Sky AM Agenda - 28th January 2013
For the last week in January we had a chat about superannuation, industrial relations and the Coalition's lack of policy vision.
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How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
On 26 February, FARE will be hosting a lunchtime forum at Parliament House with UCLA's Mark Kleiman, author of When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. Mark is one of my favourite criminologists, and I'd recommend the event for anyone interested in crime and punishment.
Details in this flyer or over the fold.
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Details in this flyer or over the fold.
How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
FARE invites you to a lunchtime forum with special guest Mark Kleiman, hosted by Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh MP
Tuesday 26 February, 2013
Room 1R1, Parliament House, Canberra
Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs. He teaches courses on methods of policy analysis, on imperfectly rational decision-making at the individual and social level, and on drug abuse and crime control policy. His current focus is on reducing crime and incarceration by substituting swiftness and predictability for severity in the criminal justice system generally and in community-corrections institutions specifically.
Professor Kleiman is the author of When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, listed by The Economist as one of the “Books of the Year” for 2009. In addition to his academic work, Professor Kleiman provides advice to local, state, and national
governments on crime control and drug policy. Before moving to UCLA in 1995, he taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Rochester.
Event details:
Date: Tuesday 26 February, 2013
Time: 12:30-2:00pm
For guests without a Parliamentary Pass, please arrive at the Marble Foyer at 12:20pm for sign-in, you will then be escorted to the event.
Location: Room 1R1, Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
RSVP: email glenis.thomas{at}fare.org.au or call (02) 6122 8600 by Thursday 21 February 2013.
A light lunch will be provided. Please advise if you have any dietary requirements with your RSVP.
Note: For guests who are driving to the event, please allow additional time to find a parking space due to the fact that Parliament will be sitting.
Construction of the NBN begins in Civic
[caption id="attachment_3740" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="In about 12 months, people living in the shaded area will be able to connect to the NBN"][/caption]Yesterday, I welcomed the release of detailed maps by NBN Co, showing where construction of the National Broadband Network (NBN) will start in Civic.
This is really exciting for local families and business in the Civic area. In around 12 months’ time, people in Civic will be able to start connecting to the National Broadband Network. The map shows that NBN fibre is being rolled out Civic, Acton and parts of Braddon which will allow more residents access to faster, affordable and more reliable broadband.
The map is another sign that construction of the National Broadband Network is continuing to accelerate, with work now having commenced or been completed to over 784,000 homes and businesses across Australia. The release of this map means that work is starting in this area and over the next few months, we’ll start to see NBN Co workers locally doing the detailed planning and inspection work, and then rolling out the fibre. Within around twelve months, construction of the NBN in Civic will be completed. This means that families and businesses will be able to connect to faster, more reliable broadband services. A standard NBN connection to the home or office is free – and NBN retail services are available for similar prices to what people are paying now, but for a much superior service.
The National Broadband Network is about preparing Australia for the future. It’s about ensuring that our local communities in places like Canberra are not left behind as the world and our local economy changes. From seeing your local doctor from home, to your kids being able to take a specialist class at another school – the NBN will change the way we live, work, and access services. It will lead to a new wave of innovation, and I’m delighted that people in Civic will be among the first to benefit.
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This is really exciting for local families and business in the Civic area. In around 12 months’ time, people in Civic will be able to start connecting to the National Broadband Network. The map shows that NBN fibre is being rolled out Civic, Acton and parts of Braddon which will allow more residents access to faster, affordable and more reliable broadband.
The map is another sign that construction of the National Broadband Network is continuing to accelerate, with work now having commenced or been completed to over 784,000 homes and businesses across Australia. The release of this map means that work is starting in this area and over the next few months, we’ll start to see NBN Co workers locally doing the detailed planning and inspection work, and then rolling out the fibre. Within around twelve months, construction of the NBN in Civic will be completed. This means that families and businesses will be able to connect to faster, more reliable broadband services. A standard NBN connection to the home or office is free – and NBN retail services are available for similar prices to what people are paying now, but for a much superior service.
The National Broadband Network is about preparing Australia for the future. It’s about ensuring that our local communities in places like Canberra are not left behind as the world and our local economy changes. From seeing your local doctor from home, to your kids being able to take a specialist class at another school – the NBN will change the way we live, work, and access services. It will lead to a new wave of innovation, and I’m delighted that people in Civic will be among the first to benefit.
Nova Peris
On ABC666, I spoke with Adam Shirley about the challenge of balancing local ALP democracy with having a caucus that looks like the rest of Australia. While rank and file preselections are at the heart of the ALP, it's also true that in twelve decades, that system has failed to put a single Indigenous Labor member into the federal parliament.
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Israel Decides
On the ABC website, I have an opinion piece on the upcoming Israeli election.
Please post any comments on the Drum website.
Update: On a similar theme, David Remnick's New Yorker piece on Israel's rightward shift is well worth a read.
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We owe it as friends to warn Israel, The Drum, 15 January 2013
Israelis will go to the polls next Tuesday to elect a new government.
If early signs are to be believed, Israel's most conservative government ever may be replaced by one even further to the right.
Already, there are signs that settler activity will intensify after the election.
The question for Australia is: what can we do to bring about peace in the Middle East?
First, some background.
In last November's United Nations vote on Palestinian status, Israel lost the support of 95 per cent of United Nations members (including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany). If there was one reason, it was the remorseless spread of settlements.
Around 510,000 Israeli settlers now reside in the West Bank. Since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord, the number of Israeli settlers has doubled. With every block of settlements, a Palestinian state gets harder.
All these settlements are illegal under international law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a party, says "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies".
This isn't just a matter of legal niceties. From a practical standpoint, settlements make it vastly more difficult - if not impossible - to set up a Palestinian state.
This is a view shared by most mainstream foreign policy makers around the world.
For example, the Conservative British Government could teach a lesson to our timorous Coalition. UK Foreign Minister William Hague said Israel's settlements plans would "alter the situation on the ground on a scale that makes the two state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, increasingly difficult to achieve."
New Zealand's conservative government went further still, voting yes to the UN resolution.
The final United Nations vote last year saw 138 countries vote in favour of giving Palestine "non-member state" status (akin to the Vatican). Forty-one nations (including Australia) abstained. Only nine voted in favour.
According to news reports, Foreign Minister Bob Carr subsequently phoned the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riad Malki, and warned him to proceed cautiously at the UN now that Palestine's status had been upgraded.
Australia does not want to see early reference to the International Criminal Court or for the Palestinians to use their newly-gained status to seek membership of other UN bodies.
But the response from Israel was deeply troubling.
Within 48 hours of the UN vote, the Netanyahu Government announced it would build 3,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and unfreeze planning in the area known as the E1.It was difficult for reasonable observers to see this as anything other than the Israeli Government using settlement policy as punishment.
Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Israel had "repeatedly betrayed" the Obama Administration. The European Union said that the viability of a two-state solution was threatened by this systematic expansion of settlements. A two-state solution is the key to Israel's long-term security.
Yet that isn't the view from everyone.
In a recent article in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland quoted two hardline members of Israel's right.
Referring to a Palestinian member of the Knesset, Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party said: "When you were still climbing trees, we had a Jewish state here... We were here long before you."
Projections have the new Jewish Home Party winning as many as 18 of the 120 Knesset seats.
Moshe Feiglin of the Likud party reportedly said: "You can't teach a monkey to speak and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic. You're dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers ... The Arab destroys everything he touches."As former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin has pointed out: "Israel's right-wing parties - which in 1993 rejected the Oslo Accords that envisaged Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of Palestinian autonomy in those areas - are now using, and abusing, that same agreement to prevent Palestinian statehood".
In this atmosphere, Australia has one responsibility above all: tell the Israelis, as one friend to another, that the path they are on is self-destructive.
Consider what happens if there is no Palestinian state, but only a Greater Israel as some settlers seek: Israel ends up governing a large Arab population.
As David Ben-Gurion famously argued, Israel can be a Jewish state, it can be a democratic state, and it can be a state occupying the whole of historical Israel. But it cannot be all three.
The risk, in the words of Tzipi Livni, leader of centrist party Hatnuah, is Israel becoming a "boycotted, isolated and ostracised state".
As a strong friend of Israel, Australia has a duty to highlight this danger.
The Australian Government has a warm regard for Israel as the strongest democracy in the Middle East. We acknowledge the power of its courts, of judges who can overrule its executive. We respect its freedom of expression, the lively political debate and acceptance of dissent like its vocal peace movement.
As an economist, I am a particular fan of Israel's vibrant culture of innovation, as exemplified in Dan Senor and Saul Singer's terrific book Start-Up Nation.
The Australian Government has firmly asked the Palestinians not to be provocative.
We have stressed that a return to negotiations based on recognition of Israel was the way to get a Palestinian state. But that won't work if Israel imagines it can count on our support even when it pursues a policy rendering a two-state solution unachievable.
There can be no peace without a Palestinian state. And there can be no Palestinian state if settlement activity roars ahead.
Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser.
Please post any comments on the Drum website.
Update: On a similar theme, David Remnick's New Yorker piece on Israel's rightward shift is well worth a read.
Talking Gun Control
702 ABC Sydney with Richard Glover
2CC Breakfast With Mark Parton - 14 January 2013
I spoke with both Mark Parton and Richard Glover about Australia's gun buy-back program. We chatted about Philip Alpers' new paper for a Baltimore gun summit, and some of the issues it raised. Can population growth explain the increase in the number of guns in Australia? And has the number of households with a gun increased? Have a listen...
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2CC Breakfast With Mark Parton - 14 January 2013
I spoke with both Mark Parton and Richard Glover about Australia's gun buy-back program. We chatted about Philip Alpers' new paper for a Baltimore gun summit, and some of the issues it raised. Can population growth explain the increase in the number of guns in Australia? And has the number of households with a gun increased? Have a listen...
2CC Breakfast With Mark Parton - 14 January 2013
Yesterday I spoke with Mark Parton about Australia's gun buy-back program. We had a chat about the latest research coming out of Sydney University and some of the issues it raised.
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2CC Breakfast With Mark Parton - 14 January 2013
Yesterday I spoke with Mark Parton about Australia's gun buy-back program. We had a chat about the latest research coming out of Sydney University and some of the issues it identified.
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Did the Gun Buyback Work?
I have an opinion piece in today's Fairfax papers, drawing on research that I did as an ANU professor with Christine Neill, in which we looked at whether the 1997 National Firearms Agreement caused national gun deaths to trend downwards, and whether states that had more guns bought back subsequently had fewer firearms deaths.
Note to the curious: Yesterday's Fairfax report by Nick Ralston implied that Australia had imported 1 million guns since 1997. In fact, the research (here) shows that the figure of ‘1 million more guns’ is from 1988/89 onwards (not 1997). If you look at post-buyback imports, there have been about half a million guns imported into Australia since 1997/98. Off a firearms base of 2½-3 million, that’s approximately a 20 percent increase. Over the same period, Australia’s population rose from 18½ to 22.9 million (24 percent).
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Tougher Laws, Buyback on Target, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012
Guns Policy Saving Lives, The Age, 15 January 2012
Guns Policy Saving Lives, Canberra Times, 15 January 2012
Since the 1997 gun buyback, your chance of being a victim of gun violence has more than halved. Yet as yesterday’s Herald/Age pointed out, the number of guns in Australia has increased by nearly one-fifth over the same period. What’s going on?
The simplest answer is that Australia’s population is a fifth larger than it was in 1997. In reality, Australia has about as many guns per person as we did after the gun buyback. The only way you can conclude that the gun buyback has been undone is if to ignore a decade and a half of population growth.
Moreover, the figure that really matters is the share of gun-owning households. In 1997, many households used the chance to clean out the closet, and take a weapon to the local police station that hadn’t been used in years (the most common weapon handed in was a .22 calibre rifle). So the share of gun-owning households nearly halved, from 15 percent to 8 percent.
It’s quite possible that the new firearms in Australia are being bought by people who already have a weapon in the home. Adding a tenth gun to the household arsenal is much less risky than buying the first. Trouble is, surveys of household gun ownership are rare, so we don’t know whether the share of gun-owning households has risen.
To understand the policy success of the National Firearms Agreement, it’s important to recognise precisely what happened. Alongside the gun buyback, what had been a patchwork of state and territory regulations were strengthened and harmonised. Self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns and pump-action shotguns were banned. Firearm owners were required to obtain licences and register their weapons.
While the changes were backed by the then Labor Opposition, political credit must go to then Prime Minister John Howard and National Party leader Tim Fischer for standing up to the hardliners in their own parties. While they may have paid a short-term electoral price, history will judge them well.
In the 1990s, some argued that the gun buyback would make no difference to the firearms homicide and suicide rates. Yet a series of careful studies have shown otherwise. In the decade prior to Port Arthur, Australia experienced an average of one mass shooting (involving five or more deaths) every year. Since then, we have not had a single mass shooting. The odds of this being a coincidence are less than one in 100.
The gun buyback also had some unexpected payoffs. As an ANU economics professor, I collaborated with Wilfrid Laurier University’s Christine Neill to look at the effect of the Australian gun buyback on firearm suicide and homicide rates. Shocking as mass shootings are, they represent a tiny fraction of all gun deaths. If there’s a gun in your home, the person most likely to kill you with it is yourself, followed by your spouse.
Neill and I found that the firearm suicide and homicide rates more than halved after the Australian gun buyback. Although the gun death rate was falling prior to 1997, it accelerated downwards after the buyback. Looking across states, we also found that jurisdictions where more guns were bought back experienced a greater reduction in firearms homicide and suicide.
We estimate that the Australian gun buyback continues to save around 200 lives per year. That means thousands of people are walking the streets today who would not be alive without the National Firearms Agreement. Other work, including by public health researchers Simon Chapman, Philip Alpers, Kingsley Agho and Michael Jones, reaches a similar conclusion.
For the United States, reform is tougher. According to the General Social Survey, 32 percent of US households own a gun, and a patchwork of city and state laws means that restrictions in one jurisdiction are often undercut by people travelling interstate to buy a weapon.
Historically, the US National Rifle Association was a moderate body, akin to some Australian shooting bodies. It supported the first federal gun laws in the 1930s, and backed a ban on cheap ‘Saturday night specials’ in the 1960s. Yet after the ‘‘Cincinnati Revolt’’ in 1977, the NRA was taken over by the likes of Harlon Carter, Wayne LaPierre and Charlton Heston. It began opposing all restrictions on firearms ownership, including bans on assault rifles and armour-piercing bullets (‘cop killers’). Members of Congress rate the NRA the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation.
The challenge for American legislators today is to stand up to these powerful extremists, and follow the example of Australia’s leaders in 1996. With 86 Americans dying each day because of gun accidents, suicides or homicides, perhaps our experience can persuade sensible US legislators that there is a better way. As in Australia, the onus is on the conservative side of politics.
For Australia, the challenges in firearms policy are more modest, but real nonetheless. All states and territories should heed the call from federal Justice Minister Jason Clare to implement a national firearms register. This will help to keep track of weapons when they are sold or their owners move interstate. And it will help to ensure that Australian firearms do not fall into the wrong hands.
Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. His website is www.andrewleigh.com.
Note to the curious: Yesterday's Fairfax report by Nick Ralston implied that Australia had imported 1 million guns since 1997. In fact, the research (here) shows that the figure of ‘1 million more guns’ is from 1988/89 onwards (not 1997). If you look at post-buyback imports, there have been about half a million guns imported into Australia since 1997/98. Off a firearms base of 2½-3 million, that’s approximately a 20 percent increase. Over the same period, Australia’s population rose from 18½ to 22.9 million (24 percent).