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On the topic of US politics …

There’s a perennial question thrown around by Australian and British politics-watchers (and, no-doubt, by people in lots of other countries too, but I’ve only lived in Australia and Britain):  Why do American elections focus so much on the individual and so little on the proposed policies of the individual?  Why do the American people seem to choose a president on the basis of their leadership skills or their membership of some racial, sexual, social or economic group, while in other Western nations, although the parties are divided to varying degrees by class, the debate and the talking points picked up by the media are mostly matters of policy?

An easy response is to focus on the American executive/legislative divide, but that carries no water for me.  Americans seem to also pick their federal representatives and senators in the same way as they do their president.

The best that I can come up with is to look at differences in political engagement brought about by differences in scale and political integration.  The USA is much bigger (by population) and much less centralised than Australia or Britain.  As a result, the average US citizen is more removed from Washington D.C. than the average Briton is from Whitehall or the average Australian from Canberra.  The greater population hurts engagement by making the individual that much less significant on the national stage – a scaled-up equivalent of Dunbar’s number, if you will.  The decentralisation (greater federalism) serves to focus attention more on the lower levels of government.  The two effects, I believe, reinforce each other.

Americans are great lovers of democracy at levels that we in Australia and Britain might consider ludicrously minuscule and at that level there is real fire in the debates over specific policies.  Individual counties vote on whether to raise local sales tax by 1% in order to increase funding to local public schools.  Elections to school boards decide what gets taught in those schools.

That decentralisation is a deliberate feature of the US political system, explicitly enshrined in the tenth amendment to their constitution.  But when so many matters of policy are decided at the county or state level, all that is left at the federal level are matters of foreign policy and national identity.  It seems no surprise, then, that Americans see the ideal qualities of a president being strength and an ability to “unite the country.”

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Needing a visa to visit America

Australia, like most of Western Europe and a few other countries, is on America’s “visa waiver” programme, which lets people travel to the USA for up to 90 days at a time without first applying for a visa, although the US can still deny entry to anybody that doesn’t answer the immigration official’s questions to their satisfaction.

By comparison, Australia requires that all visitors from everywhere except New Zealand have a visa. It’s a staggeringly simple and not overly expensive process that can happen online, but it’s a visa-requirement nonetheless.

It looks like the US is moving to an Australian-style system. They’re still calling it a “visa waiver,” but the requirement that I register before entering the US and that they reserve the right to deny my registration seems a lot like a visa to me. From the article:

Passengers travelling to the United States from countries whose citizens do not need visas must register online with the US government at least 72 hours before departure [from January 2009]

…

Although the new rule requires 72 hours advance registration, it will be valid for multiple entries over a two-year period. The rule will only apply to citizens of the 27 visa waiver programme countries

…

A Homeland Security official said the new measure would require the same information that passengers now have to include on the I-94 immigration form they must fill out before entering the US. He said Australia has been using a similar system for several years.

Presumably this means that the US will be more likely to start adding the newer members of the EU to the “visa waiver” programme.

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Non-geographic constituencies

The Australian House of Representatives has 150 members for a resident population of 21,268,746 (10 April 2008), or almost 142,000 people per representative. The US House of Representatives has 435 members for a resident population of 303,817,103 (10 April 2008), or almost 670,000 people per representative. The UK House of Commons has 646 members for a resident population of 60,587,000 (mid-2006), or almost 94,000 people per representative. The Canadian House of Commons has 308 members for a resident population of 33,231,725 (10 April 2008), or almost 108,000 people per representative.

Traditionally, which is to say always, the constituency of each representative or member of parliament has been defined geographically. That’s simple enough, but now that communication and identification technology has advanced to where it is today, they no longer need to be.

Members of the various lower houses of parliament/congress are meant to be representatives of their constituents, speaking on their behalf and seeking to act in their best interest. Before anybody mentions it, the Edmund Burke argument, that members of parliament ought to focus on the well-being of the nation as a whole, carries more strength in a unicameral parliament than it does in the constitutional arrangements of Australia, Canada and the USA where an upper-house exists with members sitting for longer terms so as – in principal, at least – to focus more on the issues more than the politics. It also seems to me that within her role as a member of parliament thinking of the good of the nation, a representative has a duty to pass on to the parliament the democratically valid views of her constituents, even if she ultimately votes in another direction.

By having electoral districts be geographically defined, we remove from the people the right to self-organise and they instead become passive receivers of groupings that are set down upon them. Unless you have an independent body to determine electoral boundaries, you therefore run the risk of gerrymandering (although whether that necessary causes polarisation is apparently debatable). Even if gerrymandering does not cause polarisation, the relevance of a geographically-defined groups is becoming less relevant as communication and transportation technologies improve. In a more globalised world where the economic fortunes of people are less tied to those of their neighbours, the issues of concern that people share will be less likely to be spatially concentrated.

My question, then, is this: What if 150,000 Australians were to voluntarily opt out of their resident electoral districts and form a non-geographically defined constituency with their own seat in the House of Representatives?

  • Individuals would only be permitted to be a member of one electoral constituency.
  • Everyone would be a part of a geographic district by default, but could change to a non-geographic grouping if they chose.
  • Even then, people would retain a geographical link to the legislature through the Senate.
  • The election of representatives from non-geographic constituencies would proceed just like any other seat in a general election; all of the various political parties would be free to offer candidates and to campaign in whatever way they saw fit.
  • By coming together around a common topic of concern, constituents guarantee that candidates will need to address that concern in their campaigns and that the winner will truly be their representative in parliament.

The idea isn’t entirely novel. Several countries allow for an expatriate electoral role so that non-resident citizens can still vote. These are usually tied back to a geographic district within the home country, but there’s no reason they have to be.

At a first glance, this might seem like a finely grained version of proportional representation. I guess that to a point it is, but since each constituency would still have elections, all parties would be able to put forward candidates and the decision process within each constituency would still be the same as within geographic districts (preferential voting in Australia, first-past-the-post in the UK and USA), it’s not.

It might also seem like this would just be formalised lobbying. To that I can only say: “Yes. So?” People are entitled to their views and in a democracy those views ought to be granted equal rights to be heard. Lobbyists are treated with such scorn today because they seek to obtain political influence beyond their individual vote. They exist, in part, because people do not have any real connection to their representatives.

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Oh please, oh please, oh please

Mr. Rudd, call Andrew Leigh.  Call him now.  Speaking on Indigenous policy, he writes:

  1. School attendance rates are appalling, and as Woody Allen says “90% of life is just showing up”. So pay Indigenous children to attend school.
  2. Literacy and numeracy gaps are large, and part of the difference may be teacher quality. So the federal government should promise bonuses of up to $50,000 to teachers who can get large improvements in performance in Indigenous schools. Teaching disadvantaged kids is the most important job in Australia – so why does no-one doing it earn a six-figure salary?
  3. Indigenous people are overrepresented in Australia’s jails, which do little more than warehousing. Since many are now private, why not rewrite the contracts, making payment conditional on post-release recidivism and earnings? Let’s create incentives for those who run jails to do more education, and less clock-watching.
  4. A major impediment to children attending school is drunkenness in communities. But a ban is a drastic measure. Let’s allow communities to set their own tax rates on alcohol, and keep the revenue (remember, a ban is effectively a tax rate equivalent to the cost of petrol to the nearest no-ban town).
  5. As many Indigenous policies as possible (including those above) should be subjected to rigorous randomised trials. Those that fail should be discarded without sentiment, and those that succeed should be expanded. We know from the headline indicators that many Indigenous policies haven’t worked; it’s time to start sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Amen.

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Tyranny and the ethical removal of children

I promise this’ll be my last post on the whole apology business for a while. 🙂 In response to my entry, “An apology for what?“, Cam Riley posted this comment:

Tyranny is tyranny – and removing children from their parents due to their skin colour is a tyrannous act. The goal of republican government is to remove all tyranny from the system. Consequently, past tyrannous acts need to be recognized as such.

I responded pretty quickly with:

I’m not denying that it was an act of tyranny (in the sense of oppression, not in the sense of a single ruler), only that the word “tyranny” is one with massive emotional and judgemental baggage in the same way as “genocide”. Its use may be justified in a literal sense, but it will rarely serve to improve the situation in a world of real politik. In any event, I accept the pragmatic necessity of an apology even if I do not fully accept the moral obligation to apologise today for something that was honestly believed to be just at the time.

I was thinking about this over dinner and it seems to me that there are three largely distinct issues at point here:

  1. The disenfranchisement of a people, meaning that any act of government concerning them was an act of tyranny
  2. The ethical question of when it is acceptable to remove a child from its family
  3. The question of whether the policy of forced removal “worked” in the sense of improving the livelihoods of those children

As I previously mentioned, I do not deny that the stolen generations represented an act of tyranny. That is a definitional consequence of Aboriginal disenfranchisement. But a tyrant may make a good decision that benefits people, just as a democracy may make a bad decision that harms them. There is no disputing the injustice of Aboriginal disenfranchisement in and of itself, but it was parallel to and, at worst, an enabler of the tragedy of the stolen generations, not the cause of it and therefore not the source of the moral wrong.

On the second point, society today still accepts that it is sometimes warranted to forcibly remove a child from its family. This is a terribly difficult decision, but as a society, we judge that it is ethical when that child is held to be in considerable danger. In the UK, for example,

A court can only make a care order if it is sure that:

  • the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm
  • the harm is caused by the child’s parents
  • the harm would be caused because of insufficient care being given to the child by the parents in the future
  • the child is likely to suffer harm because they are beyond parental control

I accept as fact that the Australian government’s policy of removal was based, for the most part, on the ethnicity of the children taken and not their individual safety. That on its own was immoral and warrants reparation to balance the damage done. The problem is that, while the act was wrong, it was performed under the honest (but false) belief that it was the best thing to do. At the time, I have no doubt, it would have been widely believed that although the removal of children was regrettable, the ends justified the means.

Which brings us to the third point. I seriously wonder whether the stolen generation would be as much of an issue today if the policy had been a roaring success. What if the democracy, acting tyrannically over the disenfranchised, made a bad decision that nevertheless turned out to be beneficial to all involved, with Aboriginals today enjoying educational, health and income outcomes equal to non-indigenous Australians? It ought to still be as much of an issue, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be.

The difficulty in passing judgement on the drafters of the Aboriginal Protection Act (1869) is that while we have the benefit of perfect hindsight, they did not enjoy the benefit of perfect foresight. Does anyone seriously claim that they still would have gone ahead with it if they had they known – and comprehended – what the full consequences of their actions would be?

All of which means that I find myself (a) supporting calls for reparation and (b) opposing the apology on moral grounds, but supporting the necessity of it on pragmatic grounds.

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On the necessity of an apology

Earlier this morning I asked:

Should we hold the actions of the past against the moral standard of today, especially if those actions were held to be just at the time?

I asked because it’s not at all clear to me that we ought to. In response by email, a good friend of mine argued that whatever the answer to my question, it simply isn’t relevant to the practicality of moving forward, because both the perpetrator (the government, not the necessarily the individuals that operated it at the time) and the victims are still around to face each other.

To quote the SMH in quoting Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary:

It is “something that every child knows”, says Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary and Australia’s unofficial keeper of the national vernacular.

“When you say you are sorry, life can go on. Your brother, sister, friend will drop the dispute, whatever it was, and enter into normal relations again. To withhold that ‘sorry’ utterance is to continue the war.”

Like “Good morning” and “How are you?”, she says, it is what linguists call a phatic expression; its meaning lies in its utterance, not necessarily in the content of its words.

In other words, when you have wronged someone, and refuse to say sorry, you are responsible for perpetuating the dispute. You all know that – how many times has each of you fumed over the absence of an apology rather than the original act?

…

The apology is about choosing not to act like dicks, something on which we’ve failed spectacularly so far.

It’s a really strong argument and I take his point. He missed a bit further down in the article, though:

A document handed by the Stolen Generations Alliance to Macklin last week, on behalf of victims and their families, said they overwhelmingly desired money to make the reparations process meaningful.

And Butler realises this, too. The nature of the gesture – its wording and what comes after – remains important.

Examining the seemingly simple five-letter word in a recent edition of the Walkley Magazine, she ended by saying that not saying sorry is as damaging as an insincere sorry.

“Phatic expressions may be about emotion rather than meaning but that is not to say they are not complex and powerful utterances. How you say, or don’t say, ‘Good Morning’ can encapsulate your attitude to life and reveal the state of your personal account in the bank of social capital.”

An insincere apology, given grudgingly and against the wishes of the person saying it, rarely achieves much and sometimes only serves to poison the future relationship. If the apology is needed to move forward, as my friend powerfully argues, it needs to be a real one. It can be embarrassed and awkward, but it needs conviction.

It also needs to be accepted. The government will easily be able to drum up a few indigenous Australians to forgive them on national television, but unless the vast majority of Australian Aboriginals do the same – and I’m not sure they will unless it comes with financial reparations – it won’t solve a thing.

Update:  Post #3 in this mini-series:  “Tyranny and the ethical removal of children“

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An apology for what?

For any non-Australians in the audience, the new Australian government is doing what the previous lot refused to do: apologise on behalf of the parliament and government of Australia to the indigenous people of Australia for the forced removal of children from their families for approximately 100 years until 1969.

I want (as should be little surprise to anyone who knows me) to abstract away from the specifics of this a little. When is an apology for some past injustice warranted?

Should we hold the actions of the past against the moral standard of today, especially if those actions were held to be just at the time? If the answer is ‘yes’, how far back in history is it acceptable to apply our outrage? We don’t judge the Romans for having sex with children or the Aztecs for their human sacrifices – we simply view them as having taken place in an environment of ignorance.

The Aztecs were not only a long time ago, but also from a different cultural heritage to us. The Romans were a long time ago and also our cultural ancestors, so we can’t simply say that we only judge our own.

So where (and why) do we draw a line in the sand?

If someone can explain that to me, then I can happily endorse the apology (I already accept it). People who argue that since we didn’t do it (after all – we weren’t around then) we shouldn’t apologise are missing an important point: The government and the parliament of Australia were around then and did play an active role. The difference between the (wo)man and the office is important here. The office of the government of Australia did the Bad Thing. If it is right to judge the past against the moral measures of the present, then it is also right for the office of the government of Australia to apologise. The particulars of who is occupying that office now is of little consequence.

The only way out, from my point of view, is if there were a significant change of constitution in the intervening period, so that it might be legitimately said that the government of today is not in any way the government that existed at the time. Is that why we let the Romans off the hook? We would judge them, only they don’t exist any more?

Back to the particulars: I don’t really mind whether we call it tyranny (although I think that choice of words is inflammatory) or whether Labor supporters want to poke fun at the Coalition (although I think that at least some of the Coalition’s concerns are legitimate). I think that the apology is a symbolic gesture that, on its own, will help not at all. I think that the Aboriginals of Australia have complaints (most but not all of them legitimate) far deeper and wider than the stolen generations and that the stolen generation issue simply became an emblematic focal point.

The apology is no skin off my nose and if it makes people feel better for a while, go nuts. But don’t try telling me that it’ll do a damned thing to improve the lives of Aboriginals in Oz. For that we need real policies of support from the government and real acknowledgement of the realities of the world from the Aboriginal community.

Update:  I got an excellent response from a good friend of mine.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury: mischaracterised, but still off the rails

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has drawn a storm of criticism ( BBC, Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph) by calling for a “plural jurisdiction” that allows for Islamic law to be recognised in Britain.

It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system. We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances.

There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.

That principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy. But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose that people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that.

As I understand it, under English (and, I’m guessing, Australian) law, there is already the following arrangement:

In the event of a civil dispute, if both parties independently agree to it, that dispute can be heard in arbitration by somebody (or a group of people) separate from the courts and the decision of that arbitration will be binding under the law. There are nevertheless legal limits as to what the arbitration may declare.

As a first example, this practice is widely used in investment law, both domestic and international.

As a second example, it would be available if a tenant is complaining that their landlord hasn’t fixed the heating.

At present, there is a Jewish version of this set up in Britain. There is nothing to stop a Muslim equivalent being set up, if it hasn’t already.

The key point is that the arbitration can not proceed unless both parties agree beforehand to take part and abide by the ruling. If either one does not, then it goes before the regular courts.

Where the archbishop has gone off the rails, in my opinion, is that he seems to be calling for an entirely extra-judicial set-up; a competing system of justice that is parallel to (not a component of) the general law of the state.  That is simply wrong.