Tag Archives: Government

The “new, new normal” post-Covid-19

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After the GFC of 2007-8, we were told to get used to the “new normal” – of low/slow/no growth, record-low interest rates, constant tech disruption and market dislocation as economic systems became increasingly decoupled from one another. And just as we had begun to adjust to this new reality, along comes Covid-19 and totally knocks our expectations sideways, backwards and upside down, and with it some negative long-term consequences. Welcome to the “new, new normal”.

Just what the doctor ordered: “Stay home and read a book!”

In the intervening years since the GFC (and don’t those days seem positively nostalgic from our current vantage point?), we have already seen ever lower interest rates, even faster disruption in business models and services, and a gradual dismantling of the trend towards a global economy. The pre-existing geopolitical landscape has either exacerbated this situation, or has been a prime beneficiary of the dismantling of the established structures of pluralistic, secular, non-sectarian, social-democratic and liberal societies.

First, relations between the Superpowers (USA, Russia and China) have not been this bad since the Cold War. Second, nationalism has not been as rife since the 1930s. Third, political leadership has tended toward the lowest common denominator of populist sloganeering. Not to mention the rise of fundamental religious sects, doomsday cults and tribal separatist movements. Let’s agree that even before the current pandemic, our resistance was already low….

Whatever your favourite conspiracy theory on causes and cures for Covid-19, it’s increasingly apparent that populist leaders of both the left and the right will use the pandemic as vindication of their policies – increased xenophobia and tighter border controls, increased centralisation of power and resources, greater surveillance of their citizens, a heightened intolerance of political dissent, a continued distrust of globalisation, and a growing disregard for subject matter experts and data-driven analysis.

The writing’s on the wall? Message seen in East Melbourne

There are obviously some serious topics up for discussion when we get through this pandemic. Quite apart from making the right economic call (“printing money” in the form of Quantitative Easing seems the main option at the moment…), governments and central banks are going to have to come to grips with:

  • Universal Basic Income – even before Covid-19, the UBI was seen as a way to deal with reduced employment due to automation, robotics and AI – the pandemic has accelerated that debate.
  • Nationalisation – bringing essential services and infrastructure back into public ownership would suggest governments would have the resources they need at their disposal in times of crisis – but at the likely cost of economic waste and productivity inefficiencies that were the hallmark of the 1970s.
  • Inflation – as business productivity and industrial output comes back on-line, the costs of goods and services will likely increase sharply, to overcome the pandemic-induced inertia.
  • Credit Squeeze – banks were already raising lending standards under tighter prudential standards, and post-pandemic defaults will make it even harder for businesses to borrow – so whatever the central cash rates, commercial lenders will have to charge higher lending rates to maintain their minimum risk-adjusted regulatory capital and to cover possible bad debts.
  • Retooling Industry – a lot of legacy systems might not come out of the pandemic in good shape. If we have managed to survive for weeks/months on end without using certain services, or by reducing our consumption of some goods, or by finding workarounds to incumbent solutions, then unless those legacy systems and their capacity can be retooled or redeployed, we may get used to living without their products all together.
  • Communications Technology – government policy and commercial settings on internet access, mobile network capacity and general telco infrastructure will need to be reviewed in light of the work from home and remote-working experience.
  • The Surveillance State – I’m not going to buy into the whole “China-virus” narrative, but you can see how China’s deployment of facial recognition and related technology, along with their social credit system, is a tailor-made solution for enforcing individual and collective quarantine orders.

Another policy concern relates to the rate at which governments decide to relax social-distancing and other measures, ahead of either a reliable cure or a vaccine for Covid-19. Go too early, and risk a surge or second wave of infections and deaths; go too late, and economic recovery will be even further away. Plus, as soon as the lock-downs start to end, what’s the likelihood of people over-compensating after weeks and months of self-isolation, and end up going overboard with post-quarantine celebrations and social gatherings?

Next week: The lighter side of #Rona19

 

Australia’s Blockchain Roadmap

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The Australian Government recently published its National Blockchain Roadmap – less than 12 months after announcing this initiative. While it’s an admirable development (and generally, to be encouraged), it feels largely aspirational and tends towards the more theoretical rather than the practical or concrete.

First, it references the US Department of Homeland Security, to define the use case for Blockchain. According to these criteria, if a project or application displays three of the four following requirements, then Blockchain technology may offer a suitable solution:

  • data redundancy
  • information transparency
  • data immutability
  • a consensus mechanism

In a recent podcast for The Crypto Conversation, Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, defined the primary use case for Blockchain as a “secure decentralized/distributed database”. On the one hand, he describes this as a “total oxymoron; on the other, he acknowledges that Blockchain provides a solution to the twin problems of having to have trusted third parties to verify transactions, and preventing double-spend on the network. This solution lies in having to have consensus on the state of the database.

Second, the Roadmap speaks of adopting a “principles based but technology-neutral” approach when it comes to policy, regulation and standards. Experience tells us that striking a balance between encouraging innovation and regulating a new technology is never easy. Take the example of VOIP: at the time, this new technology (itself built on the newish technology of the internet) was threatened by incumbent telephone companies and existing communications legislation. If the monopolistic telcos had managed to get their way, maybe the Post Office would then have wanted to start charging us for sending e-mails?

With social media (another internet-enabled technology), we continue to see considerable tension as to how such platforms should be regulated in relation to news, broadcasting, publishing, political advertising, copyright, financial services and privacy. In the music and film industries, content owners have attempted to own and control the means of production, manufacture and distribution, not just the content – hence the format wars of the past in videotape, compact discs and digital file protocols. (A recurring theme within  Blockchain commentary is the need for cross-chain interoperability.)

Third, the Roadmap mentions the Government support for Standards Australia in leading the ISO’s Technical Committee 307 on Blockchain and DLT Standards. While such support is to be welcomed, the technology is outpacing both regulation and standards. TC 307 only published its First Technical Report on Smart Contracts in September 2019 – three years after its creation. In other areas, regulation is still trying to catch up with the technology that enables Initial Coin Offerings, Security Token Offerings and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

If the ICO phenomenon of 2016-18 demonstrated anything, it revealed that within traditional corporate and market structures, companies no longer have a monopoly on financial capital (issuance was largely subscribed via crowdfunding and informal syndication); human capital (ICO teams were largely self-forming, self-sufficient and self-directed); or networks and markets (decentralized, peer-to-peer and trustless became catch words of the ICO movement). Extend this to DAOs, and the very existence of, and need for traditional boards and shareholders gets called into question.

Fourth, the Roadmap makes reference to some existing government-related projects and initiatives in the area of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. One is the Digital Transformation Agency’s “Trusted Digital Identity Framework”; another is AUSTRAC’s “Digital Currency Exchange” regulation and registration framework. With the former, a more universal commercial and government solution lies in self-sovereign identity – for example, if I have achieved a 100 point identity check with Bank A, then surely I should be able to “passport” that same ID verification to Bank B, without having to go through a whole new 100 point process? And with the latter, as far as I have been able to ascertain, AUSTRAC does not publish a list of those digital currency exchanges that have registered, and exchanges are not required to publish their registration number on their websites.

Fifth, the need for relevant training is evident from the Roadmap. However, as we know from computer coding and software engineering courses, students often end up learning “yesterday’s language”, rather than acquiring flexible and adaptable coding skills and core building blocks in software development. It’s equally evident that many of today’s developers are increasingly self-taught, especially in Blockchain and related technologies – largely because it is a new and rapidly-evolving landscape.

Finally, the Roadmap has identified three “showcase” examples of where Blockchain can deliver significant outcomes. One is in agricultural supply chains (to track the provenance of wine exports), one is in education and training (to enable trusted credentialing), and one is in financial services (to streamline KYC checks). I think that while each of these is of interest, they are probably just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Next week: Brexit Blues (Part II)

 

Signing off for Saturnalia

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According to a Gallup Report, in 2018 the world was “sadder and angrier than ever“. If recent global events are anything to go by, 2019 will easily top that. And as I write, much of south east Australia is on fire (the bushfire season having started back in early August), only adding to the sense of rage. I can’t recall an angrier year, maybe not since the 1970s.

Image of Scott Walker scanned from the NME Annual for 1968

Reasons to be angry? World politics, climate change, fake news, growing nationalism, economic stagnation, and sectarian intolerance. Evidence of anger? Brexit, Impeachment, Hong Kong, France, Chile, Iran, India, Iraq, Adani, Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo, etc.

Meanwhile, considered academic debate has been reduced to very public slanging matches. Even popular music seems shoutier than ever, and no action movie is considered complete without gratuitous violence, hyperbolic pyrotechnics and pounding soundtracks.

So much noise, so much hot air (verbal and atmospheric) and so much sheer rage, not always easy to articulate or understand – and not easy to predict how that will translate at the ballot box, given the election results in Australia and the UK. Politicians of all persuasions are increasingly seen as being a key cause for voter anger, but in both cases, continuity was deemed preferable to change.

As we wind down for the holidays, it’s frustrating to think that the “season of goodwill” is limited to just a few weeks of the year. I’m not suggesting 12-month-long Black Friday Sales. Rather, can we find it in ourselves to be more civil to each other throughout the year, even if we disagree on certain things? In particular, I’m thinking of the growing evidence of sectarian strife. Established religions may condemn to hell (or even death) anyone who disagrees with their belief systems, but in a democratic, secular and pluralist society, the right to “freedom of religion” also means everyone is entitled to “freedom from religion”.

In light of that, I’d like to wish all my readers a safe and peaceful Saturnalia. Normal service will be resumed in the New Year.

 

 

Brexit Blues

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Reading the latest coverage of the Brexit farce combined with the inter-related Conservative leadership contest, I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s description of fox hunting:

“The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”

Whichever candidate wins the Tory leadership race and, as a consequence, becomes the next UK Prime Minister, they will inevitably fail to deliver a satisfactory Brexit solution, simply because there is no consensus position.

But the underlying cause for this impasse is a series of flawed processes:

First, the promise made by previous Prime Minister David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership was flawed, if not highly disingenuous – because from the start, there were no terms of reference. Cameron chose to make it part of his manifesto pledge ahead of the 2015 general election campaign. Even at the time it felt like a desperate ploy to appease the mainly right-wing and Eurosceptic faction of the Conservative party. Despite being generally in favour of the UK remaining within the EU (but with “looser ties”), Cameron probably never expected that he would have to deliver on his referendum promise let alone lead the Brexit negotiations. Behind in the polls, the Tories were expected to lose the election. Instead, they won, but with a much reduced majority – which should have been the first warning sign that all was not going to be plain sailing with Cameron’s EU referendum pledge.

Second, the referendum question put to the electorate in 2016 was itself flawed. Cameron had originally talked about renegotiating the UK’s terms of EU membership, much like Margaret Thatcher had done with some considerable success in the 1980s. There was certainly no mention at all in Cameron’s January 2013 speech of a “No-deal Brexit”. However, the referendum question put to the voters was a stark, binary choice between “Remain” or “Leave”. As some have argued, the design of the referendum should have been enough to render it invalid: both because the voters were not given enough reliable data upon which to make an informed decision; and because there was no explanation or guidance as to what type of “Leave” (or “Remain”) outcome the government and Parliament would be obliged or expected to negotiate and implement. Simply put, the people did not and could not know what they were actually voting for (or against). I am not suggesting that the voters were ignorant, rather they were largely ill- or under-informed (although some would argue they were actually misinformed).

Third, the respective Leave and Remain campaigns in the 2016 referendum were both equally flawed. The Leave campaign was totally silent on their proposed terms of withdrawal (I certainly don’t recall the terms “Hard Brexit” or “No-deal Brexit” being used), and their “policy” was predicated on the magic number of “£350m a week“. And the Remain campaign failed to galvanize bipartisan support, and was totally hindered by the Labour leadership’s equivocation and ambivalence towards the EU (which has only deepened as Jeremy Corbyn refuses to confirm what his policy actually is).

Finally, the Parliamentary process to implement Brexit was flawed from the start. Cameron jumped ship and ending up passing the poisoned chalice to Theresa May. The latter had supported Remain, but now had to lead the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. However, rather than trying to build consensus and broker a truly bipartisan solution (this is not, after all, a simple, one-dimensional party political issue), May proved to be a stubborn, inflexible and thick-skinned operator. Now, there are threats to prorogue Parliament in the event that MPs vote against a No-Deal or Hard Brexit, if a negotiated agreement cannot be achieved by the October 31 deadline. May’s negotiation tactics have only resulted in deeply entrenched and highly polarised positions, while she ended up painting herself into a corner. Good luck to her successor, because if nothing else, Brexit is casting division and national malaise across the UK.

Next week: Pitch X’s Winter Solstice