National interest and nationalism
At $7 billion, the takeover bid lodged for Western Mining is not the largest involving an Australian company, but with control of the company set to move offshore, it will take with it Australia's largest remaining metals miner and explorer. Once, a takeover of a mining company of this size and importance would have triggered a debate about our dwindling control of our national resources. Yet there has been barely a murmur from the economic nationalists.
This is a far cry from just two years ago, when the Federal Government used the "national interest" argument to block offshore control of the energy concern Woodside. That decision may have had as much to do with the timing of the state election in Western Australia as protecting local resources, although there was the clear concern that if control of Woodside changed hands, that could adversely affect further gas developments off north-west Australia.
The steady opening of national borders and the merging of financial markets have given rise to the view that corporate interest and national interest are one and the same. Certainly the free-trade agreement drawn up between Washington and Canberra sees no place for the "national interest" argument, even though the US has itself readily resorted to it in the past to protect domestic assets.
It may be an unfashionable view in some quarters, but it is clear that corporate interests and national interests are not the same: what is in the best interest of a company and its shareholders is not necessarily in the national interest. To see that we have only to look at James Hardie and the appalling mess that has been created as it sought to evade its asbestosis liability to see that.
Equally, it is clear that the increasing size of natural resource companies can make it difficult for state governments to protect their own interests when conflict emerges. In this regard, the recent move by the Queensland Government to resist pressure from the foreign owner of mineral reserves in the north of that state is notable. Here, the holder of bauxite deposits at Arukun on the Cape York peninsula was committed to develop them under a "use it or lose it" clause. After controlling the reserves for decades, it refused to do so, compelling the State Government to withdraw the rights to that mineral resource - a stance that the Northern Territory Government has signalled it would mimic if a similar situation arose.
The situation with Western Mining is quite different. The takeover is in its early stages, and has far to run. It is unclear whether control will, indeed, change hands. Yet if it does and this encourages investors to search for new ore bodies and to develop new mines, there is little cause for concern. The decline in exploration activity resulting from the spate of takeovers is a greater threat to the national economy than losing control of existing miners.
Confusion at the ballot box
The Australian Electoral Commission statistics from last month's federal election reveal a surge in the informal vote, to as high as double the national average rate of 5.18 per cent in many Sydney seats. Across the country nearly 640,000 people voted informally. It is as though the votes of electors in a city just more than twice the size of the Newcastle-Lake Macquarie conurbation were not taken into account, something surely to be lamented in a country where compulsory voting is an integral part of national life.
Thirteen seats in Sydney recorded the highest informal votes in the country. Of concern for Labor is that the overwhelming majority of them were in western Sydney, long considered Labor's heartland. The biggest informal vote in the country occurred in the electorate of Greenway, where more than one in 10 voters wasted their ballot and the Liberals won the seat for the first time, by a slim 1.16 per cent.
There appears no one reason for the rise - up from 4.82 per cent in the 2001 election. What is to be made of ballots that come in blank, incorrectly completed, bearing messages or spoiled? AEC research suggests not all informal votes are deliberate and they may result from frustration and an inability to understand a complex voting system.
The commission's figures show the lowest informal vote was mostly in Melbourne middle-class seats held by the Liberals. There are exceptions, and on this occasion it was New England, which registered the second lowest informal vote - 2.77 per cent. The commission's research found the informal vote is usually associated with low levels of education, non-fluency in English and with voters aged over 80 years.
There are ways of reducing the waste of such votes. Obviously more educational resources should be dedicated to seats returning large informal votes. Authorities could simplify ballot papers into a universal form to avoid the confusion that currently results from differences between federal, state and local government electoral systems on top of the difference between the Senate voting system and that of the House of Representatives. Another helpful reform would be allowing different ways of marking ballot papers, so long as the voter's intention was clear.