Political Corrections

TINA, NICE or GITS – the dairy debacle

Bob Katter has been at me for years to get interested in dairy. He'd bend my ear in the Parliament house coffee shop, in his office, and in the press gallery. But the issue sounded so complicated, I begged off. Leave it to the the experts, I thought.

The $1.7 billion compensation package seemed huge to me at the time, and I did wonder why consumers would be slugged 11 cents a litre for years in the cause of deregulation. Wasn't deregulation supposed to be about cheaper milk?

Katter still wasn't happy though, and he wasn't happy when the government announced this week it would pump another $140 million into compensation either.

'All that deregulation has achieved was taking $450 million off farmers, and handing it over to Woolworths, Coles and the other retail chains,'' he said.

To Katter, dairy deregulation is destroying farmers, families and communities. He thinks those social costs haven't been properly factored into all the economic equation that says deregulation is of net benefit. Experts be damned.

On March 29 I received a 7,000 word opus on dairy deregulation from a regular contributor to my webdairy, Tim Dunlop.

Why on earth would a bloke doing his PhD thesis on the relationship between intellectuals and citizens in Australia want to find out everything he could on deregulation, weigh up the competing claims, and conclude that the whole thing was nutty?

So I asked him. ``It is rather a symbolic topic in debates about the role of government, the notion of free markets, and the place of economy versus society in our lives,'' he replied.

``Thanks to the internet an immense amount of material is available and I thought the claims of the various advocates just didn't add up.

'So I decided to put what I'd found on paper and see what I came up with. It shows how ideology can simply overcome common sense in that, even if deregulation worked exactly as they say it should, the net benefit to consumers is so bloody small that you have to wonder what the point is.

'I show in the article that even if it reduced the price of milk to zero, on average we would be only $3.20 a week better off. And this against the loss of 4000 dairy farms and $2 billion out of rural communities.''

Tim's experiment in entering a debate run by experts and putting forward an intelligent layperson's contribution had amazing results. He kicked off a debate in the webdiary which is still going on, on the specifics of dairy, on what a democracy really is and on economic rationalism. It is passionate and very informative.

Democrats Senator John Woodley has distributed Tim's piece at dairy conferences and to constituents. More than one MP has asked for and obtained permission to use the dairy debate contributions on their websites.

So what does this show? The experts don't know what's best.

Most of them fail to account for real costs in social and environmental capital in their cost benefit analyses. There is genuine interest from many Australians in all walks of life in civilising the current economic orthodoxy.

Pauline Hanson has sometimes asked the right questions for quite a while now.

She has no answers, but unless those who can contribute to finding them have the capacity to participate in the debate, the experts will keep winning by default.

Tim Dunlop points out that the experts simply assume that deregulation equates to public benefit. He sets out the big three defences they use to shore up their position and allow them to refuse to engage in genuine, constructive debate.

They are TINA (There Is No Alternative), followed by NICE (Not Implemented Completely Enough) and GIT (Give It Time).

If all else fails, attack your critics as Luddites, reactionaries or whatever other demonising word you can think of.

Let's move on from this barren soil. Let's have a conversation instead.

Email: mkingston@mail.fairfax.com.au