudible), it will be very interesting…

SINODINOS: Look Waleed, the reality is that if we sat here and said that's fine, that's all just a further increase in debt, you and Andrew would be quite within your rights to say ‘well that's just further profligacy’.

ALY: No what I would say is that's very unlike you. I wouldn't say necessarily about the profligacy, that's a separate debate. The reason I raise education is because of the OECD report that we now have. Australia's education standards are slipping, relative to the world. Now part of that is the improvement of other countries, other parts of the world and we should keep that in perspective, but part of it is slipping in our own standards, particularly in mathematics. I am going to ask you first, how concerned you are, just get a brief response on that before we talk about the policy issues that this has raised. How big a deal is this for you?

LEIGH: It's a huge deal from my perspective, it's one of the issues Chris Ryan and I worked on when we were academics at the ANU. We went right back to the 1960s and it's all flat lining over that period, so I think there really is a concern and it's the absolute slump rather than the relative slump that worries me. I do think though that it gives stronger impetus to get the school funding system right and the work that was underpinning the Gonski review was having looked at the decline which we'd already seen going from 2003 to 2009. We'd seen a decline in absolute terms and the Gonski panel were looking at ways of getting a fair school funding system. Because aside from Christopher Pyne, I don't think there is anyone in Australia that thinks that the current school funding model is anything but broken.

ALY: Well you've kind of delivered us to the policy question, but I'll get your reflections first Arthur.

SINODINOS: Well look, we could get into a whole lot of argy bargy over what period some of these outcomes declined, but the point is now, where there is hopefully agreement between both sides about quantum of funding going forward, the real issue is the quality that goes with the quantum that we are talking about delivering. And that's an area where I think Christopher Pyne generally wants to put his own stamp on some of the proposals that are around. This is not about throwing Gonski out and saying it can't be used at all, because clearly there are issues around the needs basis of the system and all the rest of it that have to be addressed.

ALY: Except that he is not stamping it at all, isn't that the point?

SINODINOS: No, but the point is…

ALY: Once you get beyond the Gonski States, he is shovelling money at them, 1.2 billion, with no strings attached.

SINODINOS: No no. He has made some considered commitments around the quality of teaching, around independence of school, the role of principles and the like. And I think what we need to do is give him the time now, over the next year, to roll out that agenda as part of negotiating what goes with the funds that we're providing, because we will be holding the States to account. There will be, to use the buzz word of the moment, transparency around how our funds are being used and what they are being used for.

ALY: But there is no, as I understand it, unless I've got this radically wrong, there is no obligation that the States who receive this money, and the Territory I should say who also receive this additional money, that they have to put in any money of their own. We've received no indication that there has been negotiation on what obligations the States and that Territory would carry in to receiving that money. All we've been told is there is an in principle agreement, we're chucking money at them and we're going to be less involved, we're not going to do command and control.

SINODINOS: In the period before the Prime Minister and Christopher Pyne announced this funding agreement or deal on Monday, there had been discussions with those States and the issue here is that it's not one size fits all. You talk to Western Australia, you talk to Queensland, I was in Queensland last week and I saw Campbell Newman on other matters and he made it clear to me he had a particular view about how he wanted his education system or the State's education system to run. So to some extent we've got to deal individually with each of these States around how our funds are used and our understanding of what those States and Territories will do.

ALY: So a different funding model in every State?

SINODINOS: No, not a different funding model, but a recognition of where conditions differ. For example the Northern Territory has a particular Indigenous issue.

ALY: As does WA.

SINODINOS: As in part of the State, exactly. So what I'm saying is, what he's doing is not a one size fits all approach, he's been having those bilateral discussions and I think they will bear fruit.

ALY: Andrew?

LEIGH: I think that more money certainly creates the potential for improvements and if you strike a deal with a State, which doesn't increase the amount of money that goes to students, because the State withdraws a billion dollars for every extra billion dollars the Commonwealth puts in…

ALY: Cost shifting effectively..

LEIGH: Exactly. If all you do is you see that the education system is now payed for more by the Federal Government and less by the State Government, then there is no new funding available for schools and it's hard to see how you then begin to bring about change. I respect what Arthur is saying on terms of autonomy and so on. But I do think we've learned a bit from the economics of education over recent decades. Questions around teacher quality I think are paramount. And when I look at say the role that literacy and numeracy coaches are playing at some of the more disadvantaged schools in my electorate, that's a model which was federally driven, where you can actually be in a classroom and see the coaches working side by side with teachers, improving the way in which they raise literacy and numeracy. But if we'd simply said to the jurisdiction ‘well here you go, here's the cash, do with it as you will’, I'm not sure why any reasonable person would expect that to raise standards.

ALY: Well I think Arthur's saying is that's not necessarily what's going to happen and we'll have to wait for some detail. We're waiting on a lot of detail Arthur I've got to say, I do look forward to receiving it. I want to ask though about the higher education and the cuts to funding that you, your side of Government Andrew were effectively using to pay for the Goski reforms. You received a lot of criticism, taking money out of tertiary education to give it to secondary education. Now you've changed your mind on that, just at a time where the new Government is looking to fund its education. You asked the consistency question before, is this just political opportunism?

LEIGH: Well Waleed you and your listeners know the broad context to this, which is that over the period that Labor was in Government we increased education funding by about 73% and then introduced an efficiency dividend, which meant that people had expected we would increase it by 75% and instead we increased it by 73%. Either way you're talking about massive increases in university funding under Labor, largely because we took the cap off places, allowed a whole lot of kids to be the first in their family to attend university. And in terms of the efficiency dividend, the view we took was that it was worth imposing that while the money was going to go to schools, but if we're not going to see that money flow through to improve outcomes in schools, then we don't support it being taken out.

ALY: Hang on, but the money is still going to schools.

LEIGH: But we're not going to see that I don't think, because I suspect that, the States are pretty cash-strapped at the moment and I suspect many of the States will withdraw money from schools as fast as the Commonwealth puts money in.

ALY: But they still have to fund those original agreements with those States that signed on under Gonski. They still have to fund those and part of that funding was going to come from this and now you're denying them that funding that you yourself wanted.

LEIGH: Well it's unclear whether they're going to follow through on those deals. They're taking about four years of certainty rather than six years of certainty, which means that the total amount that they're putting into schools is considerably less than what we would have seen under Labor. They were saying during the election that it was a unity ticket on education, but I'm not sure that we've seen that delivered after the election, in fact I'm pretty sure we haven't.

ALY: Arthur I'll let you give expression to that smirk that I can see.

SINODINOS: No no, I wasn't smirking so much as reflecting on the fact that, having identified these saving, to now go back on them after the election, I don't think is a good look for the Opposition. I think there has to be consistency.

ALY: There's not consistency anywhere in the Parliament can I just say as a voter. Really, that seems to be the theme, I not sure anyone is entitled to run on it are they?

SINODINOS: On consistency?

ALY: Yeah.

SINODINOS: Well from our point of view, given the state of the Budget, we do need to maximise our savings going forward and these measures play into all of that.

LEIGH: We've got the two consistency issues, we would like the Opposition to be consistent in their attacks on debt, they would like us to be consistent on spending less on universities. I'm happy to be criticised that Labor now has a position where we believe we should be spending more on universities.

ALY: Kind of like the Coalition are happy to be criticised for spending more on schools. I expect in three years' time the Australian people will give their verdict on this gymnastics show that they are watching. We will see. Gentlemen it is always a pleasure to talk to you. I know it's very busy around here and you've got engagements to get to, thank you so much for dropping in.

SINODINOS: Thank you.

LEIGH: Thanks Waleed, thanks Arthur.

ALY: We'll be doing it again.

This afternoon I issued a release about the Government's disdainful treatment of the Not-for-Profit sector as it prepares to axe the charity regulator.

MEDIA RELEASE

Abbott Government to increase red tape on charities

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh says the Abbott Government has a tin ear for genuine dialogue with the charitable sector which overwhelmingly wants to keep the first national charity regulator.

Social Services Minister, Kevin Andrews, said today that he’ll seek to axe Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) with repeal legislation to be introduced into the Parliament early next year.

“At the same time the Minister said he’ll listen to the sector. How patronising,” said Dr Leigh.

“The ACNC is the result of years of consultation and listening by Labor to the Not-for-Profit sector.

“The sector supports an independent regulator as a one-stop shop to strengthen charities, grow their profile and reduce red tape over time. The ACNC is based on a robust Productivity Commission inquiry.

“Mr Andrews claims to want to assist the sector but is deaf to it,” Dr Leigh said.

Before the election a major Not-for-Profit sector survey by peak body the Community Council for Australia and Tomorrow’s Agenda Research Institute reported a strong preference for the newly established ACNC. Eighty per cent of respondents said the ACNC was important to keep.

“The Abbott Government knows what it is against but not what it is for,” says Dr Leigh.

“This is another example of regressive and shallow policy on the run.”

“The Coalition talked a lot about consultation before the election but has already made up its mind about the ACNC with the veneer it will listen to the sector,” Dr Leigh said.

WEDNESDAY, 4 DECEMBER 2013

‘A victory won by a lost battle’: What Eureka Means to Australians Today

EUREKA LECTURE

3 DECEMBER 2013

Delivered at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Ballarat East

Exactly 159 years ago, in the dirt upon which we are gathered, a man called ‘Happy Jack’ fought and perished. We know little about him – not even his real name. But he was described in one nineteenth century newspaper account as ‘a big black fellow… one of the pluckiest fighters in the Stockade’. Without the Eureka Stockade, Happy Jack might have made his fortune on the goldfields – or, as was more common – scrabbled to eke out a living. But he would likely have had a family. A handful of children. A classroom’s worth of grandchildren. He might have lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century. To be there at the moment of Federation.

Happy Jack was fighting for a cause larger than himself. So too were those who stood alongside him. They came from around the globe. From Canada, Württemberg, England, Nova Scotia, Petersburg, Wales, Scotland, Elberfeldt, Prussia and Rome. Eleven of the dead miners came from Ireland.

The killing was brutal. After perhaps a 15 minute exchange of bullets, the soldiers were within the stockade. Most of the dead were slain after this point. Troopers, hot with victory, killing in cold blood, stormed through the mining encampment, setting fire to occupied tents, cutting at the injured and fleeing or riding them down beneath the hooves of their horses.

Llewellyn Rowlands was hacked to death by troopers over 800m from the stockade. A woman, her name unrecorded, was murdered pleading for the life of her wounded husband. Eyewitness accounts mention Captain Wise bravely leading his men over the wall, ignoring a bullet hole in his leg. The same accounts describe Captain Ross, a Canadian miner, being killed after the action was finished. He died at the foot of a flagpole that held aloft a flag called the Southern Cross.

Some reports suggest 30 miners died within the vicinity of the stockade – their bodies rent by numerous sword wounds – with the final toll as high as 60. Without doubt, wounded crawled into the scrub or down diggings and died of their damage, alone and forgotten. The night after that morning, a Government sentry on a hair-trigger fired into the dark. His bullet killed a woman and her child. We may never know the names of all of those who perished: the Eureka memorial honours those whose names are known ‘as well as the other men and women whose names are unrecorded’.

And yet those who lost the battle of Eureka went on to win the war. Just three months after the confrontation, 13 miners were farcically tried in the Supreme Court for high treason against the State of Victoria. To loud and consistent cheering from the Court’s public galleries, Timothy Hayes - the Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League; James McFie Campbell - a black Jamaican; Raffaello Carboni - self-styled revolutionary; Jacob Sorenson - a Jewish Scot; John Manning - a journalist with the Ballarat Times; John Phelan - the friend and business partner of Peter Lalor; Thomas Dignum - from Sydney; John Joseph - a black American; Jan Vennick - from the Netherlands; and the Irishmen; James Beattie, William Molloy, Michael Tuohy and Henry Reid, were all acquitted by juries that generally deliberated no longer than 30 minutes. Indeed, John Joseph, the black New Yorker who was the only American for whom the US Consul did not intervene, was chaired through Melbourne streets after his exoneration.

On 24 November 1857, Victoria’s Parliament – alert to the democratic spirit of the goldfields - passed a bill granting universal suffrage:

‘All British, male citizens of sound mind and record, 21 years of age or over, could vote for the Legislative Assembly, regardless of their income or property, so long as they could read and write. And they could do so by secret ballot!’ -

One of the truisms of politics is that ideas that sound revolutionary today become conventional wisdom tomorrow.

As historian Geoffrey Blainey put it, Eureka:

‘[B]ecame a legend, a battlecry for nationalists, republicans, liberals, radicals, or communists, each creed finding in the rebellion the lessons they liked to see.’

December 1854 is a long time ago. A child born in Sydney in the early years after 1788 may well have lived to read newspaper reports on 3 December 1854.

And yet, it’s not so far back. My great-great-grandfather might have glanced at the same article. Since his time, Eureka has been reinterpreted by successive generations, the same way each generation feels a need to update Shakespeare, or perform again the great rock ballads.

Was Eureka a youth movement of an 1850s clash of generations? A revolt of free-enterprise against the tyranny of the British Empire? An uprising of the proletariat against the Australian bourgeoisie? The first explicit flowering of republican sentiment in the colonies of the Southern Ocean? Was it small business owners protesting against unfair taxes and red tape? Was it miners demanding more efficient resource rent taxation? Or did it go deeper: a protest against burdensome taxation without representation - a bona fide Boston Tea Party on Australian shores?

Whatever the interpretation, Eureka had a more powerful hold on the Australia of my great-grandfather and my grandfather than it does on today’s Australia. As Mark Twain wrote of Eureka in 1895:

‘I think it may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution – small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression....It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honourable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.’

In the 20th and 21st centuries, Australian political leaders have gone on the record to agree with Twain about the unique resonance of Eureka in Australian history. Ben Chifley, monument of the Australian Labor Party, wrote that, ‘Eureka was the first real affirmation of our determination to become masters of our own political destiny’. Chifley’s successor as Federal Labor’s leader, H.V. Evatt, averred bluntly ‘Australian democracy was born at Eureka’; while conservative luminary Robert Menzies constantly wove the Eureka story into his speeches and declared that the uprising was, ‘an earnest attempt at democratic government.’

Even John Howard – no apparent lover of Eureka’s ongoing symbolism – noted, ‘[Eureka was] central to the development of Australia as an independent democratic country,’ while Steve Bracks doubts that Australian Democracy, ‘would have come as quickly – and I suspect our democracy would not be as egalitarian - without Eureka.’ Gough Whitlam hoped that ‘an event like Eureka, with all its associations, with all its potent symbolism, will [come to] acquire an aura of excitement and romance, and stir the imagination of the Australian people.’

The history, this past ­– our past – isn’t dead. As William Faulkner – and Clare Wright – have said - it isn’t even past. The tidal wave of accounts written after Australia’s Federation is evidence enough that, unlike these names, the history of the Eureka Stockade is not set in stone. Nor, I think, will it ever be. The Battle of the Eureka Stockade has become a Battle for the Eureka Stockade, a battle for its history, meaning and legacy. Geoffrey Blainey has compared Eureka to a, ‘great neon sign with messages that flick on and off with different messages for different people on different occasions.’ This is fair because history has always only ever been an attempted consensus of speculations about what was done beneath the morning mist and gun smoke; but what is done isn’t what’s seen, and what is seen isn’t what gets written.

Organisations of the left and the far right both see Eureka as a militant struggle of protest against the entrenched powers of the status quo, a radical tradition to which only they are the rightful heirs. The beauty and utility of Eureka exists in the fact that these groups, on opposite fringes of our society, can find vindication in their appropriation of the event’s symbolism.

But so can we.

As John Moloney has written, Eureka was a:

‘bloodied drama of the human spirit...their deaths and the symbol under which they died, the Southern Cross, now belong to the consciousness of our nation.’

Our perception and embrace of Eureka is about how we see ourselves, our national fabric, our Australian essence.

What we feel about who we are.

Because history cannot be defined, let alone owned, by any individual or group – particularly self-aggrandising extremists. Well, stuff them. They own Eureka as much as we, they can relate to it as much as we. But no more than we. We can elevate the Eureka Stockade to the central legend of the Australian patriotic identity – where it will embody the first Australian claim to the global ideals of democracy, freedom, republicanism and multiculturalism, enhanced by our national values of egalitarianism, mateship and above all, the “fair go.” Every one of us can identify all or some of those ideals within ourselves, no one would unearth a philosophical dispute with the core values that became the basis of the struggle. It can be all things to all our people.

The Eureka Stockade is Australia’s greatest story. It deserves to be acclaimed as a founding story, perhaps the founding story, of this nation.

For tens of thousands of years, Australians have been constantly updating our dreamtime – our national legends – to reflect new information, new speculations, new interpretations. As the commemoration of World War I takes place over the next four years, we will see much of this discussion take place in the middle of the public arena.

But I defy the pages of our history to uncover a moment of similar transcendence as the Eureka Stockade. Of similar power and suitability. 26 January is Australia Day but also, in the words of Paul Keating, the point from which ‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?’

ANZAC day, Australia’s dominant founding legend, lacks both the purity of motivation and moral authority of the Great War’s conclusion, or even the balm of ultimate military success that characterises every other nation’s heroic military moments.

The world went mad in 1914 because a Serbian killed an Austrian and the major European powers could not – or did not – prevent the conflagration that eventually took 10 million lives. Australia went to war without question and without hesitation. It wasn’t our fight, but we fought alright. Our soldiers described their experience on the cliffs, amongst the sand-dunes or in the trenches as fighting for their mates and not to let them down.

Almost exclusively of those nations that fought World War I, Australia’s major commemoration of that conflict is not Armistice Day, 11 November, the day the catastrophe ended, but ANZAC Day, 25 April, the day Australia’s war started. Unusually, we commemorate Reveille more than the Last Post. There’s a message in that, perhaps.

It’s telling too that we focus so strongly on Gallipoli, an invasion that took nine months to invade three miles at a cost of 8700 Australian lives. An invasion described by a journalist in the trenches, Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith, as a, ‘series of disastrous underestimations,’ that was, ‘one of the most terrible chapters in our history.’

Unlike Pericles at the funeral of the Athenian Heroes or Lincoln at Gettysburg, there were no speeches from Australian leaders in 1914 that told us why we were fighting. No speeches that framed the coming cataclysm as a battle between right and wrong, a defence of inalienable rights owned by a free people, a fight for freedom. At best, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher’s strident, shrill declaration that Australia would, ‘stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to the last man and the last shilling.’

Not enough. Never enough.

However, the absence of a defining speech or an oath for the ages highlights more starkly the gap in our national story.  And if you’re looking for stirring prose, I’m afraid you won’t find it in our Constitution. As one of its greatest fans, Greg Craven, puts it: ‘Saying the Australian Constitution does not have a strong hold on our popular imagination is like saying fish survive better in water than on land: a statement so obvious as to be remarkable only because someone could be bothered making it.’

Unlike most any other country, Australia references only a military action as its day of national maturity. We do not turn to, we do not celebrate, we do not rely, upon inscribed Australian words that establish our democratic soul.

This is unlike the United Kingdom, which may look to the signing of the Magna Carta Libertatum by King John on Runnymede meadow in 1215 – that nation’s finest democratic hour.

This is unlike the United States, which can draw upon the 1776 Declaration of Independence (‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’), the United States Constitution of 1787 (‘in Order to form a more perfect Union’), and the 1789 Bill of Rights (‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech’).

This is unlike New Zealand, whose national day commemorates the Treaty of Waitangi between the British settlers and the Maori nations.

And this is unlike France, which celebrates its nationhood on July 14, Bastille Day, when the citizens of Paris overwhelmed the Bastille Fortress and inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’).

By contrast, we Australians have no such documents. No statement of freedoms, no democratic demands, no organic recognition of universal rights, and no common principles of liberty defined, transcribed, acclaimed and proclaimed.

Except one.

It was written here, in Ballarat, in the late spring of 1854. Its expectations were as clear, its motives as pure, the privileges it identified as universal, its language as authentic and as beautiful in its transformation of moral rights into political demands, as any of those I have just mentioned. It was the democratic sum of all establishment fears, and it lit the touchpaper of the fuse that exploded on these hills in the waking minutes of December 3rd.

We have words. They are our words.

They were written in Australia, in response to Australian experience, and they were read in the Australian morning sun on Saturday the 11th of November to a crowd of 10 000 men and women gathered on Bakery Hill. According to Canadian miner Alpheus Boynton, the words were declaimed by men who, ‘took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men.’ They are words that have been inscribed on the Memory of the World Australia Register of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

They were words inspired by a growing and, by that morning, irrepressible collective sense of injustice amongst the mining community. The community was beginning to realise that pickings on the goldfields were no longer as easy as advertised, and profit, if any, would be slogged out over the long term. There was labour for willing hands but the chances of a liberal reward for that labour was vanishing into the mud. Clare Wright suggested recently that,

‘Those who [had] immigrated in their thousands to the Victorian goldfields aspired to something different from what they knew, and particularly from the hierarchies of Home. Yet they also expected that the substructure – the traditional values and social assurance of law, order and justice – would stay the same.’

But the substructure they endured was partisan and corrupted. For some time, the unfairness of the mining license fee had been decried – a monthly charge levied by the Colonial Government on anyone who resided on the diggings, regardless of whether they dug, regardless of whether they found. 30 shillings a month when the average wage was 34 shillings a week and a loaf of bread cost four shillings. The infrastructure that the license apparently paid for did not exist. Although there was a baby boom in Ballarat, those children were dying like, ‘spring flowers,’ for want of doctors and hygiene. The Police were underpaid, dishonest and abusive. The licence, as Wright has identified, made poverty a crime and the penalty of poverty was prison. The memories of oppressive and brutal hunts carried out by authorities anytime they chose for unfortunates too poor, too unlucky or too foreign to buy a license agitated the mining community.

The fact that miners, indeed anyone without property or serious wealth, were also disenfranchised - not allowed to vote or buy land - was the deep-set offence. It was a wrong requiring an entire social realignment to right, but it was a realignment many considered fundamental and overdue.

A series of recent events had fired up the miners, gathering dark clouds of strife above Ballarat. One month previous the miner James Scobie been murdered outside the Eureka Hotel, owned by nouveau-establishment entrepreneurs James and Catherine Bentley. When, at the next days’ inquest, James Bentley, the mining community’s first and only suspect was acquitted of any involvement by a magistrate not celebrated for his moral virtue, the looming discontent blackened like a summer storm. The fix was in.

A week later, some thousands gathered outside the Eureka Hotel to vent their spleen. Heated by a hot, dry sun, fanned by gritty and menacing winds, fuelled by alcohol and pack mentalities, dissatisfaction became anger, threats became violence, the crowd became a mob and the mob became a riot. Flames were set to the Hotel and it burned, quickly and completely. Over the next fortnight, the arrests of nine men in connection with the fire provoked two more mass meetings. These meetings agreed to the need for a league to protect miners’ rights. Everyone who wanted to be a part of that organisation was invited to Bakery Hill on the 11th of November.

At that meeting, men spoke, the crowd listened and, convinced, voted the ‘Ballarat Reform League’ into existence. The Charter that the League then immediately adopted noted ‘That it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called upon to obey – that taxation without representation is tyranny.’ It committed the League to manhood suffrage, the abolition of property qualifications for the Legislative Council, and payment of members of parliament.

The Charter is the outstanding flare in our democratic consciousness. We have never been the same. Until that summer day no Australian political movement had demanded or defended the freedoms that we recognise today as the bedrock of our society. The call by the miners to have their dignity recognised and valued is echoed in egalitarian principles we still espouse. The League’s formation and political ambition electrified these golden plains.

Its impact was acknowledged by this editorial in The Ballarat Times:

‘This League is nothing more or less than the germ of independence. The die is cast, and fate has stamped upon the movement its indelible signature. No power on earth can now restrain the united might and headlong strides for freedom of the people of this country, and we are lost in amazement while contemplating the dazzling panorama of the Australian future. We salute the League, and tender our hopes and prayers for its prosperity. The League have undertaken a mighty task, fit only for a great people—that of changing the dynasty of the country.’

Australians who, like myself, fondly hope for a day sooner rather than later when Australians will come together to agree that Australia’s Head of State should be an Australian of merit-earned rather than a Germanic-Briton to title born, happily read in these words the first conscious step in the direction of Australian republicanism and Australian independence.

A critical aspect of the Eureka uprising is the strong strain of republicanism prevalent amongst the miners. The desire to create an Australian republic and to gain independence from the United Kingdom owed itself to the presence on the goldfields of large numbers of Irish, Americans and Europeans. The Irish were republican because of their hereditary hatred of the English; the Americans were republican because of their own history of struggle against the British; and many of the Europeans bore republican sympathies having lived through the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe.

Nonetheless, any Australian, republican or no, can read the words of the Charter, or listen to their fearless clarity, and understand immediately their relevance to any Australian, of any era, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, political affiliation, state, city or suburb.

On 29 November another Reform League mass meeting swore to defend from arrest any member of the League who was unlicensed, with weapons if it came to that. The uncommonly collectivist, us-against-them, team mentality of the Australian goldfields was made concrete.

And then, on 1 December, in a moment of pure theatre and matchless symbolism, all the League members became unauthorised diggers as the disdained and disputed gold licenses were consigned to the flames of a bonfire set in view of the Government Camp, while a handsewn flag was raised to the top of a handcut flagstaff.

A white constellation on a blue field, ‘all exceedingly chaste and natural,’ the Southern Cross was also described as the Eureka Flag or the Australian Flag. It had been sewn by Anastasia Hayes. The Age described it as waving triumphantly, ‘in the sunshine of its own blue and peerless sky, over thousands of Australia’s adopted sons.’ Raffaello Carboni, one of the leaders of the League, called on all miners, ‘irrespective of nationality, religion or colour to salute the Southern Cross as a refuge of all the oppressed from all countries on earth.’

Beneath the Southern Cross knelt Peter Lalor and swore on behalf of all those who stood around him;

‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties!’*

They are as bold and brave a set of words as has been sworn on this continent. They are not a glorification of Australia’s first invasion in defence of Empire, nor are they self-congratulatory couplets from the founding of a prison-nation. They are words galvanised by expressions of the universal human right to political participation and freedom from undemocratic oppression taking place across the globe. They are words that complement the continuing struggles for those rights today. Any citizen, of any country, could identify with these words, but citizens of this country should be inspired by them.

That these ideals were a branch of a global democratic project is underscored by the polyglot menagerie that was Ballarat’s mining community. Chinese miners were mistrusted and not invited, but otherwise Black and White Americans, Jamaicans, Canadians, Italians, Swedes, Scots, Jews, the Dutch, French, Germans and, of course, Irish immigrants attended and voted in support of these words. And they all voted as equals.

So the crucial elements of the Australian experience were crystallised in the Eureka Stockade moment – Australian multiculturalism, Australian democracy, Australian egalitarianism, and Australian republicanism – values many of us feel cannot be separated from what it means to be Australian. Eureka speaks to us positively about all of them.

But not comprehensively so. There was much about the Battle of Eureka that was not iconic, much that we must be wary of over-inflating. The words – the Charter of Liberties and the Oath of the Southern Cross – are outstanding, but while it was in some respects multicultural, the attitude of the European miners to their Chinese brethren is indicative of the deep and easy nature of Australian racism still walking in the shadows of our society.

So too for women. Australia’s suffrage movement was driven in large part by women whose formative experiences were on the goldfields, but Lalor was not in arms to extend the franchise across the gaping gender gap. Adult men were within the ambit of Eureka’s democracy, but not adult women. In a ‘conversation with the author’ that I did with Clare Wright in Canberra recently, I asked her how she thought Peter Lalor would have felt if he’d known that Australia’s first female Prime Minister would be the Member for Lalor. Wright replied: ‘I don’t think that he would have been very happy about it’.

Sadly, Lalor’s legacy as a democratic firebrand is also besmirched by his actions after he was elected to Parliament following the great political reforms catalysed by the Eureka Stockade. In Parliament he voted against a bill to introduce universal (white male) suffrage in Victoria, voted for a land bill that explicitly protected the rights of the rich over the requirements of the underclass and used low-paid Chinese workers as strike-breakers at a mine where he was a director.

Eureka is a great symbol, but not a perfect one. In my first speech, I talked about how the Australian Labor Party was the rightful heir to Alfred Deakin’s model of social liberalism. Yet there’s not much that’s liberal in Deakin’s defence of White Australia and protectionism.

Eureka too has its limits. So goes the human condition.

Although the Battle of the Eureka Stockade was not a major armed rebellion, at different times by different people it has been compared to the Civil War of the English, the Revolution of the French or the United States War of Independence. It is important to accept that, much as we seem drawn to victorious deeds in glorious combat, the brief struggle within the Eureka Stockade and the following unheroic massacre was not our Marston Moor, our Bunker Hill, our Bastille moment. The accusing memories of Pemulwuy and Yagan bear witness that this was not the first time in Australia’s colonial history that a rebellion was led in defence of a people’s right to self-determination. The smug orchestrators of the Rum Rebellion preceded and succeeded in their coup d’etat, while the dead Irish convicts at Castle Hill can attest to the first revolt of white men against the wickedness of Colonial Authorities.

To quote Wright:

‘The miners were not disloyal to their sovereign, but rather had lost any shred of respect for the minions who served her. They did not want to change the system of government; they wanted to be included in it. … Those rights, they considered, were nothing more or less than their entitlement as free-born Britons to be treated like men. Not animals, serfs or slaves: men. They sewed a flag and built a fence.’

And, I could add, they were thumped into next week by the Government. That’s all.

The core ideals expressed in the Charter and the Oath stand comparison to anything similar, but the fight to defend them cannot, even though some of us might wish our founding principles baptised in gouts of gold-flecked blood. Tragically, and terribly, blood was spilt on the Ballarat dirt, but it was the Oath sworn to the Southern Stars that should ignite our imagination.

Indeed, the events around the Eureka Stockade, and the reaction to it, now and then, bespeak of a curiously Australian style of political revolt. It knits together instantly recognisable themes of the Australian national character in a way like no other event in our history.

For instance, our little acknowledged but overriding respect for the security offered by the State. As the Eureka kettle began to boil, the majority of Victorian citizenry expected the authorities to take control of the situation, and despite the violence applauded them when they did. The State was safe.

But when it was clear the revolt had been defeated and the status quo restored, the people embraced the opportunity to demonstrate what has become compulsive Australian support for the underdog.

And then, when the State was safe but the underdogs triumphant, thoughts turned on the question raised by the losers of this civil brawl; namely whether a civil society was required to recognise democratic rights and needed relatively inclusive, representative government. Society answered those questions quickly. In legislative terms, breathtakingly so – considering it was not the establishment who were set to benefit most from political reform. But that Australian characteristic – today absolute – our commitment to democracy, for everyone, eventually, was born in the mass public support which brooked no obstruction. By 1857 a series of laws had been passed in Westminster and Melbourne that provided every white male with a vote in elections in the Victorian Legislative Assembly - the second male democracy in Australia after South Australia, and the first with convict heritage. And the license fee became a mining right. 30 shillings a month became 20 shillings, one pound, a year.

Compare that to England, the United States, France and New Zealand, where goodwill and peace to all humankind of was not the immediate, manifest consequence the people of those countries had desired when they identified and wrote down common rights of humanity. France consumed itself during the Reign of Terror within five years of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the same span that it took the New Zealand Wars to erupt after Waitangi, England was riven by a civil war in the 1640s and 50s that took toll of a greater proportion of its population than did the First World War and did not consider its female population mature enough to vote until 1928, while four score and seven years after the fathers of the United States brought forth on the North American continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the citizens of that nation were engaged in a great civil war, testing whether it, or any nation so conceived, could long endure. But it was not until 1920, 55 years after that conflagration’s conclusion, that women took the vote in the USA.

Since the 1903 federal election, Australian women have had the right to vote and stand for office. On this measure, Australia is the world’s first democracy.

Australia in contrast, sparked by the beautiful ideals expressed at Eureka, but not riven by the scale or nature of their proving, very quickly became the very model of a modern democracy. As a result of the political reforms ushered in by Eureka, notes Peter FitzSimons:

‘Australia became nothing less than one of the key ‘lights on the hill’ for democratic movements around the world, most particularly when it came to secret ballots, known as the ‘Australian ballot’...the country would remain at the forefront of those reforms for decades to come.’

There’s hard work in this. The same hard work done by the men and women on the Eureka diggings. Unrelenting, unforgiving. Hard work undertaken with no guarantee of ultimate success, but with every hope of improving the future for themselves, their families, their communities and their society. Hard work that continues.

But there’s some luck too. Economic historian Ian McLean points out that - perhaps for reasons of administrative simplicity - the colonial authorities initially chose to prescribe an extremely small claim size for goldminers: eight feet by eight feet. This spread the ‘lottery’ of gold mining across a large group of self-employed miners, who then helped spur the transition towards democracy. The alternative would have been much larger claim sizes, with mining carried out by wage labour. Our history might have looked like that of a dozen ‘resource curse’ autocracies around the globe.

No story, myth or legend is static. Least of all our history at the Eureka Stockade. To see the ideas of Eureka thrive, we need to be open to all interpretations of those events, old and new, to be open to the idea – to encourage the idea – that principles of freedom, of fairness, of democracy, written down and sworn to beneath the timeless Southern Cross sparkling atop Bakery Hill, that these principles can and do mean different things to different people.

* * * * *

GK Chesterton once said ‘Tradition is the democracy of the dead’, that it is about ‘giving votes to our ancestors’. Quoting these words, British Labour MP Jon Cruddas rebukes progressives for too easily scorning tradition. We must, Cruddas argued, respect the struggles and sacrifices of those who have gone before us.

There’s nothing ‘conservative’ or ‘nostalgic’ about a love of history and tradition. I take it as read that the Eureka principles will always mean something to all us. To any of us. Beneath the turbulence, anger and fear, in the stark commitment gone beyond class, race and gender, as the first gunshots burn the dawn stillness, we can each of us, all of us, stand there in the morning fog and we can know what we stood for. What we stand for.

For an idea that continues to epitomize Australia’s success, safety and ambition in a world often beset by a sea of troubles. An idea born in Ballarat that our nation lives and defends. An idea – the idea – undeniable, reliable and precious – that, beneath our radiant Southern Cross we can, and will, advance.

* My speech originally omitted the words 'and fight' from the Eureka oath. The oath (as read out by Lalor) was: 'We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.' I am grateful to those who got in touch to point out this error.

I spoke in parliament yesterday in honour of two great Australian economists - Steve Dowrick and Paul Miller - who I worked with, and who died much too young this year.

Steve Dowrick and Paul Miller, 2 December 2013

I rise this evening to speak about the passing of two great Australian economists, Steve Dowrick and Paul Miller. Steve Dowrick was born on 7 May 1953 in Dublin, Ireland, and passed away in August of this year. His life and his contributions to the economic profession have been beautifully laid out in an obituary for the Canberra Times by Bruce Chapman and Maria Racionero. I will draw on that obituary in some of my comments today.

Steve and his brothers, Christopher and Nicholas, attended a Quaker school in York that had a strong emphasis on practical social action, which reinforced his commitment to collective action. When he finished high school Steve was offered a place at Cambridge in theoretical physics but spent a year undertaking volunteer work at Blackfriars Settlement, Southwark in London, driving a van for a project named Workshop for the Disabled. It was perhaps that year that he spent working for disabled communities that meant that, when he started at Cambridge, he chose quickly to move out of physics and into areas in the social sciences. He continued to be active on social issues, representing disadvantaged residents at public inquiries on town planning. Steve Clarke has written that Steve Dowrick's contact with the people of Newport, and in the workhouse in London, gave him some really important insights into the lives and the stress that the poor encounter dealing with the poverty not only in their own lives but also with bureaucracies. Those issues of equality continued to pervade Steve's work throughout his career.

Steve returned to Cambridge in 1982 to study economics and had the great fortune to meet Deborah Mitchell, another Australian social scientist. They married in York in 1984 and then moved to Canberra. Deborah is now a professor at the Australian National University in the Australian Democratic and Social Research Institute. Their two children, Helen and Lydia, were born in 1986 and 1987. Steve immersed himself in the life of his daughters. Deborah said he was the kind of dad who would rather spend time with Helen and Lydia at night and set the alarm for 4.30 the next morning to attend to unfinished academic business.

In 1996 Steve became the professor of economics and head of department in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. He was at the peak of his academic leadership career but also his research career. He had worked with John Quiggin to develop a multilateral welfare index, to shed light on global income inequality, and was published in the American Economic Review—no more prestigious journal is there in the profession of economics. Steve also continued to champion and to work with women in the department and was recognised in March this year with a Gender Champion Award on International Women's Day.

There is a story which perhaps I should not tell but which is too good to hold back from this place. In the last few months of Steve's life, due to his neurological condition the nursing staff would often ask questions to check on his alertness. The usual question was: 'Who is the Prime Minister?' Apparently asked this in June 2013 Steve responded, 'It's Julia Gillard at the moment, but ask me again tomorrow and I will probably have a different answer—it will still be correct.'

I greatly enjoyed my interactions with Steve, who was always an insightful presence in academic seminars, coming forth with ideas and suggestions to improve work. He had that great spirit of the best economists of identifying flaws but also helping you to fix them. He was insightful but never cruel in the comments that he delivered. It was a privilege to work alongside him at the Australian National University.

Australian economics has also lost another great scholar in Paul Miller, who passed away in November this year. Deborah Cobb-Clarke and Chris Ryan, two of my colleagues when I was at ANU, and I have been reminiscing on what an extraordinary contribution Paul made to fields in Australian economics that are not overpopulated with scholars. The economics of education and the economics of immigration are fields that have probably lost a tenth of their productive research capacity as a result of Paul's passing. His 21-page CV attests to his huge intellectual contribution to these vital fields, with research published in the best journals including the American Economic Review.

Paul was also the editor of the Economic Record from 2006 and over-invested in that role. Economics does not always repay the time people give to collective works such as this, and with the devotion that Paul gave to papers, his comments were often more valuable than those of the referees—and I can certainly say this as somebody who had a number of papers published in the Economic Record under Paul's editorship. He was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 1997 and inducted into the ANU College of Business and Economics Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame, and in 2011 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Economics Society of Australia. His work at the University of Western Australia and at Curtin University was first rate.

I want to acknowledge particularly his wife Tram Le and their two young children: Erin, aged 12, and Andrew, aged 11. I feel particularly for the family, with such young children, for having the loss of such an extraordinary man as Paul. Elisa Birch from the University of Western Australia recounts to me the story that Paul started dating Tram when she was his PhD. student. She says that while it may seem a little taboo, Paul did everything above board. And in fact Tram has said that the vice-chancellor at UWA at the time, Alan Robson, knew more about Paul's feelings towards her and their relationship than she did at the time.

He was a member of the Fremantle Dockers football club, and probably one of his most happy times in recent years was when he watched Fremantle win the preliminary final to make the grand final. He was able to cheer the Dockers on from the patients' TV room and even had a glass of wine and a pizza with him, along with his family.

Many scholars have told their stories about Paul Miller, and Elisa has been kind enough to pass some of those on to me. Charles Mulvey tells the story of when Paul and he submitted an article to the American Economic Review. After some suggestion that it might be accepted, Charles suggested that, if it was, they would drink a bottle of 1984 Henschke Hill of Grace. He said one of his most glorious pleasures was sitting on the top-floor balcony of the old economics and commerce building savouring the glorious wine and basking in the glow of the academic coup. Tim Villa, the IT and facilities manager at UWA Business School, talks about Paul as being a 'friendly chap clad in stubbies and a T-shirt, stalking the corridor barefoot while wearing an expression projecting something between severe purpose and utter bewilderment'. Daniel Kiely speaks about the quality of Paul's lecturing and quotes one student evaluation in which the student said that Paul was 'the best lecturer I've ever had; the way he did the lectures was amazing; the fact he wrote on each slide explaining everything was extremely helpful.' And Daniel says that this sort of review was the norm for Paul.

Michael McLure writes to Paul's children: 'My main memory of your father, Paul, is that he was a great juggler, not of balls or blades or things like that but of the many things he managed to get done at the same time. It was a wonder to me that any one person could do so much in so little time.' Mike Dockery speaks about their shared passion for the Freo Dockers and the family holidays in Dunsborough, leading to 'a valued but far-too-brief friendship'. Michael Kidd remembers Paul as being 'a bit gruff, but inherently a no-nonsense kind of guy; he was always very helpful, willing to provide comments on drafts and provide references and the like.' And Ingebjorg Kristoffersen writes about emails sent at 1.30 in the morning and replied to at 1.35, asking: 'Was that man ever off duty?'

In my own dealings with Paul as another scholar on the economics of education, he was always generous with his time. I enjoyed the opportunities to exchange ideas and I would have greatly appreciated the chance to collaborate with him. I expected that he would continue to enhance our knowledge, as Australians, of these vital issues. It is a loss to Australia's intellectual community that he has passed, but of course a great loss to his family as well. Rest in peace Steve Dowrick and Paul Miller.

On Sky AM Agenda, I spoke with host Kieran Gilbert and Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg about the Coalition's broken promise on school funding, protectionist decision on foreign investment, and problematic calls in foreign policy.