I’m published in Crikey today, discussing the way an apparent deficit of ‘social capital’ has been wrongly used as an excuse for the decline of political parties, particularly the Labor party.
It’s paywalled, but if you’re not a Crikey subscriber, you should think about becoming one for all sorts of other good reasons!
Not all of us can afford to subscribe, alas.
Can’t access the paywalled article, but I hope this is on topic: I was deeply, deeply unimpressed by this speech which I’ve just read about. I’ll go and look on other fora in case News Ltd has distorted what Gillard said, but from what’s quoted it seems as though she is using the Gough Whitlam lecture to trash everything that the Whitlam years stood for. In those days Labor was not so anti-environment and the government cared enough about being a clever country to fund university and public education. The progressive values she sneers at used to be part of the Labor platform.
The neoliberal “aspirationals” they are kowtowing to won’t vote for them, because if you’re espousing much the same values as the Liberal party, why not vote Liberal?
I read the Gillard speech.
It started off okay.
Then I thought, half-way through, I’d stumbled into an 18th century Methodist revivalist meeting or something.
Its a bit rich to talk about Whitlam’s university reforms when you belong to the party that started the rot to get rid of them.
If I looked closely (I was gagging by the end) there’s probably heaps more hypocritical bullshit in it.
I’ll see if I can find a link to the speech.
The Gillard speech.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2011/04/01/gillard-we-are-a-party-of-ideas/
Gillard states in that speech:
Oh yeah? Doesn’t know the history and philosophy of the labour movement. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the idea of the equality of opportunity is a component of a moral theory of justified social inequality… which is a far cry indeed from older ideas of distributive justice that were foundational for labour movements and the parties of social democracy.
So, we’re all liberals now?
A post on Gillard’s speech is now up: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2011/04/01/julia-gillards-whitlam-oration-and-ordinariness/