In a media release on the Indigenous Affairs part of the 2012 Budget, the federal government insists it ‘will continue to prioritise access to the new program for people seeking to move into home ownership on Indigenous land’ – but this is a furphy.

The government is well aware that people living on Indigenous land will not be able to access money from the new Indigenous homeownership program as long as they do not have security of tenure. To pretend that they are serious about helping people living on Indigenous land move into their own home without mentioning how exactly this will happen is misleading.

The current lease arrangement for Indigenous lands is extremely unpopular, and the only community that has private housing leases is the Nguiu township on the Tiwi Islands.

Communities could potentially bypass the controversial head lease arrangement for the 99-year leases initiated by the Howard government in 2006 if land councils issued residential leases to communities. But land councils have demonstrated myopic thinking on this issue.

When the residents of Baniyala, a small community in East Arnhem Land, approached the Northern Land Council (NLC) for 99-year leases on their land, the council refused to issue leases and told the residents they could build private housing without leases.

Kim Hill, chief executive of the NLC, said in an article in The Australian that residents should be ‘well aware that leasing is not required for charitable construction on Aboriginal land.’

This comment completely misses why residents are applying for leases on their land. They know charitable organisations can help construct buildings on their land – this is already happening – but there is no legal clarity on who would be the owner of these buildings.

Under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976, the ‘owner’ is the NLC. But for residents to actually own their home, they need to have secure title.

Without leases, Baniyala families are not only denied the government grants available to all other Australians purchasing a home, but they also cannot access funding under the Homeownership on Indigenous Land program. Nor can they apply for a mortgage from a mainstream bank, insure their houses, or leave their home securely in their wills to their children.

The situation is a farce. Land councils happily lease land to mining companies for commercial operations but won’t lease land to residents. Instead, residents are expected to rely on charitable aid for new housing. Baniyala residents requesting help from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) with their lease negotiations with the NLC were told the government could not help them.

Like other areas of the federal budget, the government’s supposed largesse for Indigenous homeownership is a sleight of hand that does not hold up to scrutiny.

Sara Hudson is the author of From Rhetoric to Reality: Can 99-year Leases Lead to Homeownership for Indigenous Communities?

At long last, services on Sydney’s highly inefficient rail network are getting some attention. Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian has announced  that 750 jobs will be cut in a restructuring effort intended to reduce bureaucratic waste.

Even more heartening is that RailCorp’s projected job cuts are relatively mild, consisting of voluntary redundancies to middle management, not to frontline staff who carry out the day-to-day operations on the trains.

Of Sydney’s transport modes, none is as inefficient or wasteful as RailCorp . The service is more heavily subsidised than any other mode of public transport in Sydney. RailCorp recoups just 29% of its costs from passengers, compared to around 40% by the ferries. The rest of course comes from the taxpayer.

Labour costs represent a large part of the cost structure of any business, and the situation is no different for RailCorp. Employee benefits and entitlements represent 41% of its total expenses. Any company looking to cut costs, and any government serious about making savings for taxpayers, cannot go past labour costs. Some jobs must be shed, and if a state-owned enterprise is run anything like a public department, there will be a significant amount of ‘fat’ that can be cut.

Of course, cuts in any public enterprise or department attract the usual cries about the need to protect jobs. But not a thought is spared for the commuters who, as a result of waste and overstaffing, pay higher prices for substandard services, or for the taxpayer whose contributions continue to mount.

No service, whether public or private, exists to serve those employed by it. Businesses exist to provide customers with a product or service, not jobs for workers.

The Sydney Morning Herald is running a poll asking if Australians are Racist. So far 74% of respondents say yes and 26% say no.

Some of the commentators include Larissa Berendt who argues that Australia is a racist country because Aboriginal people have a shorter life expectancy. However, there are many reasons why their life expectancy is shorter than the average Australian. Berendt also claims that institutional racism is rampant in Australia. This is somewhat ironic given she was the beneficiary of some of that institutional racism herself – albeit in the disguise of positive discrimination.

The gross generalisations used by a number of the people commentating on this issue are not good arguments for establishing that racism is rampant in Australia.

A minority of Australians do appear to be racist but their prejudice does not discriminate to just one ethnic group. They are racist to all people they perceive as ‘different’ calling Aboriginal people Abo’s or Boongs, Asian people Chinks, Lebanese people Lebo’s and so on.

While we should not pretend that racism does not exist in the ‘amazingly’ multicultural society that is Australia, we should also not view the offensive comments and actions of a few as representative of all Australians.

Most Australians are not badly behaved Bogans with inferiority problems trying to build themselves up by knocking others down. It may be common for people to make disparaging remarks about Asian drivers when stuck behind a slow or erratic driver but this does not stop them from making friends with Asian colleagues at work.

Our relationship with people we know personally is different from our collective view of people. When we categorise people into a group it is easy to make generalisations about the characteristics of that group. Arguing that all Aussies are racist is also a gross generalisation and dare I say it racist.

New FIRB chairman Brian Wilson promises greater openness in an interview with Glenda Korporaal:

The former investment banker, who has been on the board of FIRB since 2009 and took over as chairman last month, says FIRB is making a greater effort to communicate the government’s foreign investment policies through its website and in briefing sessions for advisers. “It is important for all our constituencies — the Australian public, Australian business, foreign investors and their governments — to understand that the processes FIRB goes through are sensible and rigorous, and open and consistent,” he says. “Being a little more forthcoming, and having a little more transparency, will actually reduce, for some, the suspicion that we hear or read about from time to time.”

Wilson says FIRB is now putting up a lot more on its website about Australia’s foreign investment policies.

The FIRB has some catching up to do when it comes to posting things on their web site. The fundamental problem with the legislation the FIRB administers — the open-ended national interest test — remains:

There is only one test — is the proposal contrary to the national interest? What that may be varies over time depending on economic circumstances, community attitudes, geopolitics, a whole gamut of things.

Then there is this:

So, I wouldn’t have thought talking to FIRB about a concept or a possible transaction would tip you over the ASX disclosure threshhold.

Probably not quite the level of certainty investors are looking for, but perhaps a good quote for the M&A lawyers to file away for future reference.

The Gillard government has reneged on its promise to reduce the corporate tax rate by 1% – a cut that was part of the package to secure the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT). Although this backflip will surely anger the business community, there are far bigger problems affecting the bottom lines of Australian businesses.

Many small business owners cite a strong dollar, growing regulatory burden, and inflexible labour laws as major impediments to their competitiveness. There is not much the government can do about the strength of the dollar, since strong demand for minerals at home and weak financial markets abroad have caused large capital inflows.

But the government can help ease the regulatory burden and increase labour market flexibility.

On regulation, the Productivity Commission has published some meaningful proposals. In last year’s Review of Regulatory Burdens on Business, the commission drew attention to promising developments in the states. Victoria, NSW, South Australia, and Queensland have all implemented Red Tape Reduction Targets.

These targets require departments and agencies to reduce existing compliance costs by a certain value within a specific time period. Most refer to the costs related to paperwork, but in some cases (Victoria, for example), this includes the costs created by delays.

There has been a degree of success with this approach. Victoria set a reduction target of $500 million by 2012. The state estimated that reductions had reached $401 million by July 2010. Perhaps the federal government could implement some ambitious reduction targets of its own.

On labour market flexibility, the fact that the passage of the Fair Work Act did not include an accompanying Regulatory Impact Statement (as is common with many large reforms) has been a major cause for concern.

Though some headway has been made in the simplification of awards, much rigidity still remains.

The retail sector could benefit from a loosening of penalty rate rules and minimum hours for shifts. This would provide some breathing space from the pressures of declining consumer confidence, increased saving, and online competition. Unfair dismissal provisions can be scrapped, or at least tightened, to reduce both the costs arising from claims and the employment risk that new workers now pose.

All these measures are concrete changes the federal government can make to yield significant cost savings for businesses across the board.