Tag: government

Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter 9: Deeper and broader relationships

Australia in the Asian Century concludes with a look at how we build relationships into Asia.

This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report.

Australia in the Asian Century’s final chapter looks at how Australia can deepen relationships with its Asian neighbours. The chapter is full of fine ideas which don’t quite match the reality of government policies and spending.

Early in the chapter the white paper proposes increasing the number of Australian diplomats in Asia along with opening a new embassy in Ulan Baator, a Jakarta based ambassador to ASEAN and consulates in Shenyang , Phuket and eastern Indonesia.

Fine words, however Australia’s diplomatic corps has been shrinking for the last twenty years so staffing these facilities will require a withdrawal from other regions. The white paper doesn’t identify which countries Australia’s representation would be cut from and the consequences of that.

More importantly, it doesn’t identify how Foreign Affairs and Trade staff will be skilled up to man these facilities, instead we get another worthy ambition.

National objective 22. Australia will have the necessary capabilities to promote Australian interests and maintain Australia’s influence.

  • Australia’s diplomatic network will have a larger footprint across Asia.

Again, one would surely expect that Australia would already have the necessary capabilities to promote its national interest and maintain influence. Is the white paper suggesting we don’t?

Which leads us to the next national objective;

National objective 23. Australia will have stronger and more comprehensive relationships with countries across the region, especially with key regional nations—China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea.

If we accept the assumption which underlies the entire paper, that Asia is going to continue to grow both economically and in influence then this will happen regardless of what governments do. It’s a meaningless and silly statement which once again ignores most of Asia and simplifies the dynamics.

The Australia Network

One of the great wastes of the Howard years was the dismembering of Radio Australia which was a cheap and effective way of projecting ‘soft power’ across the region. I personally came across this as a backpacker in China where many manual workers in the hard seat carriages practiced their Australian accented English that they’d learned on Radio Australia’s programs.

This was shut down by one of the spiteful, stupid and poorly thought out decisions that were the hallmark of the Howard government.

Replacing this was a new Australia network that replaced the previous awful overseas television service which had been a niche product on Asian cable TV channels – I had it on my Thai cable subscription when I lived in Bangkok. It was rarely watched.

The Australia Network hasn’t been a great success and that is largely due to the funding – the 2011-21 contract was costed at $221 million in the budget papers.

A break out box in the white paper boasts about the Australia Channel and its “mandate to encourage awareness of Australia, promote cross-cultural communication and build regional partnerships.”

Listed is the funding for some other services – Al Jazeera, $359 million in 2009; CCTV, $280 million in 2009 and NHK World/Radio, $226 million in 2008.

With the Australia Network receiving less than a tenth of this funding, it’s no surprise the station looks amateurish and irrelevant. Once again we see the difference between government words and government deeds.

Which brings us to the final two national objectives;

National objective 24. Australia will have deeper and broader people to people links with Asian nations, across the entire community.

National objective 25. Australia will have stronger, deeper and broader cultural links with Asian nations.

Again these are more motherhood statements and barely worth considering. The section itself skates over some of Australia’s most important assets – the cultural diversity and immigrant communities.

That the final chapter spends just a few pages on this aspect probably sums up the entire project – simple, full of motherhood statements and missing the critical strengths and threats to Australia’s, and Asia’s growth.

Overall the paper is a disappointment that tells us little we didn’t already know while stating some big ambitions which successive governments have shown they aren’t capable of delivering.

The message for those building Australia’s 21st Century links with Asia is not to wait for government but to get on and do it.

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Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter 8: Building sustainable security in the region

What are the security issues for the Asia in the 21st Century

This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report.

The eighth chapter of Australia in the Asian Century looks at the security picture of the region, this is one of the bigger chapters and like some of the others it’s as notable for what it leaves out as for what it says.

National objective 20. Australian policies will contribute to Asia’s development as a region of sustainable security in which habits of cooperation are the norm.

That’s nice, worthy and has been undoubtedly true for most previous Australian governments. Except of course when Australian Prime Ministers join the prevailing colonial power in wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Malaya, Korea, Vietnam or kicking around the German territories in World War I.

Chapter Eight partly dives into territory already covered in Chapter Three, this time though the analysis does discuss the United States’ role in more detail and makes the observation that US military spending dwarfs that of any other Asian nation – interestingly this is one of the few times Russia gets a mention in the entire report.

Encouragingly, the paper doesn’t confine the concept of ‘security’ just to military matters and takes a broader view of issues such as guaranteeing access to resources, food and water. There is some discussion of climate change and on regional responses to natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes.

One notable omission is that of refugees. Given that most of the asylum seekers arriving by boat are Asian – currently coming from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka – and almost all pass through other Asian countries, it would be expected this issue would get some exploration. Sadly it doesn’t and once again skirting over an important issue detracts from the paper’s substance.

As befits Australia’s most important relationships in Asia, there is a lot of discussion of the three way relationship between China, the United States and Australia with a detailed breakout box in section 8.4.

The discussion on Australia’s relations between China and the US makes an interesting statement;

In managing the intersections of Australia’s ties with the United States and China, we will need a clear sense of our national interests, a strong voice in both relationships and effective diplomacy.

Undoubtedly this statement is true, however successive Australian governments have conflated the interests of the United States with being the same as Australia’s. In recent times Australian leaders have followed the US lead even when it has been clear American policy conflicts with Australia’s Chinese relations.

Moving away from a reflex support of the United States is going to be one of the biggest challenges for Australian governments in the Asian Century and one hopes the process is as gradual and incident free as the white paper hopes.

National objective 21.The region will be more sustainable and human security will be strengthened with the development of resilient markets for basic needs such as energy, food and water.

National objective 21 is an interesting statement in itself – “resilient markets for basic needs such as energy, food and water” smacks of the 1980s privatisation and corporatism that has left Australia with duopoly industries and an excessive financialisation of those markets for basic needs.

It may well turn out to be the case that Asian countries choose not to follow that path, particularly those like the Philippines and Indonesia who have experienced the effects of crony capitalism in recent history.

Chapter 8 of Australia in the Asian Century finishes with a detailed look at the regional efforts aimed at building trust and co-operation on trans-national issues.  Much is made of various international groups such as the G20 and the UN.

An interesting case study is that of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty with an examination of Japan’s and Australia’s work in that field. Sadly this is another area that’s let down by the actions of current and previous Australian governments in selling uranium to India.

The nuclear weapons stand off between India, Pakistan and China is another ‘elephant in the room’ issue that doesn’t really get the coverage it should in such a report.

Chapter 8 of Australia in the Asian Century is a very optimistic section of the report however it does hint at the path Australia could follow to being a credible, medium sized economy and influencer in the region. However one has to consider the actions of Australian leaders when asking if the nation is really interested in taking that path.

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Australia in the Asian Century – Building the agriculture industry

How can Australia improve agricultural exports to Asia?

Before going into Chapter 8, the Australia in the Asian Century report has a detailed look at the agriculture industry. Which kicks off with National Objective number 19;

National objective 19. Australia’s agriculture and food production system will be globally competitive, with productive and sustainable agriculture and food businesses.

While this objective seems to have already been achieved, the bulk of the chapter does a good job of identifying the opportunity and challenges for the industry.

The examination of trade treaties, biosecurity and food security is a good overview of the industry however it does suffer from a rose coloured view of prospects and government programs.

Issues such as protectionism, genetically modified foods and the running sore of live cattle exports don’t get a mention.

Another aspect of this section is how the aspirations don’t match the actions of governments, for instance the industry capture of regulators – the case of defining free range eggs being a good example – is a real barrier to Australia selling quality produce internationally.

While the section does discuss ‘value adding’, the tenor of the section seems to be focused on bulk exports and really doesn’t identify industries such organics and free range which are an opportunity for the agricultural industry.

Overall though, this section at least does give a reasonably detailed snapshot of an industry and its a shame the paper doesn’t attempt to profile other sectors in the Australian economy.

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Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter Six: Building capabilities

How can Australia build a productive workforce to take advantage of the Asian Century

This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report.

Of all the chapters in the Australia in Asian Century discussion paper, Chapter Six has probably attracted the most opprobrium because of the fine words which haven’t been matched by government policy and action.

Parts of this chapter have a strong “school marm” tone as it tries to mandate the composition of company boards or the locations of where students will study. Overall though, most of the objectives are either motherhood statements, impractical or at odds with the actions of both state and Federal governments.

National objective 9. To build the capabilities of Australian students, Australia’s school system will be in the top five schooling systems in the world, delivering excellent outcomes for all students of all backgrounds, and systematically improving performance over time.

  • By 2025, Australia will be ranked as a top five country in the world for the performance of our students in reading, science and mathematics literacy and for providing our children with a high?quality and high?equity education system.
  • By 2015, 90 per cent of young Australians aged 20 to 24 years will have a Year 12 or equivalent qualification, up from 86 per cent in 2010.
While these objectives are worthy, there’s little discussion of exactly how this will be achieved beyond broad statements. Again it’s notable that these aspirations are being laid out at a time when funding is being cut and staff retrenched in both state and Federal government education departments.

National objective 10. Every Australian student will have significant exposure to studies of Asia across the curriculum to increase their cultural knowledge and skills and enable them to be active in the region. All schools will engage with at least one school in Asia to support the teaching of a priority Asian language, including through increased use of the National Broadband Network.

Says who? Who exactly is going to force a school to engage with at least one school in Asia? These are the sort of broad brush statements that detract from the report.

These kind of statements are the “thought bubble” approach to policy that marks much of what passes for governance in Australia today and such poorly thought out programs end up at best wasting money. At worst, the unintended consequences of a ‘policy’ thought up on the back of beer mat end up causing more damage than good.

Such a program could work well if properly thought out and integrated properly into the long term curriculum of the students but it would take proper leadership from state and Federal education ministers.

National objective 12. All students will have access to at least one priority Asian language; these will be Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese.

This is good and fair, but is something that was supposed to have been put in place thirty years ago. Instead the proportions of students studying Asian languages has steadily dropped.

As newspapers have reported there are barely a dozen Hindi language teachers in New South Wales, so the priority needs to be training teachers to deliver the courses.

Such inconvenient logistical problems are an excellent example of those well meaning but poorly thought through “thought bubbles.”

National objective 12. Australia will remain among the world’s best for research and teaching in universities, delivering excellent outcomes for a larger number of Australian students, attracting the best academics and students from around the world and strengthening links between Australia and the region.

  • By 2020, 20 per cent of undergraduate higher education enrolments will be people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, up from 17 per cent in 2011.
  • By 2025, 40 per cent of all 25 to 34?year?olds will hold a qualification at bachelor level or above, up from 35 per cent in 2011.
  • By 2025, 10 of Australia’s universities will be in the world’s top 100.
  • A larger number of Australian university students will be studying overseas and a greater proportion will be undertaking part of their degree in Asia.
This objective really smacks of poorly thought out ideas on the run and illustrates starkly the differences between the well meaning objectives and the behaviour of governments.
It’s almost impossible for ten of Australia’s universities to make it into the more reputable measure of top 100 universities when for the last three decades research and post graduate programs have been slowly strangled by falling government funding.
Even if a Gillard government were to change that trend, it’s unlikely Australian universities could make up the lost ground in 13 years.
Mandating that “a larger number of Australian university students will be studying overseas and a greater proportion will be undertaking part of their degree in Asia” is nice but who is going to force students to study overseas and specifically in Asia?
More to the point, what are notoriously conservative Australian employers going to do with all these graduates of Asian universities?

National objective 13. Australia will have vocational education and training systems that are among the world’s best, building capability in the region and supporting a highly skilled Australian workforce able to continuously develop its capabilities.

  • By 2020, more than three?quarters of working?age Australians will have an entry?level qualification (at Certificate III level or higher), up from just under half in 2009.
  • Australia’s vocational education and training institutions will have substantially expanded services in more nations in the region, building the productive capacity of the workforce of these nations and supporting Australian businesses and workers to have a greater presence in Asian markets.
Given the week before the Gillard government cut apprenticeship funding and the NSW government announced it was further emasculating its state TAFE system a few days after the report was released, this objective can be treated purely empty words.

Business capacity

One of the reasons why Australia engaged so little with Asia over the last twenty five years is because the business community became focused inwards rather looking for opportunities in foreign markets. So the idea of getting more Asian experience into boardrooms is laudable but the solutions proposed impractical.

National objective 14. Decision makers in Australian businesses, parliaments, national institutions (including the Australian Public Service and national cultural institutions) and advisory forums across the community will have deeper knowledge and expertise of countries in our region and have a greater capacity to integrate domestic and international issues.

  • One?third of board members of Australia’s top 200 publicly listed companies and Commonwealth bodies (including companies, authorities, agencies and commissions) will have deep experience in and knowledge of Asia.
  • One?third of the senior leadership of the Australian Public Service (APS 200) will have deep experience in and knowledge of Asia.
This objective has drawn a lot of scorn from the business community and for good reason – how is a Federal government going to mandate that a third of the ASX200 will have “deep experience and knowledge of Asia”?
While the aim of having a third of the senior public service possessing Asian experience is worthy, this is almost impossible given the deadline for this is thirteen years away, any bureaucrat hoping to have “deep experience and knowledge of Asia” would have had to have been working on it for the last five or ten years. If this program isn’t in place now, it isn’t going to happen.

Society

Probably the biggest strength of Australia as a nation is in its diverse and relatively tolerant society so this section of the report is notable for what it misses in opportunities.

National objective 15. Australian communities and regions will benefit from structural changes in the economy and seize the new opportunities emerging in the Asian century.

Another worthy aim and its notable that the region cited in the case study is Darwin, a city whose economy is being wildly distorted by the LNG boom which is driving up prices and labour costs. If anything Darwin is an example of Australia turning its back on opportunities and focusing on a quick, resources driven buck.

National objective 16. By preserving and building on our social foundations, Australia will be a higher skill, higher wage economy with a fair, multicultural and cohesive society and a growing population, and all Australians will be able to benefit from, and participate in, Australia’s growing prosperity and engagement in Asia.

Cant and motherhood statements as one would hope all government seek to build a fair and cohesive society on our social foundations. It’s interesting that much of the poorly thought out, short term tactics by publicity hungry politicians probably does more to damage Australia’s institutions than other factors.

Overall this chapter deserves to have drawn the most criticism with its motherhood statements and wholly unachievable aims.

Most disappointingly, it skates over Australia’s diverse workforce and provides no ideas on how to harness the talents of the country’s ethnic groups in building ties and improving the nation’s skills.

Image of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival from EmmaJG on Flickr

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Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter Two: The future of Asia

Chapter two of Australia in the Asian Century attempts to predict the development of the region’s economies over the next decade

This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report. An initial overview of the report is at Australian Hubris in the Asian Century.

“Asia’s economic resurgence is set to continue” is the bold statement at the beginning of Chapter Two of the Australia in the Asian Century report and with that the chapter immediately falls back to warm motherhood statements;

Average living standards are set to improve dramatically and transform the way people live and work. Asia’s economies are projected to expand at a strong rate. The region’s expansion and development will change the contours of Asia and the globe—opening up exciting new opportunities, while also posing some challenges.

All of this is true, however the report struggles to identify exactly what those challenges and opportunities are as Asia develops and where Australians fit into the region’s evolving economy.

Demographics will matter, but they are not destiny

The constant mantra through the report is “demographics will matter, but they are not destiny.” Yet, despite the headline, Chapter Two illustrates that so far it has been destiny.

Graph 2.6 of the report shows how Japan’s, and now South Korea’s, productivity has tailed off as the population has aged. This is to be expected when economic expansion has been based on labour intensive manufacturing, as China’s is today.

Frustratingly, the report acknowledges this with the following paragraph;

But the fruits of adopting new technology and adapting it will become harder to harvest. A point will come, though it’s still some way off, where the growth of labour productivity in developing Asian economies will slow—opportunities for gains from importing foreign technology and for shifting workers from agriculture to industry will diminish.

“Some point in the future” doesn’t wash when the rest of the chapter shows off various ‘firm’ numbers estimating ‘base’, ‘low’ and ‘high’ growth rates. If you can quantify those growth assumptions, then it should be fairly trivial to estimate the turning point where aging populations start to affect China.

Luckily others have done this work, the Australian Macrobusiness site suggests that turning point could be as early as 2015. In which case, unlike Japan and South Korea, China will have got old before it got rich.

If this true, then IMF’s projected growth rates will miss their targets – particularly the ‘low growth’ scenario which is almost identical to their ‘base scenario’.

Rise of the middle class

Much of the emphasis in this view of Asia’s development is on the rise of the middle class and the report features a case study of Hitesh, a middle class stockbroker in Ahmedabad.

While there’s no doubt Hitesh and his family’s income and standard of living are rising, the idea that several hundred million Indian and Chinese will jump to European or North American income levels before 2025 is improbable.

Most stockbrokers in New York, London or Sydney earn between 30 and 300 times Hitesh’s $5,000 a year and in 2010, average Chinese income was a tenth of the US.

Even if the Indian and Chinese middle classes did manage a tenfold growth in income over the next decade, the assumption they would adopt the debt driven high consumption patterns of the US or Australia isn’t a given as we see in how the Japanese middle classes haven’t aped the spending behaviour of their profligate Western friends.

The credit and banking points in this chapter illustrate the hubris mentioned in my original overview of Australia in the Asian Century.

And with financial systems in advanced economies unwinding the high debt levels built up before the Global Financial Crisis, financial institutions in stronger economic positions, such as those in Australia and elsewhere in the Asian region, will have opportunities to expand into new markets.

Given the dire records of Australian banks in expanding overseas along with the “stronger economic position” being due more to government guarantees during the GFC and the desperate political desire to prop up Australia’s property market at all costs, it’s difficult to see exactly what Australian institutions have to offer Asian savers except to further underwrite the never ending down under housing bubble.

Chapter two of the Australia in the Asian Century report finishes with an overview of the current geopolitical situation which is notable more for what has been left out. This is again probably due to Canberra public service politics and the report suffers for it.

One major region left out is Central Asia and Russia – outstanding given the report’s view  that a resource poor Asia (that Japanese assumption again) will need Australia to fuel its energy and resources needs – which ignores the construction of pipelines and railways to China and India.

Also missed are the projects to upgrade China’s railway and road links to Europe and Central Asia. These in themselves may trigger major geopolitical changes over the next few years, as we’re seeing today in Tibet and Xinjiang after railways were built to Kashgar to Lhasa. Yet none of this is considered.

Not the ‘Stans should feel aggrieved, like the rest of the report the emphasis is on China and India with scant mention of other Asian countries.

For Australia, much of the hope in the report seems to be in providing raw materials for Asia’s industrialising and urbanising societies along with being a holiday destination and education provider. This is all lazy 1980s thinking which projects Australia’s Japanese experience of thirty years ago onto China and India today.

The predictions of Asia’s future in the Australia in the Asian Century report are largely are a continuation of the status quo. If this report had been written in 1960, it may have picked the rise of Japan over the following twenty years but the main focus would have been on Burma as Asia’s richest independent country.

Exacerbating the report’s weakness are the assumptions that development paths will follow the same course as Japan, Taiwan or South Korea in the late 20th Century.

Development wasn’t a smooth path in all three of those countries and each had their own unique political and economic upheavals in that time, the failure to recognise that similar disruptions will happen in Asia’s emerging economies as they develop is probably the greatest weakness in the entire report.

It’s very easy to draw straight lines on graphs based on ‘best case’ IMF projections but history is rarely linear. This is probably the greatest intellectual failing of the white paper.

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Australian Hubris in the Asian Century

Australia in the Asian century is the story of opportunities missed.

This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report.

The release of the Australia in the Asian Century discussion paper today raises the question of where the country sees itself and where it is going. It lets us down on many levels.

While there’s a lot more to discuss in the paper, which I’ll do over the next few days, there’s a few issues that come to mind on first reading.

The reliance on mining

A constant  in the discussion about Australia’s future is the continued mining boom. This was the underlying theme of Monday’s Mid-Year Economic Outlook and is also the case in the Asian Century paper. Here’s chart 4.4.2 from the document which shows the forecast makeup of Australia’s exports.

Today mining exports are shown as being just over 50% of Australia’s trade with Asia and have mineral income growing to well over 60% of trade by 2025.

What is frightening about this is the belief across Australia’s political and business leaders that the mining boom is here to stay and will continue to keep growing.

Little risk analysis

Also notable about the report is how little acknowledgement of risk there is in the document. Most of the risks are dismissed in six paragraphs in Chapter 4.4

Geopolitical risk does get its own chapter, but even there most of the challenges are glossed over. Eventually most of the risks are dismissed with this line.

None of these developments of themselves make major power conflict likely—in some important ways they will probably act as a constraint. All the major powers recognise how interdependent their economic interests are.

This is reminiscent of the line used in the late 1980s – “no two countries with a McDonalds have ever gone to war against each other.” A glib nonsense which ceased to be true when NATO attacked Serbia in an effort to stop the massacres of the Yugoslavian disintegration.

Trivialising the big risks

Had anyone predicted in 1986 that within five years, there would be a bloody civil war in Yugoslavia, the Eastern Bloc collapse and the Russian Empire’s eagle replace the hammer and sickle on the Kremlin they would have been dismissed as fools.

Yet that is exactly what happened.

The risk of instability within the People’s Republic of China isn’t mentioned or even the effects of what a collapse of North Korea would mean to South Korea – another key Australian mineral market – both of which would have massive effects on Australia’s export markets over the next decade.

While I’m certainly not forecasting the collapse of either the DPRK or the Communist Party of China in the near future, these are massive risks to any plan which purports to look at the next decade. Ignoring them or trivialising them does not help the paper’s credibility.

Australian hubris

Most notable in the white paper is the tone of Australian Exceptionalism through the commentary. In the Prime Minister’s speech she said “we are the nation that stared down the economic crisis.”

Calling massive stimulus packages, reinflating the property market and guaranteeing bank liabilities is hardly ‘staring down’. Australia’s avoiding going to into recession after the 2008 crisis was due to the “go early, go hard” philosophy of pumping money into the economy which was learned by Australia’s bureaucrats in the 1990s recession.

That policy worked to stave off recessions during the Asian currency crisis of 1998, the Long Term Credit Bank collapse and the post September 11 uncertainty. It worked on massive scale during the post-Lehmann Brothers collapse.

Crediting Australia with some sort of miracle economy is hubris on a grand scale and hardly the basis for developing a sensible plan to guide us through the next decade.

What is Australia’s competitive advantage?

Essential to understanding where the nation can prosper from the rise of Asian economies is where our current strengths lie. Apart from empty phrases on “skilled workforces” and “new opportunities will emerge in manufacturing” there’s no explanation of exactly where Australia can profit from these.

In fact most of the case studies refer to Australian companies outsourcing or Asian trading patterns that really don’t need any skilled or valued added contribution at all, a case in point is the story of ‘Hitesh’, one of India’s rising middle class.

Hitesh, 31, is a stockbroker in a firm that he opened with his friend several years ago. He brings in an annual income of US$5,280, placing his family squarely in the middle of Ahmedabad’s middle class.

Nowhere does the case study explain exactly what Australia can offer him – the air conditioners and cars certainly won’t be made or designed in Australia and his daughters’ educations in 2025 might well come through the internet from MIT or the London School of Economics instead of them flying to Melbourne to drive taxis and do barista courses in the hope of getting Australian permanent residency.

In fact if anything, it’s difficult to see why an Asian company would choose to do business with an Australian stockbroker when they earn thirty to a hundred times more than Hitesh.

1980s thinking

Much of what is in the white paper is what we’ve heard before in the 1980s – back then it was Yuske in Nagoya who was going to buy our wine and come to the Gold Coast for holidays.

There’s nothing in the projections we haven’t heard before, except today we’ve squandered two decades of opportunity by ramping up our property markets and building an unsustainable middle class welfare state.

Sometime in the 1990s – possibly around the time of John Howard’s election – Australia turned inwards and insular. We had the opportunity  to position Australia as a credible mid-level power in the region but we chose instead to renovate our kitchens.

That opportunity has been lost and repeating the mantras of the 1980s with the words ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ substituted for ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ won’t cut it.

Australia in the Asian Century was an opportunity to show some vision and stake a claim on sharing some of the 21st Century’s riches. Instead the writers chose to give us platitudes underpinned by the certainties of a never ending economic boom.

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Building new technological Jerusalems

Britain’s hopes of building a new technology hub are similar to those of Harold Wilson – how much do they owe the ideology of our times?

A Telegraph profile of Joanna Shields, the incoming Chief Executive of London’s Tech City Investment Organisation, is an interesting view of how we see economic development and the route to building the industrial centres of the future. Much of that view is distorted by the ideologies of our times.

London’s Tech City is a brave project and somewhat reminiscent of future British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 proclamation about the UK’s future lying in harnessing the “white heat of technology.” From Dictionary.com;

“We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution…. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.”

Fifty years later a notable part of Wilson’s speech is the use of the word “socialism” – the very thought of a mainstream politician using the “s-word” today and being elected shortly afterwards is unthinkable.

Today the ideology is somewhat different – much of Tech City’s objectives are around aping the models of Ireland and Silicon Valley – which in itself is accepting the failed beliefs of our times.

Based around London’s “Silicon Roundabout” – a term reminding those of us of a certain age of a childhood TV series – the heart of the Tech City strategy lies the tax incentives used by the Irish to build the “Celtic Tiger” of the 1990s and government investment funds to create an entrepreneurial hub similar to Silicon Valley, something also done in Dublin with the Digital Hub.

It’s hard not to think that copying these models is a flawed strategy – Silicon Valley is the result of four generations of technology investment by the United States military which is beyond the resources of the British government, and probably beyond today’s cash strapped US government, while the Celtic Tiger today lies wounded in the rubble of Ireland’s over leveraged economy.

At the core of both Silicon Valley’s startup culture and Ireland’s corporate incentives are the ideologies of the 1980s which celebrates a hairy-chested Ayn Rand type individualism while at the same time perversely relying upon government spending. Ultimately failure is not an option as governments will step in to guarantee investment returns and management bonuses.

Just up the M1 and M6 from London’s Silicon Roundabout are the remains of what were the Silicon Valleys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The manufacturing industries of the English Midlands or the woollen mills of Yorkshire revolutionised the global societies of their times. These were built by individuals and investors who knew they could be ruined by a poor investment and managers who retired to the parlour with a pistol if the enterprise they were trusted to run failed.

Today’s investment attraction ideologies – tax discounts to big corporations and grants to entrepreneurs – are in a touching way not dissimilar to Harold Wilson’s 1960s belief in socialism.

At the time of Wilson’s 1963 speech China and much of the communist world were showing that socialism, with its failed Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward of the 1950s, was not the answer for countries wanting to harness the “white heat of technology.”

Similarly today’s Corporatist model of massive government support of ‘too big to fail’ corporations is just as much a failed ideology, like the socialists of the mid 1960s had their world views had been framed in the depression of the 193os, today’s leaders are blinded by their beliefs that were shaped by the freewheeling 1980s.

Whether the next Silicon Valley will be in London, or somewhere like Nairobi or Tashkent, it probably won’t be born out of a centrally planned government initiative born out of the certainties of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan anymore than the 1960s technological revolution was born out of Karl Marx or Josef Engels.

Silicon Valley itself was the happy unintended consequence of the Cold War and the Space Race, which we reap the benefits of today.

Every ideology creates its own set of unintended consequences, those created by today’s beliefs will be just as surprising to us as punk rockers were to the aging Harold Wilson.

Maybe Tech City will help Britain will do better at this attempt to regain its position as global economic powerhouse, but you can’t help thinking that economic salvation might come from some West Indian or Sikh kid working out of a storage unit in Warrington than a bunch of white middle class guys celebrating a government grant over a glass of Bolly in Shoreditch.

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