Road to Hell
Just because protesters who glue themselves to the road have good intentions doesn’t mean they aren’t a menace to civilisation. By Henry Ergas.
A fact as crucial as it is little known underlies Scott Morrison’s call for tougher measures against anti-mining activists.
In 1994-95, mining accounted for less than 15 per cent of the economy’s capital stock. By last year its share had more than doubled, exceeding that of the market sector’s next two largest industries — transport and electricity, gas and water — combined.
With almost one dollar in every three invested in mining, no industry matters more to Australia’s prosperity. And few things have a greater effect on mining’s efficiency than its ability to draw on a dense network of subcontractors, whose activities range from maintaining critical equipment to ensuring vital supplies.
Crippling those subcontractors is the activists’ new goal. For the moment their aim is to prevent banks and insurance companies dealing with any of the small and medium businesses engaged in the Adani project.
However, the moves to impose that “secondary boycott” are merely a step in a campaign to destroy first coal mining and then the industry as a whole.
The economic consequences would be devastating, and not just for regional Australia. But, intoxicated by the belief they are saving “humanity”, the activists couldn’t care less about the individual men and women whose future would be gutted — all the more so because their own livelihoods, which lie largely in the public sector, aren’t at risk.
Queried on their tactics they claim to be exercising the “right to protest”. But there neither is, nor has there ever been, any such right. Rather, there are the longstanding freedoms of speech, assembly, petition and association, all of which are regulated and limited by law.
As the High Court recently confirmed in Clubb v Edwards and Preston v Avery, none of those freedoms, individually or collectively, allow its beneficiaries to trample on the rights of others — including the right to engage in legitimate commercial activity.
Nor is there a general right to boycott, much less to coerce others into taking part in a boycott. And for good reason.
Far from serving to secure “many social advances we now take for granted”, as Hugh de Kretser, executive director of the Human Rights Law Centre, claimed in response to the Prime Minister’s speech, what we now call boycotts originated in medieval Europe as organised assaults on Jews, with the cry “don’t deal with Jews” then serving as a model for the social movements that proliferated in the 19th century.
And just as boycotts were used by the medieval guilds and later by cartels to crush competitors, so they have remained the anti-Semites’ instrument of choice, with the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign being simply the latest manifestation of a disease that stretches over the centuries.
To say that is not to deny some boycotts have had worthy goals, although the historical record suggests boycotts aimed at doing good usually had less success than the ones whose objectives were morally repugnant.
But while it is undeniable that boycotts have varied, so it is undeniable that legal restrictions on boycotts were born of long and bitter experience.
That those restrictions are potentially applicable to politically motivated boycotts seems clear from the record in the 2011 inquiry undertaken by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission into the shameful BDS-led boycott of the Max Brenner chocolate chain. And it is also clear they would apply to the anti-mining activists were it not for Labor’s insistence on excluding from the prohibitions’ scope conduct whose “dominant purpose is substantially related to environmental protection”.
Four years ago the Harper review of competition policy recommended that if environmental groups engaged in secondary boycotts, the exemption, which treats environmental groups more favourably than other politically motivated campaigns, should be reconsidered. Now those boycotts are proliferating, the government has every reason to speedily implement the review’s finding.
There would, no doubt, be howls of protest were the exemption repealed, along with claims democracy was being undermined. But coercive boycotts are scarcely the stuff of democracy.
On the contrary, the essence of democracy is that all citizens can participate equally through the electoral process in framing the laws, and have both an equal obligation to respect those laws and an equal right to peaceably conduct their lives within the framework the laws establish.
But the activists refuse to accept the legitimacy of the democratic process. That they have failed miserably in their efforts to convince Australians to ban coal mining is obvious. But they are, they believe, entitled to impose their views by force — by intimidating companies into going along with boycotts or, as in Melbourne, by assaulting those they disagree with when they try to exercise the freedoms of expression and assembly the activists so stridently claim for themselves.
Should they get away with it the result will be to replicate in mining what the building unions’ thugs have inflicted on construction, where multi-factor productivity levels are 14 per cent lower today than they were in 2013-14, with that collapse being the largest single factor dragging Australia’s overall productivity growth into negative territory.
Construction cannot shift overseas but mining can. And when it does our terms of trade will decline, the commonwealth budget will take a hit (reducing its ability to fund the ever-expanding welfare spending Labor and the Greens demand) and living standards will suffer with them.
The greatest damage, however, will be to the social and political fabric. As John Rawls, perhaps the most eminent political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century, put it, once the legitimacy of liberal democracy and its outcomes is rejected in the name of “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise”, society is liable to descend into “mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion”.
Instead of building a framework within which different points of view can coexist, the language of politics degenerates into the grammar of anarchy.
The immediate test of whether that fate awaits us will be whether the Victorian courts treat the perpetrators of the verbal and physical violence in Melbourne with the severity their offences deserve or, yet again, let them off with the lightest of slaps on the wrist.
But it is every bit as important that the prohibitions on coercive boycotts be made fit for purpose, and capable of dealing with the renewed threat they pose.
“Guard your laws as you would guard your walls,” said Heraclitus, the greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, for they are all that stands between reason and barbarism. With the barbarians on the rampage, it’s time reason reasserted itself.