KEVIN Rudd has gone to the people again. This time he is seeking their views and ideas on how to turn Australia into a great modern society in which everyone – or almost everyone – can live in comfort and prosperity.
And the people love him for his bold and stunning approach and practical strategy. Any doubt that remained after he won the federal election last November to become Prime Minister seems to have dissipated.
Only the diehard critics still maintain that his Labour team is inexperienced to deal with the current economic situation following the impact of the recent chronic US subprime crisis. But the consensus among businessmen is that the Rudd government is doing fine under the circumstances and is handling the economic situation and the threat of rising inflation as best as it can.
Whatever the views, the Prime Minister’s proposed Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra next month is not only historic and the first of its kind, but also comprehensive and complex in an attempt to find, in one stroke, solutions to the nation’s social, economic and security problems and its future directions.
Admittedly, it will be an exciting and inspirational time as the subjects to be covered include digital economy, the future of the cities, planning towards a creative nation and Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and the world.
With science and innovation, which are part of the government’s productivity agenda, there are 10 critical areas for which he wants answers.
To achieve this, Rudd is bringing together some of the best and brightest brains across the country to tackle what he calls “the long-term challenges confronting Australia’s future”.
Some 1,000 leading Australians, including scientists, professors, town planners, top business executives, media chiefs, community leaders and a number of eminent individuals as well as Opposition leaders and state premiers, will attend the two-day summit at Parliament House beginning on April 19.
In addition, the government has asked the public to submit their thoughts and suggestions on the core challenges.
“For far too long Australian policymaking has been focused on short-term outcomes dictated by the electoral cycle,” the Prime Minister said. “If Australia is to effectively confront the challenges of the future, we need to develop an agreed national direction that looks at the next 10 years and beyond.”
But with such a diversity, and probably conflict of ideas, coming from the urban and rural communities with different political views, it will be difficult to find consensus on a “national direction”.
That is not a problem as far as the Rudd government is concerned, though. It will appoint 10 steering committees, each dealing with one of the 10 core challenges.
Their objective is to harness the best ideas to meet the challenges in a free and open public debate in which there are no pre-determined right or wrong answers.
The government will then accept some options and reject others, but will explain its reasons on its course of action.
Youth participation
Rudd believes the diverse and talented range of people who will be at the summit “are incredibly positive about gaining the opportunity to put forward their ideas on a national platform”. Young people, including those at schools, are also encouraged to put forward their ideas. Some 100 talented young people have been selected to attend the Youth 2020 Summit to be held in Canberra a week before the main summit.
Their presence “at the table” where the long-term challenges of the nation are discussed is a government commitment to be fair with everyone irrespective of their age. But they must be at least 15 years old to qualify as delegates to the summit.
Minister for Youth Kate Ellis is confident that the delegates to the youth summit have a tremendous balance of skills, talents, background and knowledge to discuss the issues.
Schools have also been told to organise their own summits for children to discuss the issues and submit ideas to the main summit.
What Rudd wants is for everyone to put their views towards building a “modern Australia capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century”. He hopes these ideas will help meet Australia’s long-term future through to 2020 and beyond.
In fact, the concept of the summit is essentially part of his election promise to use the benefits of the mining resources to build a more stable post-boom economy.
The aim is to ensure Australia’s A$1.2tril economy can compete with the leading nations’ economies that are being transformed by globalisation, new technologies and the rise of China and India.
However, one of the biggest challenges is meeting the urgent needs of the rapidly growing and multicultural population of Australia, which is currently more than 21.2 million. Statistically, and indeed interestingly, the latest projection is one birth every one minute and 56 seconds, and one death every three minutes and 56 seconds.
Therefore, the net gain is one overseas migrant every three minutes and five seconds, which leads to an overall total population growth of one person every one minute and 42 seconds, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Alcohol abuse has become a great concern to the health authorities and the federal government, which has officially labelled it the “binge-drinking epidemic”.
IT may seem inconceivable but alcohol use or misuse in Australia is reaching epidemic proportion.
Binge drinking, as it is known for those who consume more than five glasses of beer or spirit in one session, is apparently part of the culture of young people these days.
In any given week, about 168,000 Australian youths, some as young as 12, are reportedly drinking so much alcohol that they could cause damage to themselves.
The unfortunate thing is that they don’t realise the danger. Nor do they accept the fact that they are drinking too much for their own good.
They think it is fun; that it is hilarious to be tipsy or to act foolishly in public, even to the extent of being utterly drunk. To them, life in the 21st century is going to parties where there is alcohol and, perhaps, some drugs like ice or marijuana. And that is even more dangerous – mixing alcohol with drugs.
Binge drinking by young people is also part of college culture. And young women who binge drink do not realise that they are putting themselves into a dangerous social situation such as rape or other forms of sexual assault.
Alcohol abuse has become a great concern to the health authorities and the federal government, which has officially labelled it the “binge-drinking epidemic”.
Just over three months into office, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has launched a national strategy against binge drinking with a grant of A$53mil to tackle the problem. Last week, the Senate agreed to set up an inquiry into the nation’s “binge-drinking culture”.
The fight against excessive alcohol drinking is part of the new government initiative, National Preventative Health Task Force, whose composition and exact role and timetable for delivering its findings will be announced soon.
But one of its duties will certainly be to examine what the government considers is the burden of chronic disease caused by alcohol abuse.
Although he does not have the hard facts to back up his views, Rudd believes that, anecdotally, alcohol abuse across the country is starting to get out of control.
The police also believe that alcohol abuse is at the core of increasing spates of urban violence.
Cost of binge drinking
However, it is hard to effectively fight binge drinking when licensed pubs are open to 3am with many young people, under pressure of their peer groups, congregating to have a drinking session.
Invariably, some of these sessions end up in fights in which someone is seriously or fatally hurt.
Concerned by the increasing incidence of “one-punch killer”, as described by the media, the state government in Western Australia is now considering amending the Criminal Act to increase the penalty for manslaughter.
But binge drinking assaults are happening regularly even in some of the top licensed hotel bars in Sydney and Melbourne.
For example, two Sydney pubs in hotels named Hotel of the Year over the last three years have topped a police list of “the most violent pubs” in New South Wales.
One had 51 fights and the other 41. Two other hotels had 38 and 36 respectively. They are among the top 100 hotels where assaults related to binge drinking have taken place in the first nine months of last year.
These figures may not mean much in terms of violent crime due to excessive drinking but taken empirically to represent the total number of assaults in the nation’s hotels, which is not readily available because of the Privacy Act, it could be quite alarming.
An indication of the assault cases in pubs and clubs can be gauged on the statements of Western Australia’s Attorney-General Jim McGinty, chief executive of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council David Templeman and director of New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Don Weatherburn.
McGinty, who also announced a A$530,000 “Rethink Drink” campaign, said people were simply drinking far too much – “in fact, 30% more than we did 10 years ago” – and this was having “catastrophic effects” on the community.
He pointed out that between 60% and 80% of police call-outs in the year to the end of June 2006 (the latest available statistics) were alcohol-related. These included violent assaults, property damage and car crashes due to binge drinking.
“Drinking to a point where a person becomes sick, aggressive or vulnerable to accidents or harm seems to have become part of our culture,” he said.
Templeman was blunt when he said the costs of binge drinking among teenagers could not be overstated. “The fact (is) that we blithely accept that 3,000 people die each year, and the overall costs of harm associated with alcohol misuse in Australia is A$15.3bil a year.”
And Dr Weatherburn, who described the real level of assaults as “grossly understated”, said: “We know from national surveys generally that the vast bulk of assaults are not reported. These would be the most serious assaults and probably the tip of the iceberg.”
Overstated it may be, but the reality is that hospital records across Australia are showing that increasing numbers of underage drinkers (between 14 and 17) are being admitted as patients.
Furthermore, national school surveys show that three-quarters of alcohol use by children at the age of 12 occurred at social parties under the supervision of adults.
Researchers believe that the parents, thinking that they are acting with the best of intentions, were supervising the children’s alcohol use to encourage moderation.
But they fail to realise that children who drink alcohol at an early age are more likely to become part of the adolescent party culture in which alcohol is regularly used.
OBVIOUSLY, Kevin Rudd must be wondering: Isn’t there something more positive and enduring in the 100 days that he has held the nation’s top post of Prime Ministership?
As he celebrated the day of his government’s first three months in office two weeks ago, he was facing a gloomy world economy with the fear that the possible US recession could engulf other nations, the declining regional share markets that are moving towards a 52-week low and the collapse of some mighty corporations in Australia, one of which lost more than half its value almost overnight.
On top of these events is the increasing threat of epic inflation, which Rudd quite rightly describes as “an enemy” to business, working families and the economy. Its scourge is that food and fuel prices will bleed into other commodities which, in turn, will raise the cost of living. No one can escape from it whatever their social status.
But the brutal instrument used to combat the inflation on March 4 is not helpful to the working families either. It gave the Reserve Bank of Australia the right to exercise its independence to raise interest rate by 0.25 percentage point to 7.25% – the highest in 12 years.
This is because the RBA believes that the current inflation might not come back to the acceptable levels before 2010 – the year Rudd goes to the voters again for a second term of office.
As a result of this unpopular move, however, the low- and medium-income households will be hard hit in paying their home mortgage repayments or rents which now absorb about one-third of their wages.
This is clearly evident from two alarming revelations that emerged from a new research of the National Centre for Economic and Social Modelling, released last week.
Firstly, more than 1.1 million Australians – about 10% of all households in the country – are now in a housing stress. They are paying more than 30% of their pre-tax earnings on rents or mortgage repayments – an increase of 25% or 220,000 households in just over four years.
Unfortunately, the situation is causing great emotional upheaval and is creating a kind of tent cities around the nation, even in the mine-booming Western Australia, as some families, unable to pay their rents or mortgages, are sleeping beside their cars at parks and other public places. Certainly, it’s a distressing sight in an affluent and resource-rich society like Australia.
With the possibility of another interest rate hike, many families are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet.
Many homes are on the market at bargain prices but there are few takers. Real estate agents claim that they have never seen so many homes under repossession.
“It really makes us sick,” says one home-owner who describes the situation as a “grim picture”.
Secondly, the new data also reveals that the number of families in housing stress has more than doubled since 2004 – up 300,000 to 575,000 – while the number of elderly Australians in the same category has also increased from 56,000 to 112,000.
What a shock this is to the man who became Prime Minister with compassion to help the homeless and the needy as one of his political priorities.
It is no fault of his, of course, but some people, including the Opposition, are laying blame on his Labour government for what has happened. Apparently, the critics have forgotten that 10 interest rate hikes occurred when the Liberal-National government under John Howard was in power for 11 years until Nov 24 last year.
But Rudd braced himself as he faced the tremendous challenge.
Declaring that, as Prime Minister, he accepted responsibility for all the negativity that had risen so rapidly in the past three months, he unveiled his government’s latest measure to help Australians cope with the skyrocketing rent and mortgage repayments, although this would not come to the rescue of those who need assistance immediately.
He announced that from July 1, the child-care tax rebate will rise from 30% to 50% for working families under financial pressure. This is one of the three major sets of economic policy his government has produced in response to the given circumstances as it faces what he terms as “the most cohesive and responsible approach”.
The other two sets are to help young people through preferential tax treatment to create a “big nest egg” for investment as deposit to their first homes, and to boost the supply of affordable housing accommodation. Details will be worked out soon.
Rudd agrees that the challenges to deal with in terms of economic policy settings were of “a very complex mix”. But he was confident that, together with his economic team, the government has got the direction right.
What is the number one challenge?
“Fighting the fight against inflation,” he declares. “But to do so in a way which achieves our parallel economic objective, which is to build long-term productivity by investing in skills and infrastructure.”