When funding healthcare, don't forget the caring bit

 It’s Easter, and we’ve got the day off. So let’s think about something different. As a community, we spend a fortune each year on health, mainly through governments. What has economics got to tell us about healthcare? And, since it’s Easter, what light has Christianity got to shed on how we fund healthcare?

One man who’s thought deeply on these questions is Dr Stephen Duckett, Australia’s leading health economist, whose career has included academia, running government health departments, and the Grattan Institute think tank. He’s now back in academia, at the University of Melbourne.

Duckett has long been a lay reader in the Anglican Church. He’s recently completed a doctorate in theology, awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s turned his thesis into a book, Healthcare Funding and Christian Ethics, published by Cambridge University Press.

One way to run a hospital is to let the doctors and nurses do as they see fit until the money runs out but, for several decades, health economists’ advice has reshaped the health system, helping to ensure that the money available is spent in ways that do the most good to patients.

One definition of economics is that it’s the study of scarcity. We have infinite wants, but limited resources of land, labour and physical capital to achieve those wants. So we must carefully weigh the costs and benefits of the many things we’d like, so we end up choosing the particular combination of things that yields us the greatest “utility” (benefit) available.

Since there’s never enough money to spend on healthcare, hard decisions have to be made about what can be done and what can’t, what drugs should be subsidised and what can’t, who should be helped and who turned away.

Health economists analyse the cost-effectiveness of the various options to help governments and hospitals make their choices, working out the number of “quality-adjusted life years” each option would add.

The Scotsman called the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, saw it as a moral science but, as economists have striven to be more “rigorous” (which mainly means more mathematical) this touchy-feely stuff has fallen away.

Most economists see economics as amoral, that is, neither moral nor immoral; having nothing to say about moral issues. When it comes to means and ends, economists see themselves as sticking to means.

They’re saying: tell me what you want to do, and I’ll tell you the best way to achieve it. That’s what they say; it’s not always what they do.

Economics is based on utilitarianism: seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. But this ignores the question of “equity”: how fairly the benefits are shared. Are some getting a lot while others miss out?

Duckett says: “Economics’ assumption that humans are simply individual units, de-emphasising community, and [economics’] ubiquitous use in policymaking, comes at a cost, as Homo economicus [the self-interested, rational calculator that economists assume us to be] crowds out other manifestations of what it is to be human.”

Economists often say they have no expertise on equity and the community, so they leave that to others – such as the politicians. Economists often claim that economics is “objective” and “value-free”.

But Duckett says it’s not simple. By ignoring issues you’re implying that they don’t matter. And you’re making implicit assumptions that are value-laden.

For instance, if a cost-effectiveness study does not explicitly highlight the distribution of costs and benefits [how unequally they are shared between people], it is implicitly conveying the message that the distribution is not a relevant issue.

If nursing home funding allows money ostensibly allocated for care to be leached out as extra returns to the owners, then quality is assumed to be not a concern of those doing the funding.

If a system design places a higher monetary reward on cosmetic surgery intended solely to improve appearance compared to the monetary reward for caring for older patients and people with mental illness, this sends a signal about the value placed on care for the marginalised.

Duckett says that, because decisions about public policy inherently involve value choices, health economics becomes a “moral science” whether economists like it or not. What’s true, however, is that economics is not well-equipped to determine issues such as what should be society’s priorities, what value should be place on unfettered choice, and the value to place on ensuring no one is left behind.

This is where Christian ethics has a contribution to make, a contribution that, except on matters of sexual morality, doesn’t differ much from the views of the aggressively secular philosopher Professor Peter Singer and, no doubt, many other Western ethicists.

Duckett offers a “theology of healthcare funding” based on Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. As I hope you remember, a man was travelling to Jericho when he was set upon by robbers, who left him naked and bleeding by the road.

Two separate religious figures passed by him on the road without stopping to help. But a Samaritan saw him and “was moved with pity”. He bandaged his wounds, put him on his donkey and took him to an inn, where he paid the innkeeper in advance to look after him, promising to come back and pay for any extra expense.

From this parable Duckett derives three principles that should guide health economists in the advice they give on healthcare funding.

The three are: compassion (shown by the behaviour of the Samaritan), social justice (everyone included and treated equally; shown by the identity of the Samaritan, a race despised by the Jews) and stewardship (shown by the innkeeper, who was trusted to care for the traveller and to spend the Samaritan’s money wisely).

Compassion must involve feeling leading to doing. It must involve helping people other than yourself. So health economics must be less impersonal, remembering the flesh and blood behind the statistics and calculations. Any funding arrangement must allow time for workers to care for patients in a compassionate way.

The Christian ethic is that social justice is not simply about fairness for atomised individuals, but also the person as part of a community, something economists tend to forget. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said “a person is a person through other people . . . I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.”

“Christian contributions to the public square need to challenge policy ‘solutions’ that rely on individuals pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, victim-blaming approaches, and a narrow definition of [who is my] ‘neighbour’,” Duckett says.

As for stewardship, it’s the easy bit. It’s the Christian word for what economists already know about: making sure that other people’s money is spent carefully, and their property is looked after. It’s being efficient.

But the Christian contribution to what health economists do is to make sure stewardship is kept in tension with the other two principles. “Austerity does not mean that compassion and social justice can be ignored, or distributional consequences [for the rich and the poor] can be erased from consideration.

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In politics and the economy, Christianity is increasingly suspect

A question for Easter Monday: would Australia be better governed if our political leaders were practising Christians? Would the economy work any better?

One thing that’s changed since last Easter is that we’re no longer led by a prime minister happy to let his Christian faith be known. By contrast, I wouldn’t know what Anthony Albanese’s religious views are, if any.

Another thing that’s changing is the decline of adherence to Christianity in its many denominations. This is partly the immigration of many people of other religions, but mainly the growing indifference of many from formerly churchgoing families. And, perhaps, the growing number of university graduates.

According to the 2021 census, the proportion of people identifying as Christian has fallen from 61 per cent to 44 per cent in a decade, with those reporting “no religion” rising from 22 per cent to 39 per cent.

So, it’s no exaggeration to say we now live in a post-Christian society. Nor that a growing number of people have a low opinion of those who profess to be Christians. They’ve said or done something bad – well, what would you expect?

Actually, that’s a good question: what do we expect of Christians? How differently would a professing prime minister behave to one who kept their religious opinions to themselves?

I think the main expectation of most people – certainly, most young people – would be for Christians to be always on about their opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and gender-changing.

Plus, their God-given right to discriminate against those in their churches, schools or hospitals who don’t conform to these views.

Is this the view of themselves and their mission – and their God - that Christians and their leaders are happy to convey to the rest of the nation? That Christ died on the cross to preserve a narrow view of sexual morality?

To be fair, it’s only when clergy speak on such controversial matters that the media take much notice of what they say. An archbishop preaching a sermon on Love One Another gets a headline only on Good Friday.

But I suspect it’s only on matters of (their view of) sexual morality that the churches go out of their way to attract media publicity. By default, this is the churches’ burning message to the nation.

If that’s all Christianity has left – if it now sees itself as an oppressed minority fighting to protect its right to discriminate on religious grounds – then whether our prime minister is an out-of-the-closet Christian is of little consequence for the governance of the nation and the health of the economy.

As we saw with Scott Morrison, such a prime minister won’t prevail against the weight of the nation’s support for sexual freedom and opposition to discrimination on sexual or religious grounds.

The worst we could expect is feet-dragging on the goal of increasing women’s role in politics and the paid workforce.

But this is not the Christianity I grew up with, nor does it fit with the values and behaviour of the many Christians I still mix with. Everything I know about the church and its Saviour tells me sex is just a small part of its definition of what it means to live a “moral” life.

The imitation of Christ is about loving your neighbour as yourself – and defining “neighbour” very broadly. It’s about honesty and meticulous truth-telling, about justice tempered by mercy, about forgiveness and fairness.

And, from what I read in the New Testament, it’s about Jesus’ preoccupation with the poor and strictures on the rich: “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.”

When I heard a secret recording of Morrison speaking at a prayer meeting, the sentiments and phrases reminded me of my parents and all the prayer meetings I had attended.

But in watching Morrison’s words and actions as prime minister, my recurring feeling over the four years was that nothing about them reminded me of Jesus.

He was not the only prime minister to pander to, and play on, the worst features of the Australian character. Punishing boat people who arrive without an invitation. Telling the underprivileged that “those who have a go, get a go”.

Ignoring the law to use robo-debt to falsely accuse people the mean-spirited regard as dole bludgers. And insisting on keeping unemployment benefits well below the poverty line.

If we could get a prime minister who acted in a less un-Christian way, it wouldn’t matter much who or what he believed in. The economy would be fairer, and we could all enjoy our prosperity with a clearer conscience.

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Economists need updating on what makes humans tick

At the heart of the weaknesses of economics – its frequently wrong predictions and the bad advice its high priests often give governments – is its primitive understanding – its “model” - of how and why humans behave the way they do.

It’s taking economists far too long to realise that to understand how the economy works you’ve got to start by understanding how the people who make up the economy work. The model economists started with in the second half of the 19th century and haven’t really moved on from is the mere assumption that businesses, workers and consumers always behave “rationally” – with carefully considered self-interest.

In the 150 years since economists decided their stick-figure assumptions were a sufficient foundation on which to build their model of economic behaviour, the other social sciences – psychology, sociology, anthropology – have made much progress in understanding human behaviour and motivations.

So, just this once, let’s set aside “Homo economicus” and see what wisdom the more social social scientists have to impart.

In his book, Moral Tribes, the Harvard moral psychologist Joshua Greene lays out a view of human behaviour that accounts for most of the things missing from economics. He starts with the proposition that the way humans behave is heavily influenced by the way we have evolved.

As one of the founders of behavioural economics, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow, humans are good at thinking rationally, but it takes time and (literally) requires energy, so we’ve evolved to make most of our everyday decisions instantly and instinctively – without conscious thinking.

Our feelings and emotions can’t be dismissed because their role is to do most of our thinking for us. To motivate our instinctive reactions.

Humans have spent all but the past 10,000 years or so in roaming bands of hunters and gatherers. So it’s no surprise we still think like members of a tribe. We feel an affinity with those in our tribe, but not with people in other tribes.

As tribal animals, we care deeply about our relations with those around us, the other members of our tribe. It’s being in the tribe that protects us from harm and provides us with food, friends and someone to mate with. So we have to keep in with the tribe; make sure we’re not kicked out.

This is where moral attitudes come from. Morality is about how we treat others. Greene says “morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of co-operation”.

You can get competition within tribes, but mainly they’re about co-operation for mutual benefit. We co-operate to organise enough food and shelter, but also for the group’s protection against its enemies, animal or human.

As tribe members, the moral issue we face is “me versus us”. We’ve evolved to remember to suppress unbridled self-interest and treat others well. Thus we’re good at co-operating in shared objectives, and our moral standards involve punishing others who fail to co-operate.

This co-operation does much to explain our success in becoming the dominant species and in radically transforming the world to make ourselves more comfortable. Greene says we’ve defeated most of our natural enemies. We’ve outsmarted most of our predators, from lions to bacteria.

But note this: our ability to co-operate as a tribe has evolved into a weapon to use in competing with other tribes. And, though our evolutionary instincts may not have changed a lot since we ceased being roaming hunters, our success has greatly changed the circumstances in which we live.

Though we live in countries with populations of many millions, we still have moral instincts that evolved to help us solve the problem of me versus us, not the problem of us versus them.

In one sense, we no longer live in small tribes that don’t have much contact with other tribes, but only sometimes do we see ourselves as living in, say, one big Australian tribe. We tend to see ourselves as members of many tribes, according to our differing characteristics: not just the party we vote for, but the part of the country we live in, our ethnic origin, our religion, our occupation, social class, education and much else.

Our tribal instincts keep most of us believing and behaving the way our tribe thinks we should. But the moral intuition of particular tribes has evolved in differing directions. What I see as the moral – or fair – thing to do, may be quite different to how you and your tribe see it.

Most countries used to be fairly homogeneous, with most people in the country adhering to the same religious views, particularly about issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and assisted death.

These days, many people have abandoned traditional religious views, though many haven’t. And much moving between countries means most countries have many people from differing religious traditions.

This leaves us with moral tribes that can’t agree on what’s right or wrong. This applies not just to sexual morality, but to whether I think it’s “fair” for me to pay more tax to support you when (I tell myself) you wouldn’t need my support if you’d worked as hard as I have to get what I’ve got.

Because our two-speed brains are adept at finding fancy rationalisations for “values” that are really just instinctive desires, we argue about our sacred Right to this or that treatment – which the other tribe counters with its own sacred (but conflicting) Right.

And, Greene says, even when we think we’re being fair, we unconsciously favour the version of fairness most congenial to our tribe.

He offers no magic answers to these widespread problems caused by modern tribalism. But he does say that, with a better understanding of why these tribal disputes arise, we all ought to be a lot less self-righteous about the moral correctness of our position and more willing to find compromises all of us can live with.

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Now's a good time to work on your rules to live by

The week between Christmas and new year is unique among the 52, a week of no great consequence, a kind of no man’s land between the end of the old year and the start of the new. Not a gap year, but a gap week. A week where all the sensible people are on leave and having fun with the family, while the few who must work while others play hope there won’t actually be much work and no one will mind if they skive off early.

But I’ve always found it a good time for reflection and taking stock. What were my great achievements in the year just past – if any? And what are my grand plans for achievement in the coming year?

A few days ago I happened upon a list of "17 Things I Believe", written by the American management professor Robert Sutton, which I put away a decade ago because I believed so many of his 17. Some of them are useful for anyone using this week for a little reflection.

Let’s start with number 14: "Am I a success or a failure?" is not a very useful question.

That’s because all of us are both a success and a failure. Successful in some aspects of our life and less successful in others. Good at making money, for instance; less good as a spouse and parent.

If so, see number 17: Work is an overrated activity.

Many men do need to find a healthier balance between work and family. They need to stop kidding themselves that sending their kids to an expensive school and buying their loved ones expensive presents is a satisfactory substitute for their presence and attention.

More generally, however, the school of "positive" psychologists says that, rather than always focusing on fixing your weaknesses, you make more progress if you concentrate on getting the best from your strengths.

But Sutton has his own twist. "Rather than fretting or gloating over what you’ve done in the past (and seeing yourself as serving a life sentence as a winner or loser)," he says, "the most constructive way to go through life is to keep focusing on what you learn and how you can get better in the future."

This ties in with number 8: Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.

Yes, a much happier way to live your life.

And it leads on to number 5: You get what you expect from people. This is true when it comes to selfish behaviour; unvarnished self-interest is a learnt social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behaviour.

This really chimes with my experience. I’ve found it particularly true of bosses. If they can see that you expect them to give you a square deal because they’re a decent person, they most likely will if it’s within their power.

That’s because of a person’s natural desire to meet the other person’s expectations of them. Hold them to a high standard and they’ll rise to it. But let them see you distrust them and half expect to be cheated, and they’re unlikely to dash your expectations.

Another one I really like is number 7: The best test of a person’s character is how he or she treats those with less power. Or, as I prefer to say after too much Downton Abbey, how you treat the servants. The taxi drivers, shop assistants, receptionists and executive assistants trying to stop you getting through to their boss.

It’s a test I apply in retrospect to my own behaviour, and often don’t pass.

Now here’s a better one for this time of year, number 9: It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige or stuff?

Like many economists always have, in this age of hyper-materialism and vaulting ambition it’s easy to assume more is always better. It often isn’t, particularly when quantity comes at the expense of quality. Nor when we use cost as a measure of quality.

I think the world would be a nicer, less frantic, more generous, less unequal and, above all, more enjoyable place to live if our politicians and business people put more emphasis on making things better rather than bigger. (And by quality I don’t mean striving for an all-Miele kitchen.)

Sometimes I think top executives strive for ever-higher remuneration because they don’t get much satisfaction from the jobs they do. They’d be better off themselves if they put more emphasis on making sure their staff had more satisfying and reasonably paid jobs, and their customers always got value for money.

Which brings us back to work. There is more to life than work, but since work takes up so much of our lives, I think the secret to a better life is to keep wriggling around until you find a job that’s satisfying. And a business full of satisfied workers – from the boss down – should still be one that makes a big profit. That is, big enough.

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We won't achieve economic reform until we start co-operating

If you wonder why the push for economic reform has ground to a halt, I’ve discovered the reason. It’s because the foundational assumption of conventional economics – that individuals competing in pursuit of their self-interest make us all better off – is only half the truth.

If the mention of economic reform made you think of tax reform, then you’re making my point. Those who want a higher GST because they’d benefit if the proceeds were used to lower income or company tax are stymied by the many punters convinced they’d be worse off if this “reform” came to pass.

Many other cases for reform suffer the same fate. Your pursuit of your self-interest is neutered by my pursuit of my mine.

What the conventional economic model misses with its emphasis on individuals, competition and self-interest is that much of the success of the human animal – including its success economically – is owed to people co-operating to achieve changes of benefit to the whole community.

Often, norms of socially acceptable behaviour – entrenched views about what behaviour is ethical and what isn’t - are used to encourage people to put the interests of the group ahead of their own immediate interests. Markets work much better, for instance, if it’s realistic to assume that almost all the people you deal with can be trusted to act honestly.

All this applies in spades to our failure to make progress in the area of reform that’s more important to our economic future even than conquering the coronavirus: stopping emissions of greenhouse gases from wrecking the climate.

Here, the owners and miners of our huge remaining deposits of coal and gas are fighting tooth and nail to delay the day when those deposits become worthless, while the rest of us are encouraged to put the frightening thought of having to pay a bit more for electricity and petrol ahead of the future environmental and economic wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.

It’s okay for the oldies – who, until this year’s bushfire conflagration, fondly imagined they wouldn’t live long enough to suffer the consequences of their selfish short-sightedness. And those who will suffer the consequences have either yet to be born or are only just realising what a mess their loving parents are leaving for them.

But the deterrent to action isn’t just that the (modest) adjustment costs are upfront, whereas the (much greater) costs of inaction are off in the uncertain future. It’s also that the greenhouse effect is global, not local.

As the climate-change deniers love reminding us, no amount of effort to reduce emissions on our part will make much difference until people in other parts of the world are doing the same. In which case, why don’t you and I do nothing and leave it to all the others? (Economists call this the “free-rider” problem.)

All this may explain why a recent discussion paper from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Efficient, Effective and Fair, included a chapter on the moral case for action on climate change, written by Professor Garrett Cullity, a philosopher from the University of Adelaide.

Cullity argues there are five reasons why climate change is a moral issue, each of which is independent of the others. The first is that it involves many causes of harm including extreme weather events, tropical diseases, and malnutrition.

“These harms are primarily borne by the most vulnerable members of the global community,” he says. “We should be morally concerned to reduce the amount of harm we do to them.”

The second argument holds if we believe there’s a risk of serious harm in the future but can't be sure it will come to pass. “Action that imposes serious risks on others can be morally wrong because it is negligent and reckless, independent of the harm that actually eventuates,” Cullity says.

These first two arguments give us moral duties of both “mitigation” (reducing the further damage our emissions are doing) and “adaptation” (helping vulnerable people to adapt to the damage already done).

“They apply not just to national governments, but to any agent whose actions contribute to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations – including state and local governments, cities, corporations, non-government associations and individuals.

“And they apply to each of these agents unilaterally. The moral duty not to engage in actions that harm or endanger others is not a duty that we are exempted from when someone else is not complying with it.

“The strength of the duty is proportional to the harm or risk imposed if the duty is not followed, and it may be related also to the capacity to influence others to comply with their duty.”

The third argument concerns “contributional fairness”. When a group needs to achieve something important by acting together and is doing so by sharing the overall burden among its members, failure to contribute an equitable share of that burden amounts to free-riding. Duties of fair contribution apply to groups of any size.

In the case of a wealthy country such as Australia, the size of our contribution to the solution should reflect the size of our contribution to causing the problem, the benefit we have derived from past emissions-producing economic activity, and our relatively great “ability to pay”, as tax economists put it.

The remaining two moral arguments concern the responsibility of national governments. If you accept that they have a duty to protect future citizens, not just present ones, it follows that they must contribute to global mitigation, not just local adaptation. And, since the economic costs of responding to the problem get higher the longer you delay, they have a moral duty to begin now.

Conventional economics doesn’t take much interest in morality. But economies where everyone sticks out for Number One stop working very well. And self-interest isn’t enough to solve a “wicked” problem like climate change.

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If you’re virtuous, don’t be afraid to signal it to the world

I’m troubled by the fashion of accusing others of “virtue signalling”. This world could use more virtue and less vice. And if people want others to see their virtue, well, there are worse sins.

Usually, it’s an accusation hurled at those on the other side of the political fence as a way of impugning their motives. They’re not genuinely virtuous, they just want people to think they are when they’re not.

They want to be seen as better than we are. They want me to feel guilty for not being as good as them, but I’m not buying that. I may be motivated by self-interest in the government policies I advocate, but so are they – they’re just pretending otherwise.

You can rationalise such a response by using the assumption of the neo-classical economic model that economic agents (you and me) are always and only motivated by self-interest. Altruism doesn’t exist. When I help someone, I’m doing so only because it makes me feel good.

In truth, social psychology has found plenty of evidence for the existence of altruism. It’s associated with another truth: homo sapiens’ success as a species is owed as much to co-operation as to competition.

I remember how shocked I was years ago to hear a top Treasury official refer with contempt to the Australian Council of Social Service – the peak body representing welfare organisations, including the Salvos – as “the compassion industry”.

First time I’d heard that word used as a term of derision. It reminded me of a song we sang when I was a Salvo: “Except I am moved with compassion, how dwellest Thy Spirit in me?”.

The Treasury man’s claim was that the ACOSS people didn’t really care about the poor and needy, they’d just found a way to make their living by representing the interests of poor. They were no more than another lobby group with their hand out.

As social animals, humans form themselves into tribes – groups. We have a compulsion to divide the world into good guys and bad guys. Naturally, my group are the goodies but, unfortunately, your group are the baddies.

Each of us sees ourselves as good, but some others as bad. I’m genuinely virtuous, whereas you’re just pretending to be.

In truth, none of us is all good or all bad. All of us are good in some respects and bad in others. And psychologists tell us we’re all often guilty of hypocrisy – applying high standards in judging others’ behaviour while making excuses for our own.

Equally, much of what we do we do for mixed motives. Try this test (one I usually fail): when you’re giving money to charity, how do you answer when asked if you’d like your donation to remain anonymous?

It’s possible some of us do virtuous acts – or make statements in support of virtuous policies – without any genuine interest in the wellbeing of others. It’s possible, but I doubt it’s very common.

What’s much more likely is mixed motives: we’re genuine in our professed concern about others, but equally genuine in our desire to be seen by others as having such a concern. That’s not really hypocritical, just being human.

Because we’ve evolved as group animals, all of us care deeply about what others think of us. We want to be accepted by the other members of the group. And we fear being excluded from the group.

Like teenagers, we’re desperate to fit in. The more we look and act like the others, the more comfortable we feel.

(This points to a further weakness in the neo-classical model: its assumption that each of us is a rugged individualist who makes decisions – about what movie to see or what clothes to buy – totally without reference to what those around us are doing.)

Turns out humans are signalling animals. We’re always using what we do, what we say, the way we dress, to signal our virtues to others – including our conformity to the group’s norms of acceptable behaviour.

The economy abounds with people and businesses sending signals. The first three economists to realise this won the Nobel prize for their genius.

We resort to sending signals because neither we nor others have enough hard information about the people we deal with and who deal with us. The main message we send is: you can trust me to deal with you honestly.

In today’s economy we’re suffering from a loss of trust, caused by a lack of virtuous behaviour, which has damaged reputations. We need economic behaviour to be a lot more virtuous. As that virtue is signalled, others will join in and the group norm of acceptable behaviour will be restored.

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Australians of the Year utterly out of step with the rest of us

How moving it was to watch Malcolm Turnbull presenting the Australian of the Year awards last week. What impressive people they were. Made me proud to be an Aussie.

I can't help liking Turnbull. At a show like that he's all we could hope for in a Prime Minister. He looked the part and spoke it well. He was completely at ease, someone we can be proud to have represent us to the world.

In his introduction he said all the right things. The "extraordinary finalists" for the various awards – Young Australian, Senior Australian, Local Hero and Australian of the Year – "light the way for us – shining examples of our best selves".

"Generous and compassionate, selfless, never daunted by seemingly impossible odds, brilliant, curious, entrepreneurial, innovative, building bridges to reinforce the mutual respect which secures our harmony and diversity.

"They include First Australians and those who have dedicated their lives to working with them" – such as the wonderful Sister Anne Gardiner, who's spent her life serving the Tiwi people on Bathurst Island.

"They include migrants and refugees who have fled horrors barely imaginable ...

"Yet, however much we celebrate the remarkable, peaceful and diverse nation that we have built together, we always strive to be better. Our Australians of the Year have always shown us how ...

"Respect for women, respect for each other, in all our magnificent diversity, is the foundation on which our harmonious society depends, is the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential."

And yet I confess that in the days since that proud night I've suffered a bad hangover. It seems our One Day of the Year has moved from April 25 to January 26.

We celebrate these "shining examples of our best selves" for one night and day before we revert to being far from our best selves for the rest of the year. We hunt up a handful of people who remain "selfless" so we don't feel so bad about the self-seeking lives the rest of us lead?

Far from retaining a strong sense of community, of helping each other and working for the greater good, we live in an era of every person for themselves, where the material almost always gets priority over the social, where our ambitions centre on personal advancement rather than making the world a better place.

If our politicians – of both stripes – are so keen for us to be "generous and compassionate" as well as "respectful" and part of a "harmonious society" why aren't they setting a better example?

What's generous and compassionate about sending social security recipients bills for "debts" owed to Centrelink that you haven't checked properly, then making them prove they don't owe that much with payslips and other documents from past years that you hadn't warned them to retain?

What's "respectful" about treating invalids, the aged, and young workers down on their luck in such a way? What's Australian about denying point blank there's any problem with what you're doing?

Why when you've gone out of your way to honour the place of First Australians do you, the very next day, curtly brush aside their request that the white majority run to the huge inconvenience and expense of changing the date of Australia Day? Respect, eh?

Do we honour the work of the Sister Annes because they salve our consciences? Thank God they're willing to put themselves out, because the rest of us ain't.

Some of us – including many in Turnbull's own electorate – are the children or grandchildren of "refugees who have fled horrors barely imaginable".

Much worse, apparently, than the way we've been treating refugees on Nauru and Manus Island.

Turnbull is right to say we've built a highly successful multicultural society.

Lately it's been fraying at the edges, however, with intolerance of people with unfamiliar religious practices – women's head coverings; halal – fears that all Muslims are terrorists, fears we're being overrun by Asians, and downward envy of government help for disadvantaged Indigenous people.

But it's not just that our political leaders fail to set an example, it's that too often they seek partisan advantage from our moral weaknesses. Rather than seeking to calm our fears of foreigners they compete to pander to them. Let's protect ourselves from the resurgent One Nation by aping its rhetoric, even its policies.

As for respect being "the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential" it's sentimental claptrap – especially coming from a government that seems to have set its face against funding the nation's schools on the basis of student need rather than established privilege.

It's schools and pre-schools that should be "the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential".

The most worrying message we got from the latest bad news on NAPLAN and PISA testing of students is the wide gap between our best and worst students and the large minority of kids the system is failing.

As Peter Goss, of the Grattan Institute, has demonstrated, we can go most of the way to needs-based funding quickly and without extra spending, provided we're prepared to shift funding from the less-needy to the more-needy.

But that would require Turnbull to exhibit the undaunted, entrepreneurial and bridge-building character traits he so admires in others.

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The economy rests on Christian foundations

I can't think why, but Easter always reminds me of Christianity. Not, of course, that Christianity has anything to do with the grubby, materialist world of economics. Or does it?

Australia is the most unbelieving it has ever been, with the most recent census saying that only 61 per cent people identify themselves as even nominally Christian.

Twenty-two per cent say they have no religion and another 9 per cent didn't bother answering the question. People of non-Christian religions account for 7 per cent of the population.

Separate figures say only about 8 per cent of Australians attend religious services regularly. This is about the same as in Britain and France, but a lot less than in Canada or the United States.

With so few people having had much contact with organised religion, it's not surprising that so many people imagine Christianity to have little bearing on the modern world and economy.


But that is far from the truth, as Australian author Roy Williams argues in his latest book, Post-God Nation? I'm quoting him liberally.

Williams says he's sick of being told that religion's influence on our country has been either minimal or malign.

"It is a fact of history that Australia would not exist in anything like the form it does but for Judaeo-Christianity," he says.

"Deep-seated legacies of our religious heritage still endure, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."

Sydney Anglican Peter Jensen says "we are . . . secular, in a Christian sort of way".

This might be a new thought for many younger people, but it's not a rare observation. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said "the Christian religion . . . is a fundamental part of our national heritage. For centuries it has been our very life blood."

Historian Geoffrey Blainey has said that the Christian churches did "more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians".

All market economies rest on a foundation of laws, which enforce private property rights, the honouring of contracts and much else. Williams writes that all Western legal systems are grounded in two core assumptions, both from the Bible: that humans have free will and that morality is God-given.

But the English legal system has many other religiously based features, such as the separation of church and state, the jury system, Magna Carta (negotiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury) and the Bill of Rights (asserting Parliament's supremacy over the king, since both were "bound by the laws of God and nature").

The system of common law, based on rulings by judges rather than parliaments, was established by the devout Henry II, who ensured that most of the early judges were clerics, because of their knowledge of canon law.

Economic growth comes mainly from productivity improvement, productivity improvement comes mainly from invention and innovation, and invention mainly involves applying scientific discoveries.
Guess who were the West's first promoters of science and the inventors of universities?

The scientific method – discovery by empirical reasoning – is, Williams writes, unquestionably a byproduct of Christianity. To know the truth of God's creation, it's not enough to rely on human logic. It's also necessary to observe closely what God has created.

Most people today don't realise how many of the leading politicians, judges and business people who shaped the social and economic system we have inherited had religious beliefs or backgrounds.

Most of the founders of the trade union movement and the Labor Party, for example. John Fairfax, who bought The Sydney Morning Herald in 1841, was a deacon of the Pitt Street Congregational Church, who attended up to four services on a Sunday.

Four of the Herald's first five editors were ministers of religion. In his research, Williams found it remarkable how often famous Australians turned out to have been the son of a clergyman (me, too).

But Christianity has permeated our attitudes and values, not just the institutions of our society.
You can be an atheist or a humanist, but if you have any ethical beliefs or moral values they might be influenced by Buddhist ideas, but they're far more likely to reflect Judaeo-Christian thinking.

And though economists keep forgetting it, it's the ethical behaviour of ordinary business people and consumers that keeps our economy ticking over satisfactorily and makes the CommInsures still the exception rather than the rule.

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Business - and customers - pay for bad business behaviour

It's remarkable the way the Business Council of Australia constantly lectures us on the "reform" we should be accepting to improve our economic performance (and, purely by chance, their profits), but never seems to lecture its big-business members on their manifest need to "reform" their own standards of behaviour.

Among its most profitable members would have to be the four big banks. But the litany of scandals over their bad treatment of customers never seems to end.

The latest was CommInsure's denial of legitimate life insurance claims, but there's also been ANZ's alleged manipulation of a key commercial interest rate and the Commonwealth Bank's bad financial planning advice that lost money for many customers.

Now the chairman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Greg Medcraft, has joined Australian Prudential Regulation Authority boss Wayne Byers in demanding the finance industry fix its corporate culture.

"Time and again, we have seen firms blaming [behaviour] on a few bad apples driving bad outcomes for consumers, rather than taking responsibility by looking more closely at their organisation and implementing the necessary changes to address the cause of the problem," Medcraft said on Monday.

"At the end of the day, you need to have a culture that your customers can believe in."

The captains of finance have not reacted well to the bureaucrats' admonition. David Gonski complained about the corporate regulator being the "culture police", while someone from the Institute of Company Directors offered the uncomprehending advice that corporate culture could not be imposed by law.

It would be wrong to focus only on the bad behaviour of the banks, of course. There have been other instances from other industries. Take 7-Eleven's underpaying of foreign workers.

Or take the many notorious cases of businesses rorting government subsidy schemes in ceiling insulation, childcare and vocational education and training.

It's possible what we're seeing is merely greater exposure of the bad behaviour of big business thanks to a surge in business investigative journalism, with Fairfax Media's Adele Ferguson at its head.

But I've been in and around businesses since I left school 50 years ago, and I think bad corporate behaviour is definitely worse than it was. As executive remuneration has headed for the stratosphere, so the willingness to exploit customers and staff has grown.

But why? One reason is the rise of a more fundamentalist approach to economics. "Economic rationalism" has prompted much deregulation, privatisation and outsourcing, which has made competition a lot more intense in many industries.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but as managers have experienced greater pressure to perform – as it's become harder to keep profits high and rising – they've passed the pressure on to staff and customers.

Economic fundamentalism is both a product of the greater materialism of our age and a cause of it, with all its emphasis on monetary values and view of "labour" as just another resource to be exploited along with other raw materials.

What's worse is that economic fundamentalism has had the effect of sanctifying selfishness. When I put my own interests ahead of other people's, I'm not being greedy or self-centred or antisocial; I'm just being "rational".

One effect of the greater pressure to perform is the present "metrics" fad – the obsession with measuring aspects of the firm's performance, then using those measures to improve performance, such as by setting targets based on "key performance indicators".

What the KPI obsession is saying is: just get results; how you get them is of lesser interest. I'd lay money that the reason people at CommInsure were knocking back legitimate claims was they were being encouraged to do so by KPIs or other "performance incentives". (That's why it's dishonest for people at the top to blame "a few bad apples".)

Most people's sense of what is acceptable, ethical behaviour is determined by what they believe their peers are doing. If they do it, it's ethical for me to do it; if they don't do it, maybe I should feel guilty about it.

The trouble is, studies show that adults, like children, often harbour exaggerated impressions of how many others are doing it.

Social conformity (aka "culture") is such a powerful influence that it's always been hard for people to follow their own "moral compass". With the decline of religious adherence, it's harder even to have one.

The Business Council and its members ought to be a lot more worried about the decline in their standards of behaviour than they seem to be.

One fundamental the economic fundamentalists keep forgetting is that market economies run best on widespread trust: mutual trust between management and staff, and between businesses and their customers.

Allow declining standards of behaviour to erode trust and the economy suffers. Customers become harder to persuade, argue more with counter staff, are surlier with call-centre staff and more inclined to take their business elsewhere. They resist "upselling".

With less trust you have to waste a lot of money on increased security in its many forms. And governments react by multiplying laws and legal requirements.

When so many companies demonstrate their contempt for other taxpayers by the way they manipulate the tax they pay – their ethic is that if it's (barely) legal, it's ethical – it becomes much harder for governments to get voter support for cutting the rates of those taxes.

Who knew?

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You were a stranger, so we wouldn't take you in

Do you get the feeling we're becoming a more selfish nation? While other countries were pitching in, we hesitated until this week to send experts to help stem the outbreak of Ebola. Sending people to risk their lives in wars doesn't seem a problem, but to send people for humanitarian reasons is asking too much when their personal safety can't be guaranteed.

This comes on top of our decision to slash the planned increase in official overseas aid. Sorry, but we just can't afford to be so generous. Others may look on Australia as among the richest countries in the world, but they don't understand we have our own problems.

We're running a budget deficit, and will be for many years yet. Borrowing money to cover gifts to poor foreigners hardly makes sense. And don't try telling me there are other, less-deserving people whose assistance could be cut.

As Joe Hockey has explained, our top income-earners are already being taxed too heavily to cover our bloated and unsustainable government spending, so this budget was designed to spare the lifters and require the leaners to bear a fairer share of the burden. And how could we make our own pensioners and sick people tighten their belts while we're being so generous to foreigners?

Hugh Mackay, the social commentator, tells us we've reversed the original meaning of the saying that charity begins at home. It used to mean don't demand charity of others until your own giving is up to scratch, but now it means we shouldn't be helping outsiders while any of our own remain in need.

But nowhere is our lack of charity more evident than in our hard hearts towards boatpeople. How dare they turn up on our doorstep uninvited, expecting us to put them up?

In the past, when asylum seekers were found to be genuine refugees, with a "well-founded fear of persecution" should they return to their own country, they were allowed to stay and included in our annual quota for "humanitarian" immigration.

For years we've discharged our obligation to help with the world's asylum problem by accepting just under 14,000 refugees a year for settlement in Australia. If that sounds like a lot, it represents 0.06 per cent of our population of 23.7 million. It's little more than 7 per cent of our total permanent settler intake of 190,000 a year.

For some reason - troubled conscience, perhaps - the Gillard government upped the humanitarian intake to 20,000 a year in 2012-13, but fortunately the Abbott government has returned it to fewer than 14,000.

Much more affordable. Our loathing of boatpeople is so intense that we tend to think of them as nothing more than a drain on the public purse. And for the first few years that's true.

But in a speech Professor Graeme Hugo, a demographer from the University of Adelaide, delivered to the annual conference of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law in Sydney on Monday, he argued that humanitarian settlers eventually make a significant economic contribution.

Consistent with our more self-interested approach to immigration, these days we favour those who possess the skills - including language skills - of which we're most in need. Compared with these people, refugees are unpromising material for building the economy.

Some may have mental health issues arising from their treatment in their home countries, their experiences in transit or the kindly reception they receive from us. Many have low levels of literacy and limited skills and qualifications; few have great proficiency in English.

Those who do have qualifications will have lost their documentation, or won't have them recognised. They know little about our labour market, they often lack family networks in Australia, their family is split up and they bring no savings with them.

So, yes, in their early years many refugees aren't in the labour force and, among those who are, unemployment is high - higher than for other immigrants. Many of the younger ones you may expect to be working are still in the education system, catching up.

And yet their participation in the labour force rises with the length of time they've been here, converging towards the participation rate of the Australia-born, Hugo says. And their second generation end up having higher participation levels than Australia-born. They're also more highly qualified than Australia-born.

The humanitarian intake has other attractions. Refugees tend to be younger than other migrant groups, with a higher proportion of children, meaning they make a greater contribution to slowing the ageing of the population.

Their fertility is slightly higher. Predictably, their rate of returning home is very low compared with other migrants, and the proportion willing to settle in regional areas - almost 18 per cent - is high and rising.

Personal experience and common sense suggests all migrants who uproot themselves to move to Australia have a fair bit of get-up-and-go, with a determination to make the most of the new opportunities for themselves and, particularly, their kids. Hugo says people who move tend to be among the risk-takers.

Migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial - more likely to start their own businesses - and there's increasing evidence humanitarian settlers contain a disproportionate share of entrepreneurs.

On the BRW Rich List in 2000, five of the eight billionaires came from a refugee background. I wonder how generously they gave to charity.

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Why we care about morality - apparently

The good thing about holidays is getting time to read books. I' ll look at all the museos, oratorios, cappellas and duomos in Italy provided I can go back to my book when day is done. On this trip one book I read was Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, a young professor of psychology at Harvard.

One of the hottest areas of psychology these days is moral psychology - the science of moral cognition - which seeks to explain why we have moral sentiments and what use they are to us. It' s pretty coldly scientific and evolutionary, which may be disconcerting to readers of a religious disposition.

According to Greene and his confreres - another leading thinker in the area is Jonathan Haight, author of The Righteous Mind, which I' ve written about before - humans are fairly selfish individuals, but we are also highly social animals who like to be part of groups.

Groups, however, require co-operative behaviour, so we evolved moral attitudes to enable us to get along together in groups.

Biologists (and economists) have long stressed the importance of competition between us - survival of the fittest and all that - but it s not hard to see that humans' domination of the planet arises from our unmatched ability to co-operate with each other to overcome problems.

So humans are about competition and co-operation. Economists have schooled us to think of markets as all about competition - between sellers, between buyers and between buyers and sellers - but psychologists see markets as a prime example of human co-operation.

Co-operation through markets allows us to use specialisation - I produce what I' m good at, you do the same and we use the medium of money to exchange the things we ve produced - to increase our combined efficiency in production, leaving us all better off.

Studies have shown that people' s performance in well-known psychology games giving them a choice between selfish or altruistic responses can differ markedly between cultures. Turns out that people from cultures with more developed market systems tend to be less selfish and more co-operative.

So to these scientists, morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of co-operation within groups.

But why do we want to co-operate within groups? So our group can compete more effectively against other groups.

" Our moral machinery evolved to strike a biologically advantageous balance between selfishness (Me) and within-group co-operation (Us), without concern for people who are more likely to be competitors than allies (Them), " Greene says. This moral machinery includes our capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honour, guilt, embarrassment and righteous indignation, he adds.

The fact is that each of us belongs to a whole host of groups: our family, neighbourhood, workplace, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sporting interest, political party and more.

The groups we belong to are the tribes we belong to. We feel a great loyalty to our groups, and greatly favour their interests over those of rival groups. This group selfishness and tendency to see the world as Us versus Them is tribalism.

So, much of the conflict we see around us - both within our country and, as we' ve become more conscious of in recent days, between countries and the groups within them - arises from tribalism.

Much of the conflict between tribes is simple self-interest - I favour my interests ahead of yours, and see them much more clearly than I see yours - but there are also genuine differences in values and disagreements about the proper terms of co-operation. One major source of disagreement in political life is between individual and collective responsibility.

Some disagreement arises from tribes' differing allegiances to what Greene calls " proper nouns" - gods, leaders, holy scriptures and holy places.

Obviously, tribally based morality gets us only so far. What Greene seeks is a "meta-morality" , which can help reduce conflict between tribes rather than just within them. To this end he reaches back to an old idea now out of favour with philosophers: utilitarianism.

(This is of relevance to economists because, though they 've spent the past 80 years trying to play it down, utilitarianism forms part of the bedrock on which the conventional economic model is built.)

According to Greene, utilitarianism answers two basic questions: what really matters and who really matters. What matters most is the quality of our experience. Economists call this " utility" and the rest of us call it "happiness" .

Who matters most is all of us, equally - otherwise known as the Golden Rule.

Thus Greene summarises utilitarianism as " happiness is what matters and everyone' s happiness counts the same. This doesn 't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does means than no one' s happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone else' s ."

He claims this meta-morality involves a moral system that can acknowledge moral trade-offs and adjudicate among them, and can do so in a way that makes sense to members of all tribes.

It s a nice thought. Somehow I think it will be a while before we measure up to that ideal. But it s always good to have a vision of what we should be aiming for and how we can move towards it.

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Greed is the market's forgotten vice

Where do Easter and business intersect? Well, what about at greed.

According to Dr Brian Rosner, principal of Ridley Melbourne, an Anglican theological college, greed has been glamorised by the market economy and is a forgotten sin.

Maybe it's this that allows those Christians who are business people, economists and politicians to share their colleagues' commitment to unending economic growth and an ever-rising material standard of living.

In his book, Beyond Greed, Rosner defines greed as ''wanting more money and possessions'', a refusal to share your possessions and ''the opposite of contentment''.

Greed has always been with us, and insatiability isn't unique to modern Western civilisation, but we're certainly giving it a workout. To us, money is the simplest measure of whether you're winning at the game of life.

But what is unique to our age, according to another author, is the cultural acceptance, even encouragement of insatiability. A survey of regular churchgoers in America found that whereas almost 90 per cent said greed was a sin, fewer than 20 per cent said they were ever taught that wanting a lot of money was wrong, and 80 per cent said they wished they had more money than they did.

It seems that, by comparison with the past, greed is regarded as a trivial sin. A retired priest has recounted that, in his long years of service, all kinds of sins and concerns were confessed to him in the confessional, but never once the sin of greed.

But Rosner's having none of that. He says greed is at the heart of three major threats to our existence as individuals and societies: pollution, terrorism and crime.

Pollution is caused by human unwillingness to pay the price for the cleaner alternative (ain't that the truth, Tony). ''On any reckoning, climatic change due to the effects of pollution could cause major 'natural' disasters in the days to come,'' he says.

In most cases of terrorism, each side accuses the other of some form of greed, whether involving people, land or property. ''Greed also fits both sides of the equation in many cases of crime,'' he says. ''Thieves steal because they want more, and often because they perceive the victims as having more than their fair share.''

The greedy are those who love money inordinately, trust money excessively, serve money slavishly and are never satisfied with their possessions.

Rosner says greed is a form of religion, the religion of Mammon. Literally, mammon means wealth or possessions, but it could just as easily be taken as the biblical word for the economy. And if greed is a religion, that makes it a form of the greatest of all sins: idolatry. (First Commandment: you shall have no other gods before me.)

In Western society, the economy has achieved what can only be described as a status equal to that of the sacred.

''Like God, the economy, it is thought, is capable of supplying people's needs without limit. Also, like God, the economy is mysterious, unknowable and intransigent,'' he says. ''It has both great power and, despite the best managerial efforts of its associated clergy, great danger. It is an inexhaustible well of good(s) and is credited with prolonging life, giving health and enriching our lives.

''Money, in which we put our faith, and advertising, which we adore, are among its rituals. The economy also has its sacred symbols, which evoke undying loyalty, including company logos, product names and credit cards.''

Rosner says we have to distinguish between the legitimate enjoyment of material things, which the Bible takes for granted, and an illegitimate and unhealthy attachment to wealth as an end in itself.
But if we don't want to be greedy, what should we be? Contented.

''To be content is to be satisfied, to enjoy a balance between one's desires and their fulfilment. To be content is in effect to experience freedom from want,'' he says. But note, it's being content with your own lot, not those of others less fortunate than you.

And the other side of the contentment coin is giving. Rosner says that if Charles Dickens' Scrooge epitomises greed, giving is epitomised by Victorian jam maker Sir William Hartley. Hartley regularly and voluntarily increased wages, practised profit-sharing and supplied low-cost, high-quality housing to some of his employees and free medical attention to all of them.

He was also concerned for his suppliers, and would amend contracts in their favour if a change in the price of fruit and economic circumstances conspired against their making a decent living.

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Pollies' bad behaviour & dishonesty worsening all over

We are witnessing history being made. Unfortunately, it s a history-making decline in standards of political behaviour. At least it proves we 're not merely imagining that things were better in the old days.

Tempting though it is, one of the things incoming governments don' t do is delve into the affairs of their predecessor. The papers of the old government aren 't made available to the new masters.

But all that is out the window with the Abbott government 's decision to establish a royal commission into the Rudd government' s handling of the home insulation program and provide it with Labor' s cabinet documents.

It takes innocence greater than I can muster to believe the motive for the inquiry is to bring justice to the program 's victims rather than to embarrass the Coalition 's political opponents by raking over one of their more celebrated stuff-ups.

Labor can take its lumps. The real pity is that a long standing convention seeking to limit political vindictiveness has been cast aside. One thing we can be sure of is that when next Labor returns to power it will lose no time in retaliating, as will that government 's eventual Coalition successor. Advantage-seeking retaliation will become a bigger part of the political debate.

The man who set new lows in negativity and obstructionism in opposition is now taking us to new lows in government. In a more godly world, Labor would resist the temptation to sink to the level of misbehaviour set by its opponents, thus giving substance to its repeated claims of moral superiority.

But so intense is the competition between the parties that this seems unlikely. Last week Bill Shorten promised to lead a constructive opposition and not oppose everything for the sake of it. It 's a wonderful resolve - one which, if lived up to, many voters would find attractive - but I fear it' s another take from Tony Abbott: almost tearful promises to sin no more, followed by an immediate resumption.

The great likelihood is that Labor in opposition will model its behaviour on Abbott in opposition, in conformity with that great moral precept: tit for tat. The sad truth is that, for politicians as for most of us, the moral compass that guides us asks: what' s everyone else doing?

We take our ethics from our perception of the behaviour of those around us, particularly our competitors.
We all see ourselves as more moral than the next person, but when challenged our defence is always: I' m no worse than he is. After all, he started it.
Thus are our politicians locked in a race to the bottom.

Rather than trying to counter our fear of foreigners, politicians have preferred to pander to it, vying to be the side whose mistreatment of asylum seekers goes so far it discourages any more from coming - all intended to dissuade them from risking their lives on a dangerous sea voyage, naturally.

So far have our standards sunk that we must now suffer the indignity of being lectured on human rights by the Chinese government.

Declining standards at federal level have been matched by bad behaviour at state level. For an example of state politicians willing to blatantly mislead their electorates, look no further than the Victorian and NSW governments' dishonest explanation for the looming jump of about 25 per cent in the price of household gas.

The true reason for the rise is that the building of natural gas liquefaction plants in Gladstone will soon allow gas producers on Australia' s east coast to export their gas and obtain the much higher prices paid on the world market. The east coast will go from being outside the world market to inside it.

The price rise is thus inevitable unless governments were to prohibit the companies from exporting their gas, forcing them to continue accepting below-world prices. There has been no suggestion of penalising the gas producers in this way.

Rather, state politicians have taken up the dishonest claim of the gas companies that permitting them to build new and controversial coal seam gas plants would somehow prevent gas prices from rising or force them back down.

But as any student of economics could tell you, there' s no way NSW and Victoria could ever produce enough natural gas to significantly affect the world price of gas.

The price of gas in NSW and Victoria would stay below the world price only if the new producers were compelled to sell their gas to local users at below the world price. Again, there s been no suggestion of this.

Last week the gas companies' illogical argument was taken up by the new NSW Minister for Energy and Resources, Anthony Roberts. I' m prepared to believe Roberts may be economically illiterate, but I don' t believe his advisers are - nor that they don t read the papers, where the scam has been exposed.

Although Roberts has replaced a minister who left the cabinet under a cloud, he seems uninhibited in his efforts to mislead the electorate.

It' s hard to know whether he is simply seeking to advance the gas industry' s vested interests or is setting up an alibi which allows the government to blame the inevitable jump in gas prices on those terrible people opposed to fracking.

Either way, his only crime is seeking to deceive voters. And these days that 's the way everyone plays the political game, isn 't it?

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The psychological roots of morality (and politics)

Paul Keating still quotes his early mentor, Jack Lang: "In the race of life, always back self-interest - at least you know it's trying". This may be why, as treasurer, Keating so readily embraced economic rationalism. The economists' working model assumes the self-interest of the individual is the sole force that makes the world turn.

Fortunately, the latest research tells us it's not that simple.

I can't go on a sight-seeing holiday without taking a few good books for a little intellectual sustenance at the end of the day. One book I took this time was a ripper, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Haidt (pronounced Height) says decades of research by political scientists have concluded that self-interest is a weak predictor of voters' policy preferences.

Why? Because people care about the groups they belong to - whether they be racial, regional, religious or political. They seem to be asking themselves not "what's in it for me?" but "what's in it for my group?". Political opinions function as "badges of social membership".

Whereas the old view was that natural selection had caused us to evolve into self-seeking competitors, Haidt argues we're more accurately thought of as "homo duplex" - a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

Human nature is mostly selfish: our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers, he says. But human nature is also "groupish": our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups.

"We evolved to live in groups. Our minds were designed not only to help us win the competition within our groups, but also to help us unite with those in our group to win competitions across groups," he says. "We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players."

All this goes a long way towards explaining the psychological roots of morality. Haidt defines moral systems as interlocking sets of values, norms, practices and institutions that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make co-operative societies possible.

His research leads him to believe moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously in our minds, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started. Moral reasoning is not something we do to figure out the truth. Rather, it's a skill we evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and defend the teams we belong to.

Human nature is intrinsically moral, but it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical and judgmental.

"Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings - but no other animals - to produce large co-operative groups, tribes and nations without the glue of kinship," he says. "But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our co-operative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife."

We're much more aware of other people's moral shortcomings than our own, often making us "selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting

on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves".

Haidt says one of the hardest problems humans face is co-operation without kinship. We instinctively co-operate with people to whom we're directly related, but co-operation within wider groups carries the ever-present temptation to "free-ride" - to enjoy the benefits co-operation brings while avoiding pulling our weight.

The more people free-ride, and the more we see others failing to pull their weight, the more co-operation breaks down and we all forgo the benefits it could bring.

Haidt argues morality is, in large part, an evolved solution to the free-rider problem. We develop norms of acceptable, co-operative behaviour and find ways to sanction people who aren't co-operating.

His empirical research into the moral sentiments of people from around the world leads him to identify six dimensions to people's moral concerns. First is care/harm; we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need, and despise cruelty. Second is liberty/oppression; we resent attempts to dominate us. Third is fairness/cheating; people should be rewarded or punished in proportion to their deeds.

Then there's loyalty/betrayal; we trust and reward team players, but want to sanction those who betray the group. Next is authority/subversion; we recognise rank or status and disapprove of those not behaving properly, given their position. Finally there's sanctity/degradation; we care about what we do with our bodies and what we put into them.

Haidt believes these moral concerns are shared by people regardless of their culture, nationality or wealth. But, of course, people interpret them differently and put more weight on some than others.

Our differing moral emphases are reflected in our differing political sympathies. So the unending battle between small-L liberal and conservative policies is a manifestation of "deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society".

Haidt finds that small-L liberals' moral concerns are limited to just the first three dimensions: they care deeply about the harm suffered by minorities and the needs of the poor, about oppression and about fairness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, care about all six dimensions. Their most sacred value is to "preserve the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community". So they worry also about maintaining loyalty, acceptance of authority and the sanctity of our bodies.

The conservatives' broader range of moral concerns means they understand the motivations of liberals better than liberals understand the motives of conservatives.

Haidt argues the community benefits from the ever-present tension between the two sides - each emphasises important aspects of maintaining a good society - if only we could restore a greater degree of civility between the contending parties.

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