Embracing our liberal democracy

What should now be evident is the enormous costs that will be needed to build infrastructure, pay social welfare (even if it is streamlined), fund militaries to quash terrorism, or even provide important assistance to help build stability in nations so they do not end up hating the West. For instance, the head of Britain’s climate change watchdog (Lord Turner) recently noted that households would need to spend £10,000-£15,000 on a full energy makeover if the government is to meet its target for cutting carbon emissions by 34 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 (Larry Elliott, “Green home makeover will cost up to £15,000, says climate watchdog chief”, guardian.co.uk, November 10, 2009).

Perhaps that is why the UK government has announced a new 50 per cent income tax band to be levied from 2010 on an estimated 350,000 people with incomes above £150,000 a year alone, designed to net about £7 billion to help meet a £175 billion deficit in government finances (“Budget tax plan: 50p rate will create new brain drain, bosses warn”, The Guardian, April 23, 2009). Perhaps that is why higher taxation may become more evident in the US too given that 10 states already face financial peril with budget deficits ranging from 12 to 49 per cent with many already raising taxes, laying off state workers, and slashing services (Tami Luhby, “10 states face financial peril”, CNNMoney.com, November 11, 2009).

While Australia is in a much better fiscal position than the UK and the US, I am worried that current Australian political leadership is indeed failing us as a growing minority suffers.

Sure the policy issues will be difficult to solve with valid points made by different perspectives.

Take health. Ian Hickie (executive director of the Brain & Mind Research Institute) recently agued that government must take on domestic vested interests to help address the shortage of general and specialist doctors that has become evident recently at a time when Australian doctors tighten their monopoly over the supply of services (Ian Hickie, “Health system held to ransom by a doctors’ racket”, Sydney Morning Herald, October 14, 2009). However, as one respondent to Hickie’s article noted, Australian doctors also expect tough rules for their qualifications to be accepted overseas, and that he or she had supervised many foreign graduates who did not have the knowledge and training expected of Australian final year medical students (Doctor shopping).

We do need to observe the link between various policy issues to reflect complexity given that employment and industry cannot merely rely on high levels of consumption and immigration. Are we really going to rely on immigrants to increasingly meet our skill needs just so we can keep government outlays low? With health, it is worth remembering that Australia’s health bureaucrats and medical training institutions in the early 1990s decided to cut the number of doctors in training.

That is why Australians must offer their various arguments in a liberal democracy to ensure that policy elites think that much harder about policy complexity. Our right to freedom of speech is indeed what makes democracy the greatest political system, notwithstanding the competitive nature of nations which will continue to ensure that progress for all of humanity is slow and perhaps incapable of perfection.