Or, Does the country really change when the government changes?
Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy is encouraging some folks to participate in a sort of round robin blog q&a. So here’s my contribution in response to Tim’s question:
The Question: Tim Dunlop’s question for this first outing was: “My first question is picking up on something said by both John Howard and Paul Keating, namely, that when the government changes, so does the country. Both made the comment at a time when it looked to them like they might be about to lose power and so there was, of course, a sense of warning in their observation. So that’s my question: Does the country really change when the government changes?”
My Answer: Like the question, the biblical verse which I’ve used as a title for this post tends to recur in political discourse at times of change, frustration and aridity. For obvious reasons:
When there is no vision, the people perish.
That’s the accepted rendering, but it’s actually a pretty rough translation from the original. The Vulgate gives a much better sense because it’s clear that prophecy and prophets are what give sustenance to the people. And so it’s interesting to note that this quote, often used against George Bush the First, and picked up later on by Al Gore, has some resonances with Keating’s insight, which in itself was a prophecy. And one which has been fulfilled. The question can be turned around, then – is it true, as Geoffrey Serle asked in a book written in 1973 very much concerned with the Australian spirit, that “from deserts the prophets come”?
That question was answered in 1992, by another Australian academic and cultural theorist, Boris Frankel, who wrote a book ironically entitled From Prophets the Deserts Come.
Serle had wanted to make a point about Australian voices arising, spring like, from a dry land. Frankel, along with other Melbourne critics and scholars who’d been associated with intellectual currents such as those around the magazine Arena, was partly lamenting the end of the reformist zeal associated with a previous generation of Labor prophet – the Gough Whitlams of the world. Paul Keating and his ilk, for Frankel, were prophets too, but prophets of a sort of productivist vision of economism – the close relative (but perhaps from the Catholic and Irish distaff side of the family) of the monetarist zeal that seemed almost to inhabit and enflesh economic rationalist prophets like John Hewson.
Of course, there was another way of looking at Keating the prophet in 1992, and one real sense in which Frankel was right, though he knew not of what he prophesied. He’d contended that the zealotry and the fundamentalism of the prophets of economic liberalism would lead to a cultural desert.
What he probably missed was how quickly that desert would spread, and how few oases would remain. The wets are gone along with the dries. A featureless terrain is the terrain we now crawl along. Ozymandias doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He’s long since crumbled to dust.
So I don’t think he knew quite what a sort of atmosphere of aridity, and sort of low level frustration the politics of Howardian somnolence would lead us all into. Howard was never a zealot, and what we’ve seen is not a “brutopia” but a sort of reduction of everything interesting and alive to the tedium of the daily grind. The spirit has been sucked out of the joint, and the cup has been filled to overflowing with murk rather than tears, for the most part.
Relaxed and uncomfortable we may well be, not alert but vaguely alarmed as if niggled by something at the corner of our vision, but there’s little of drama or inspiration to enliven private sorrows let alone bring about a consciousness that they are really public tragedies.
The flash and movement across the skies has just been the false daily drama of the rise and fall of indicators and numbers – whether polls, leaky boats, interest rate rises, or billions of dollars tossed here and there with anything but gay abandon. Sourness and grimness rather encompass the temper of the times.
We’re all ABNs now, with another BAS to look forward to to mark the passing of time. Or that’s what we’re told we should “aspire” to.
I left Australia to live in California in 1996, and didn’t return for good until 2002. My leaving wasn’t prompted by John Howard’s ascension, nor was my return prompted by the feelings inspired by the US midterms – though even more so than the Presidential campaign of 04, it was possibly the nastiest race and the zenith of political life in modern American history.
Rather, I was searching for personal possibilities, and also civic and public possibilities which I found in spades all through the grim first two years of the Bush era. Perhaps that was California, but perhaps it was also something in the spirit of the Clinton years – wrapped up as they were with all sorts of other moves towards openness like the stirrings of dotcom and Silicon Alley utopianism, and a return to campus activism, and a re-inspiriting of a whole lot of artistic and oppositional movements and places and people after many of the vicious and at one stage seemingly endless identity wars had fought themselves to a stop.
A similar feeling of openness, for me anyway, and for many I knew, defined the Keating years. Things were grim economically for a lot of us, and the only true thing you’ll ever read about Gen X is that the slacker idyll had some truth in that for the first time ever many middle class white kids had few material possibilities in the wake of a devastating recession. But there was a sense in which, also, because our destinies weren’t mapped out, that there were things we could do – truly new things – and that the end of the Soviet era brought about a certain anarchic spirit in the air. The world had yet to settle down, and settle into a dire ordering and so there was a new world to be seized and lived.
Keating somehow aligned himself with that zeitgeist, or it caught hold of him. A few dams broke, and the Redfern speech shouldn’t be underestimated as symbolising an opening to the new. But of course, as PJK himself would say, that was before the fixers and the straighteners, many of them from his own party, decided that if we weren’t going to manufacture anything else any more, we’d make a lot of bottles at any rate to squeeze the genii of the age back in. And put the stoppers on.
It could be said that people get the opposition that they deserve. I was a bit too young to fully partake in it, but the strangely exciting Brisvegas culture of the late eighties had a lot to do with both a sense of change and release with the approaching demise of the Bjelke-Petersen regime, and partly to do with the dictum that “power brings resistance” and that eccentrically and wildly comic as well as wildly oppressive power brought along with it in train the resistance it deserved.
I don’t have a sense that a similar spirit stalks the land now, although I take it as an axiom that the Howard era, one way or another, is stumbling like a dying beast towards its inevitable end.
Perhaps the Rudd era, if it arrives, will bring a sense of release. One way or another, there’ll be a hangover to look forward to. The question, really, is how long that hangover will last.
I have a real foreboding that it will last for quite some time, and what replaces Howard will have been shaped, moulded, chipped away, sculpted and pre-destined to look quite eerily similar. So while I certainly do think it’s my revolution if I can’t dance, I wonder whether dancing in the streets will be in order. We can expect to be told along with our election hangovers, to take a cold shower and dampen our expectations with our towels. That much, from the Beattie playbook, you can take for granted.
In a way, perhaps, we all need to pray for some rain for the Howardian drought to break. Lest it just be a Brisbane style four minute shower some time in November.
But I fear that we’ve had a lot of the passion ground out of us. Perhaps Howard has brought into being the opposition and the culture he deserved.
I liken the Howard era to an itch you can’t scratch, perhaps on a phantom limb. Even when the leg’s amputated, and has been for years, the pain doesn’t go away though it can no longer be felt or directly touched.
Other responses:
The other responses to this question at:
Club Troppo
Joshua Gans
Hoyden About Town
Harry Clarke
The View from Benambra
Andrew Bartlett
Blogocracy
Great post; I love a good chiasmus.
Most responses to this question conclude like that – Rudd will affect the country but will ultimately disappoint. We’re afraid to get ahead of ourselves.
I’d say we’re not thinking big enough – the country will fail to change, but not in the way everyone is too afraid not to hope it won’t.
Bob Brown outlined a more plausible scenario a couple of years ago.
Paraphrasing from memory:
1. In minority in every parliament, the Coalition parties will begin to wither,
2. The ALP will be sucked into the vacuum on the right,
3. The escalating environmental crisis will force the Greens to get real and become the Opposition whether they want to or not,
4. The Greens will one day form a government,
5. Eventually the ALP will swallow the Liberal party, as the Liberals once swallowed the Conservatives,
6. We will be back where we started, but one more notch to the left.
From there we can start to think about how we will, a century from now, sneak up on the Greens from the left and cause them to merge with Labor.
Thanks, AM.
I think part of my subtext, and it’s not too subtextual, is that it’s up to us to ensure that the country does change. I think we all bear part of the blame for allowing Howard to lead us down the paths of dour uncomfortability.
Ps – the Brown scenario is intriguing.
Kim, remember the march for reconciliation? How many hundreds of thousands of people marched? Howard took one look, knew that they weren’t the marginal-seat swinging voters that keep him in office, and went “meh”.
What are you supposed to do in the face of that?
Assume that we should take action if the government won’t, Robert. That is, if even a tenth of the people who marched had involved themselves in a continuing way with others of like mind, perhaps there could have been a powerful movement for change independent of the government’s attitude.
It really is a big contrast with the States – in Australia we just don’t have much of a tradition of voluntary action and associative action, we tend to ask the government to do something, and then shake our heads if it doesn’t and go home.
“Does the country really change when the government changes?”
Yes, but the causality runs from country to government.
Howard’s election reflected the spirit of the times, which was a mid 90s petit bourgeoise individualism that he had been championing for 20 years, and a delayed reaction to the recession gifted to us by Paul Keating. In 2001 and beyond his ascendancy was due to the spirit of those times, that is anti-Muslimism, which was kicked off by 9/11, and fuelled locally by right wing agitators and, perhaps various well publicised violent crimes by Muslim youth, especially in Sydney.
If Rudd becomes Prime Minister, it will be because Howard has overreached (especially with Work Choices), the country’s values have changed again (a bit), and Rudd has caught the mood.
I think it’s more complex than that and it runs both ways.
Certainly a leader with vision, to get back to your quote that kicked off the post, can awaken certain longings and expressions of attitudes in the populace that had been previously unformed or at least widely unvoiced. This is as true for higher aspirations as it is for narrow bigotry and selfishness of the I’ve Got Mine Jack and NIMBY variety. But I think the country mostly has the stronger end of the PushMePullYou than the Government does.
Firstly, economics has always been important. The nineteenth century saw generations of classicists who were uninterested in economics, or who were unable to synthesise it with the rest of life, and on the whole they’ve served us poorly. Pericles had a keen eye for economics, so did Rameses and Darius and the Caesars, and had there been a classicist able to explain this we might not have this ridiculously insular economics profession. Imagine if medicine was as disconnected from the way people’s lives as economics is! Boris and his ilk were badly taught is all, and so are his students, and their students etc.
Secondly, I hope you’ve misquoted Brown AM, because a better analysis of the foreseeable future for Australia today would be:
1. Despite Howard the Coalition parties are starting to get their acts together in NSW and Victoria, and the Labor State Governments there and elsewhere have nowhere to go but down,
2. The ALP have already moved to the right because that’s how you win elections. Seriously, apart from not banning abortion or a few other hot-button issues they’re pretty much there,
3. The escalating environmental crisis will force the Greens to get real, which will mean they will have to sell out their statist ideas, which will mean they are both anguished about losing their traditional support and unable to cope when the major partes muscle in on their turf (see what happened to the Democrats),
4. The Greens will one day form a government, but they will bumble and stumble so badly that the majors will trim their sails a bit and replace them in a landslide, discrediting the Greens as a party of government,
5. Yeah, the Liberals have swallowed the Conservatives, real sound analysis there. That’s why Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan and Bruce Baird are in Cabinet while Tony Abbott fumes on the back bench. This idea that the conservative parties are fragile while the parties of the left are as perennial as the grass is to misunderstand politics and to beg the question,
6. Given that everyone’s moving right in order to win, what’s this bullshit about one more notch to the left?
I’d disagree with that (fab piece though Kim, really enjoyed reading that) — such activities in their DIY form independent of government were actually more visible in the middle years of the 20th century in Australia. Have you read Judith Brett’s Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class? She points out how often the Liberal Party has reformed itself and its values and directions, argues that the Libs under Menzies were the acknowledged party of moral concern (not in the degraded meaning that phrase has now, either) and of disinterested voluntary action of various kinds — though I’d agree not associative action so much — and that that the ‘moral middle’ shifted to the progressive left in Australia as late as the Whitlam years.
Fair point, Dr Cat, and yes, I have read Brett.
Perhaps I should have written a “continuing” tradition. In some ways I think the sorts of concerns and groups she talks about had a specific temporality and meaning, which is close to exhausted now.
Of course, I don’t want to exaggerate the differences with the US either, but I think there are stronger traditions of non state-centred civic and political action, which isn’t really contradicted by the Brett argument insofar as the movements she discussed looked to a partisan affiliation and to state action.
Politics is mostly about roads, drains and bridges.
However, political movements sometimes differ from each other radically at the margins.
These differences between Left and Right were never more stark than in the period running up to the 1972 Australian federal election. The Culture Wars were raging bigtime and not just in journals, but in the streets, at the dinner tables, in seminaries and in the music of the time. Australia was involved in a huge slanging match.
These energies coalesced around the ALP to give it a narrow victory in 1972. Whitlam parlayed that narrow victory into a cultural revolution the like of which had never been seen in Australia.
Many on the Left in Australia still use the Whitlam government as a template to measure the effect of government on society. For many reasons that I won’t discuss here the Left will never have the same impact again.
The Whitlam interregnum cannot be called an era despite the enormous cultural changes that his period of government legitimised.
In many ways the Whitlam interregnum was the worst thing that could have happened to the cultural left. For a brief time its leaders were ushered into the leadership tent. And the experience spoiled them. they lost their edge and discovered careers. They also discovered compromise and politics as a profession.
In the process, the cultural left lost their greatest asset — the talent for subversion. The cultural left rose during the late 1960s against the power of government and in the face of denunciation by leading conservative and reactionary voices. The gave up their greatest asset for a modicum of false and temporary comfort.
Today the cultural left is tiny, disunited and irrelevant in Australia. They can blame their elders for some of that. But mostly, they have no galvanising vision of how the world might be different. They are arguing about roads and drains and bridges too, just like normal politicians.
The Green movement may develop into something interesting, but at the moment it is dominated by too many Creeping Jesuses. If they want an impact they’ve got to get rowdy. The streets, dinner tables and seminaries must be transformed again into uncomfortable places with the din of slanging matches.
And the rebels should never, ever alloow themselves to be enticed back into the leadership tent.
Just meant that the 20th century was one notch to the left of the 19th. The original emergence of the Labor Party on the left eventually caused the major parties of the time to consolidate as an opposing force. By the time they’d sorted it out under Menzies, I think the Liberal tendency was dominant, but you’re right to say the Conservative is now on top. Regardless, the contest shifted from Conservative vs. Liberal to Conservative Liberal vs. Labor, ie one notch to the left.
Brown’s thesis IIRC was that this will happen again, and the contest will then be Conservative Liberal Labor vs. Green.
Like you say the ALP are already pretty much there. We’re just waiting for the Greens to catch up.
Not an argument that could have been made persuasively in 1789 or 1848, or perhaps even 1968.
Maybe it’s valid for a period where ideological conflict is muted and there’s a degree of consensus about underlying goals and values, and where the public sphere is largely a range of tunes sung from the same song sheet.
But I wouldn’t make the assumption that will always be the case. Nor, in my view, should we accept that it will be. Which I think is part of the point of the post.
Certainly a lot of political conflict now is fought out over the social realm (the “culture wars”) and there are many fights there still to be won. Similarly, the medium term impacts of climate change are going to overturn many assumptions. And I don’t think we should assume that “civilising capitalism” will always be the mission of the left – given the many ways in which capitalism itself has morphed over recent decades and the global questions that can be posed for the next half century.
It’s wise also to remember that public opinion, and indeed values, are not fully formed until they’re articulated and political leadership is certainly a large part of the cultural mix which shapes the way we live now and the way we interpret the way we live now.
Anyway, stimulating question and stimulating post. As were the other responses too.
It’s good to see some discussion of important issues beyond the immediate and sometimes facile movement of day to day politics. Let’s hope that this q&a experiment continues to stimulate.
The Housing affordability issue is the sort of thing that has people simmering with discontent.
With it getting more difficult for people to get away from increasing rent rises and transport costs increasing with the price of petrol, it would not be surprising if this eventually does not cause political pressure for a more fair system to be developed.
It is a case of live in the inner suburbs and be subjected to ludicrous rents or live in the outer suburbs for slightly cheaper rent and pay through the nose in time and money to get anywhere. The sort of thing that is unsustainable in the longterm.
It is hard to see where a Government line of ‘you have never been so well off’ can be sustained when so many people are living in far from preffered circumstances sooner or later these sort of issues have to be addressed.
Add this to the pervading slipage in job security from the workchoices fiasco and it is not hard to see why there is a determined mood for a change to something fairer sweeping the country.
A government which has been told of these and other problems such as climate change and has taken eleven years to half heartedly respond just is not fit to govern.
Many of these problem areas could have been solved by now if there was the political will to change but the Federal Government is just not coming up with any ideas of any depth or substance and hasn’t for a long time.
True, but that’s only three years among many. And my subject was about the consequences of 1968 when I stipulated (perhaps not clearly enough) that the “roads and bridges” trope didn’t hold.
In 1789 and 1848 the institutions of politics were violently torn down and reconstituted. In a sense, politics ceased to exist for a time and were then reinvented.
In 1968 nothing of the sort happened. The old institutions persisted. However, the subject matter of politics changed siginificantly. Business as usual went on, of course, but it did not monopolise the agenda.
This raises the knotty issue of whether the constitutional arrangements of western democracies, including Australia, are sufficiently transparent and flexible to permit major and long lasting cultural and social change. Perhaps the Left’s respect for the mystique of representative democracy prevents them from acknowledging that the constitutional and juridical cards are stacked against leftist programs.
Perhaps those programs will continue to be unachievable until current constitutional arrangements are swept away, as happened 1789 and 1848.
I agree with this:
… but could not agree less with:
Apart from some relatively well-off adolescents in some western cities blowing off a bit of steam, and falsely claiming to oppose capitalism and represent workers and oppressed people generally, that argument can indeed be made.
Katz, 1789 and 1848 didn’t come out of the blue.
You could look at the inter-war period in Europe as another example of a political era where constitutional forms were hardly settled – liberal democracy, it was widely believed (and not without reason at the time), was on its last legs.
One of the outcomes of the Paris riots of 1968 was that the French government asphalted the cobblestoned streets of the city to deprive future rioters of a ready source of rocks to throw at the gendarmes.
Mark, in terms of politics the blue is precisely where 1789 came from.
The revolutionaries who pledged the Tennis Court Oath were utterly inert until Louis XVI called them to an Estates General.
As de Tocqueville correctly asserts, but for the complacency of the privileged estates (clergy and aristocracy) the representatives of the Third Estate would have remained in their small village domains doing good works and repeating Voltairean aphophthegms.
As for interwar Europe, it was the extremist Right that profited from the perceived illegitimacy of liberal, bourgeois democracy.
Katz, you surely can’t be arguing that significant social forces weren’t at work leading up to the events following the meeting of the Estates General. Otherwise it seems inexplicable that Louis XVI didn’t get more or less what he wanted. Indeed the calling of the Estates General for the first time in over a hundred years is meaningful in itself.
But I don’t want to refight the French Revolution – we’d start straying a bit far off topic.
And in interwar Europe – it was also the extremist Left who profited in many ways. But I’m not sure what your point is. I’d be the last to argue that all historical change moves in either a predetermined or a progressive direction.
My simple and modest point is that politics is mostly about bridges, roads and drains. Sometimes it is about more fundamental things.
My second point is that in countries with large middle classes the Left tend to be more constrained by respect for representative democracy than the Right.
My third point is that this respect may inhibit the success of leftist programs.
My last point is that the greatest moment of success of leftist programs in Australia occurred under Whitlam, under circumstances that are unlikely ever to be replicated in Australia.
I’m not clear as to why you’d argue the latter, though.
What, precisely, are the conditions which would prevent any similar success for the left? I doubt that anything similar would replicate the Whitlam moment, but I’m not seeing the reason why.
Very true for the Whitlam government. One of Gough’s major promises for the 1969 and 1972 campaigns was to use federal money to sewer the outer suburbs of the major cities, where swags of swinging voters lived.
Cue Strocchi to fight the Whitlam years, while Katz and I get
mediaevalearly modern and re-fight the French revolution. I bags being Robespierre.And the people’s right to cheaper air fares. Is it also time for a GOVT1001 primer on ideology and material economics? Are the lastsuperpowerists around to explain and critique the base/superstructure model?
Interesting question.
Note that I framed the assertion (and that’s all it is) in terms of likelihood, not impossibility. Thus I’d use the word hamper rather than your word prevent.
Just a laundry list of things to begin with:
1. The hegemony of keynesian economic thinking. This is unlikely to return unless there is another worldwide, deep and prolonged economic depression.
2. The recent upsurge of second-wave feminism. This has since lost its shock value.
3. The demography of the baby boom generation. We need another world war to create its like again.
4. The lack of political savvy of the Tories and the Right in the age of mass media. The Right have got real clever at media politics since.
5. A dumb, dumb war in Vietnam, fuelled by conscription. I doubt that’ll ever happen again.
6. The end of colonialism worldwide. The Third World was really sexy in 1968.
7. Some great music, fun drugs, reliable contraception and no nasty STDs and full employment.
With all of that Whitlam just scraped in.
There’s probably a lot more, but I’ve forgotten the rest.
PS FDG, I bags Talleyrand.
We can add
8. The absence of a credible alternative to capitalism. In the late 60s/early 70s, centralised socialist planning was considered to be a credible alternative to capitalism.
9. Billy McMahon, whose combination of decrepitude and fatousness will never been seen again in a national political leader. McMahon was a a laughing stock even amongst his own side.
10. The presence of a very decent social safety net. This was absent in the late 60s/early 70s. Just about everybody in Australia – apart from aboriginal communities, truly a national disgrace – either lives well, or reasonably well, or has available a social security system which enables to them to live reasonably well.
Yes, but such a conjunction of events need not repeat itself for an upsurge in left sentiment and culture to occur. A different conjunction of events, many no doubt not foreseeable at the moment, might produce a new left moment.
For instance:
And Keynesian economic thinking was the orthodox paradigm back then and no one would have foreseen its supercession. There’s no reason in principle therefore that we should assume that current economic nostra will never be shaken. In many instances, and it would perhaps be tedious to parse each point made because this one can stand as illustrative, I’d be much more interested in left rethinking of political economy rather than a Keynesian return.
Tim Dunlop says:
It shouldnt if the country is not in crisis and accountability institutions are working as they should. Grass-roots conservative evolution is a lot more sensible than tall-poppy constructivist revolution.
Most useful enduring social change in well constituted and institutionalised liberal democracies is from the bottom-up, not the top-down. That is how the accountibility principle is supposed to work, voice for principals reflected in choice by agents.
Reforming govts have more of a leading role the more they reflect elite fashions rather than popular traditions. So the more democratic a governmental process the more reactive the government.
Keating’s economic laissez-faire and cultural diversity policies reflected prevailing elite fashions. When Keating got to far ahead of the people he came a cropper.
Howard economic dirigisme and cultural unity policies draw on populist traditions. Its obvious which has more staying power given the rise of Kevin “mini-me” Rudd.
In the sixties the Cultural Revolution completely caught the cultural establishment completely off-guard esp old churches. The CR was cultural elite driven initially but its more moderate form gained popular acceptance eg female careers, race-blind immigration, gay tolerance. Later the AUS polity caught up and legislated to equalise cultural transactions.
In the eighties the Financial Revolution caught the economic establishment off-guard esp blue chip corporations. The FR was financial elite driven initially but its more moderate form has gained popular acceptance eg self-funded super, residential investment properties. Later the AUS polity caught up and legislated to liberalise finance transactions.
Ecological politics, the biggest political change of the naughties, was driven by ecological elites and then taken up by the populus before govts took notice.
Mark on 29 May 2007 at 6:14 pm
Constitutional democracies have both a Leftist ideological bias and a conservative chronological bias.
Representative democracy with universal suffrage is necessarily populist and therefore lists Left rather than Right. The bias of democracy towards the Left was well-understood by classical democratic theorists (eg JS Mill) since the Left tend to support the low-status and in economics the populus are mostly low-status.
[The paradox of the Culture Wars is the contested status of the majority populus (typically straight, male-led, Caucasian, Christian households) versus minority populus (variously gay, female-led, Coloured, ethnic households). In the case of AUS, the popularly acclaimed majority are still considered higher status than the elite-sponsored minorities. The proble will only be sorted once we determing how much biological classification conditions sociological stratification.]
But representative democracies in a well-constituted polities also tend to be conservative rather than constructivist. ie social change tends to be grass-rooted, bottom-upped, small-scaled and gradual rather than tall-poppied top-downed large-scaled and rapid.
This is because democratic social change that has enduring value (ie has the potential to be a tradition rather than fashion) is legitimised by routine institutionalisation through accountable institutions. This is literally a conserving process.
Properly constituted democracies (majority rule, minority rights) therefore invariably tend to be evolutionary and reformatory. (Obviously Protestant Englishmen were the first and best and mastering the art of crafting such organisations.) The notion of a revolutionary (rapid forward change) or reactionary (rapid backward change) policies in such polities is therefore oxymoronic.
Australia has just gone through a long period where govts tried to take the initiative and drag the populus kicking and screaming into the brave new world. The results have been mixed. The futher the govt followed elitist fashions and disregarded populist traditions the greater the back-lash.
For Keating, in the eighties, the constructivist “times were a-changing”. He took financial elitism (economic rationalism) and cultural elitism (political correctness) as far as they could run that decade. But he turned against his own economic program in 1993 and came acropper on his cultural program in 1996.
Conversely for Howard in the naughties, the conservative “times suited him”. He turned towards fiscal populism (targetted interventionism) and a cultural populism (traditional nationalism) for most of this decade.
‘I think we all bear part of the blame for allowing Howard to lead us down the paths of dour uncomfortability.’ I’d go a deal further – we all bear part of the blame for allowing Howard to have succeeded and to have influenced us in any way. Of course it’s true that one of Howard’s signature tactics has been to bring out the worst in us all. But he wouldn’t have succeeded in doing so if our worst wasn’t laying there, possibly dormant, awaiting release. I’ll fight any man in the house (or at least I would if I was the violent type) for the title of number one Howard hater, but while we’re apportioning blame for the nightmare of the last 11 years, let’s not forget to look in the mirror.
Snorky on 29 May 2007 at 8:46 pm
Get your hand off it and get a grip. To call the last 11 years a nightmare shows the Left’s delusional disconnect from reality.
Howard’s govt has not been particularly wicked, either professionally or politically. This has been a mainly moderate centre-right govt. which only got militant twice in industrial relations (P1998 & 2007), both times being rebuffed.
Fear and greed are sometimes necessary or inevitable emotions. It is typical to get greedy in a boom and right to get fearful when terrorists are abroad.
The last decade has generally been one of increased economic prosperity, improved cultural unity and stronger national security. Most Howard ministers have been honest enough and where dishonest have done so in the national interest.
His has been a which has engineered some regressive shifts in financial allocations. Its hard to fault macro-economic policy which has been nicely adjusted to get high growth with low inflation.
But has also made some unifying moves in cultural integration. So cultural policy is no longer the province of corrupt ethnic lobbies wanker arts graduates.
The Howard national security paradigm has serious flaws. We cant be beholden to US global adventurism of the Bush type at any rate. And we are suckers for the US military-industrial complex in defence procurement. Howard has put some great runs on the board in regional defence issues, particularly in Timor, Bougainville and the Solomons.
Impossible to argue against this.
For example, an image of Che Guevara may suddenly appear on the face of the moon. That may persuade many folk to join a new left moment.
That’s a rather flip(pant) response, Katz. I’m merely trying to point out that the specific conjunction of forces which may have led to the Whitlam experience do not need to be repeated for something similar to occur.
I’m very suspicious of lines of thought which suggest that current political configurations are frozen in stone, or just about so. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to waste my time trying to chip away the rock.
The whole assumption underlying Whitlam was not so much Keynesianism, it was an assumption that Australian economic growth was a given and that nothing – building inland megalopolises on the world’s driest continent, the assumed linkage between welfare payments and improvements in well-being on the part of recipients, screwing East Timor, compulsory unionism or free university education – would change that. Whitlam was the last economic illiterate (probably the only one – I’m trying to think of another PM less mindful of economic issues).
Nobody today takes economic growth as given, or as anything but a fragile and delicate thing that must be tended to carefully, which includes beating off dreamers with big spending plans. If said dreamers define what it is to be leftist, then so much for the left. If not (and I think not), then politics is about to get iunteresting.
Nobody?
In his own way, Howard is every bit the economic illiterate Whitlam was. So is Costello. Talking up the size of our “trillion dollar” economy isn’t economic literacy. Nor is writing off the Current Account Deficit as a non-problem because all the debt is private (i.e. consumer and corporate debt). Nor is Howard’s mantra that “interest rates will always be lower under the Liberal Party than under Labor”.
No.
Keynesianism appeared to provide the guaranteed elixir of growth and to deliver it into the hands of government.
This supposition of the infallibility of Keynesian nostrums was based on the belief in the permanency of fixed foreign currency exchange rates and on the ability of governments to control entry to and egress from nations of currency and credit.
This trick had worked for more than 20 years by the time Whitlam assumed office in 1972.
Whitlam wasn’t the only leader to underestimate the effect of a run on the US dollar after 1968, the rise of the market in petrodollars, and the ability of OPEC to insist on higher oil prices.
Whitlam wasn’t an illiterate in the world of Bretton Woods. What he didn’t understand was that the world of Bretton Woods was about to collapse.
To return to the question of cultural change. Much of the Whitlam program was funded by deficit expenditure. When this source of funding was proven not to be cost-free, Fraser and his Razor Gang cut back on cultural programs. Whitlamite apparatchiks and many others, including numbers of academics, found themselves out of the tent and in the cold, where they have remained ever since.
Of course leftist moments can return without access to Keynesian largesse. British Suffragettes of the first decade of the 20th century demonstrated the effectiveness of petty terrorism, civil disobedience and headline-catching martyrdom.
But what causes could be promoted by such tactics today? In the end, the British public accepted that it was unjust and unfair to deny political rights to women.
What causes are amenable to this switching of sentiment today?
Howard won’t do anything that does, or is seen to, inhibit economic growth and the accusation that his opponents (whomever they may be at any given time) might is a powerful weapon for him to use against them.
Whitlam wasn’t the only economic illiterate of his time, but he was economically illiterate.
Programs such as those which provide free university education to all, or which provide money to Aboriginal individuals as a means for redressing material disadvantage, have failed and should be abandoned. They meant well, but they didn’t work and those who would seek to resurrect them in the name of leftist purity are doing favours to nobody who doesn’t accept leftist purity as the highest goal.
Andrew E, you may well argue that the Bretton Woods system was a species of economic illiteracy.
But the point is that by 1972 the Bretton Woods system had been in operation for more than 20 years.
If governments of nations ordered their affairs during this period as if the Bretton Woods system did not exist, then those governments would have been justly criticised for failing to promote the interests of their economy and their citizens.
You write as if “economic literacy” were nothing but some kind of revealed truth independent of human wishes.
In truth “economic literacy” is in large measure what economic actors declare to be economic literacy.
An actor taking centre stage may know all of his lines and have phenomenal stage presence, but if he is insouciant of the other actors then he’s going to botch it.
If he had been as out-of-touch with other areas of policy as he was of economics, he’d never have been Prime Minister at all. Once his economic ignorance was revealed he ceased to hold that office – a lesson not lost on those who came, and are yet to come, afterwards.
You write of economics as Bush speaks of the Middle East – something that can be shaped by exercutive fiat and political will.
Incorrect.
Bush transgressed consensual norms of international conduct.
Whitlam replicated (though stretching) consensual norms of economic conduct.
Your analogy is therefore false.
Whitlam was out of touch with new realities in 1974-1975. Until then, his approach to economic planning and nationbuilding were consensual.
As Nixon said in 1971: “We’re all Keynesians now.”
Interesting that you should leap to characterise my anti-Government sentiments as ‘left’, Jack. There are many who are trenchantly critical of the Government who would hardly identify as ‘left’, Malcolm Fraser and John Valder for two. What this demonstrates is that this Government is not a ‘conservative’ government in the normally accepted sense at all.
There are numerous examples of its conduct that could only be described as radical. Here’s one: the amendments to the Electoral Act to close the rolls on the day the election is called, thereby removing the normal period within which those who are not properly enrolled can rectify their status so that they can vote. There has been no legitimate explanation for this move, because there is none. It’s a crass political stunt, designed to disenfranchise those who the government assumes would be unlikely to support it.
The wanton and unjustified disenfranchisement of parts of the electorate is the most anti-democratic act imaginable of any Australian Government, and hardly the act of a truly conservative government committed to liberal democratic traditions.