EDITORIAL : THE AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALIA

 

It's Ford's new car plan

THE automaker's cuts underline the sector's problems.

Anyone needing evidence of the hazards of propping up the Australian car industry to quarantine jobs should look no further than yesterday's announcement that Ford Australia will cut its workforce by 240. The decision to reduce daily production of the Falcon and Territory from 260 to 209 because of falling demand comes just two months after car companies extracted a promise from Prime Minister Julia Gillard she would not cut their billions of industry assistance. Since rationalisation of the sector began 25 years ago, tariff cuts have led to more choice and lower prices for consumers, but taxpayers' money continues to underwrite the industry. Ford says jobs will go from Broadmeadows and Geelong but that most workers will be redeployed, with the remainder shed through voluntary redundancies. The strategy to cut volume makes sense. After all, if people aren't buying them, why make them? Ford would be aware of the problems encountered by Mitsubishi a few years back when it discounted the Magna only to see the market collapse. Union leaders blamed the downsizing in part on tariff cuts yet there is no going back on restructuring. After 60 years of support and endless reform plans, the industry continues to face major challenges. By now, the unions and companies should have worked it out.

Who tweets for Aborigines?

A BITTER struggle for authority in indigenous Australia.

The comments were crude in the extreme but the real import of the Twitter commentary about indigenous leader Bess Price is how offensive it is to thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children living in regional and remote Australia. When Larissa Behrendt wrote that Price's appearance on ABC TV was worse than watching "sex with a horse" the city-based legal academic exposed the deep divide in the indigenous community.

Behrendt, who belatedly apologised yesterday, may portray her words as a throw-away comment about Price's performance on Monday's Q&A but there is more going on here. The Twitter exchanges reveal the split between urban and remote Aboriginal leaders over Canberra's intervention in dysfunctional communities. Behrendt's comments are made against the background of a bitter struggle between these two groups for power and the authority to speak for Aborigines. Behrendt and those who joined her on Twitter oppose the intervention but that is really a proxy for a fight over turf, resources and the direction of indigenous politics. Those on Behrendt's side elevate rights and legalities over everything else. But The Australian is on the side of those who believe housing, education and jobs are the pre-eminent steps towards equality.

That Behrendt is herself involved in a racial vilification case against News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt adds irony to her comments. That action has people across the political spectrum concerned because of its implications for free speech. At its core is the identification by Behrendt and others as Aboriginal. This is not the place to argue the merits of the action, but Behrendt's professional career is central to the split exposed on Twitter. Like others who work in the urban indigenous industry, she has built a career on indigenous issues and policy. Like others, she argues against the 2007 intervention initiated in response to appalling levels of violence, addiction and child abuse. Difficult as it is to believe, this newspaper has been lobbied directly by Aboriginal leaders in Canberra to stop reporting on the despair of communities in the far-north, central Australia and the Kimberley, and to focus on success stories of urban Aborigines. In essence, these leaders have urged us to ignore the shameful state of affairs in so many areas and boost the good-news quota in our pages. Such a view is not just out of touch with the needs of remote Aborigines, it casts them as unworthy of attention. These urban dwellers are prepared to risk the health, education, physical safety and futures of other Aborigines in the cause of an out-dated, leftist agenda which privileges "rights" above well-being. There is a "let them eat cake" touch about it all.

All this when there is a largely bipartisan approach on indigenous policy and when non-indigenous Australia is committed to improving the living conditions and education and work opportunities for disadvantaged communities. Many Q&A viewers would have cheered when Price spoke so plainly of indigenous needs. Australians want to see better outcomes and an end to the shameful conditions endured by many Aborigines. Yet the professional class of urban blacks is more interested in bridge walks or the agenda of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The Left once stood for improving the living standards of the poor. Today, it would appear to prefer gesture politics and symbolism.

Union revolt tests Swan's economic resolve on trade

AWU luddites must not be allowed to dictate policy.

If ever a prime minister needed the backing of a strong, effective treasurer it is now, when Julia Gillard finds herself boxed in by the Australian Workers Union, which has threatened to withdraw support for her proposed carbon tax if one job is lost. The union, which is flexing its factional muscle within the ALP in the wake of the demise of the NSW Right at the state election, is also mounting an attack on the Prime Minister's push to liberalise trade policy. Unfortunately for Ms Gillard and the nation's economic interest, Wayne Swan, although he purports to support free trade in principle, opposed Ms Gillard's initiative in cabinet on the dubious grounds that it had no political constituency.

For all their political hostility towards each other, Peter Costello and Paul Keating shared a sound treasurer's instinct for expanding the economy, chopping waste and reform. In contrast, Mr Swan's quest for populist political support is born of his experience as a political neophyte in the Queensland AWU and as ALP state secretary. Such an instinct was evident in the Fuel Watch and Grocery Choice debacles, which were national versions of the Pricewatch surveys that proved popular among pensioners in Mr Swan's Lilley electorate. The original resource super-profits tax, of which Mr Swan was a key driver after he cherry picked a potentially worthwhile idea from the Henry tax review and bungled it, was another populist quest, based on the erroneous idea that workers wanted to see miners slugged and wealth redistributed.

However ruthless AWU national secretary Paul Howes's tactics in contributing to the demise of Kevin Rudd as prime minister and now forcing Ms Gillard's back to the wall over carbon tax and trade policy, Mr Howes's economic instincts are crass and unsophisticated. In declaring that no one with "half a brain" would liberalise trade at a time manufacturing was struggling, he was reflecting the naive views peddled by the AWU in shearing sheds and mining backblocks for generations in Queensland, where past Labor governments ran "government butcher shops".

What Mr Howes, many Queensland Nationals and other agrarian socialist free trade opponents such as Bob Katter fail to grasp is that resources and agriculture, Australia's biggest export industries, whose workers are represented by the AWU, have most to lose from protectionism. As other nations retaliated against Australian protection of manufacturing, some would look elsewhere for commodities and force up the costs of imported machinery with their own tariff barriers -- an equation grasped in the 1860s by the south in the US Civil War but not yet by many in Australia.

Rather than arguing that dismantling trade barriers has boosted prosperity since the Whitlam government slashed tariffs by 25 per cent in 1973, Mr Swan has left Trade Minister Craig Emerson to explain why "trade equals jobs", just as former finance minister Lindsay Tanner was left trying to impose a modicum of fiscal discipline in Labor's first term. It is extraordinary that in 2011, after decades of reforms that opened up the economy, Australia finds itself with a Treasurer who appears to be in sync with some of Mr Howes's views.