I spoke yesterday at a Search Foundation Forum, Breaking the Addiction: challenging Bligh’s privatisation push, in Brisbane at the Workers’ Community Centre at Paddington. This is the text of my talk, written up from my notes:
I
The Bligh government’s decision to privatise a range of public assets, most significantly Queensland Rail, certainly requires explanation. It’s politically irrational, and as John Quiggin argues, the economic case for privatisation has no merit. Most observers of the 2009 Queensland election campaign concur that Labor’s victory was secured only in a few short days before polling day itself; in part because electors started to focus on the real prospect of a Lawrence Springborg led LNP government, but importantly also because Labor ran a more activist campaign than could have been anticipated – highlighting the need to preserve public sector jobs, and standing up to credit ratings agency in favour of an economic growth agenda to protect Queensland jobs and workers’ standards of living. Debt and deficit scares were pushed aside in the midst of the GFC.
Yet, a few short months later, with no advance warning or consultation, Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser dropped the privatisation bombshell. The polls essentially haven’t moved since, and the public trust that Anna Bligh herself had created collapsed almost instantaneously. Though the LNP opposition led by John-Paul Langbroek is hardly a convincing alternative government, they’ve looked ever since like they have a very smooth path to victory at the next election.
So, the political rationality of this push stands in question, and particularly so given that obvious compromises to reverse part of the privatisation have not been made. Though you can hardly walk up George Street without hearing rumours of coups against Bligh, it appears clear that it is now very unlikely that there will be any backdown, despite a very prominent and active community and union campaign (led by the ETU, in particular).
Labor faces a large defection of support – notably in the suburbs and regions – to the LNP, and a probably slightly smaller swing in inner city seats direct to The Greens. The optional preferential voting system, and the habit inculcated by years of ‘Just Vote One’ campaigning by Peter Beattie in the face of conservative disunity, make it likely that many electors will vote for The Greens, then walk out of the polling booth in disgust, without giving Labor a preference. The ALP’s rational political strategy would be to reverse at least the privatisation of QR, and make a turn to the left, but this almost certainly won’t happen. Rather all the government can offer – including to its own backbenchers – is a strategy of toughing out public criticism and hoping it will all be forgotten before we next go to the polls.
II
A number of possible explanations can be advanced for the privatisation craze. One would be in terms of the factional and political dynamics within the Labor party and caucus, the elimination of any real independent powerbases in Cabinet, the group around Bligh, and the relations between the ALP, the Labour Movement, and the community. Another would be the influence of local business, economists, bureaucrats in Treasury and the Premier’s Department, and the inter-relationship of a resources economy and global flows of investment, exports and capital.
As others will be focusing on these aspects of the privatisation push, I’ve chosen to look at the decision more in the light of longer term structural factors – particularly the influence of the twin forces of globalisation and the centralisation of state power in Australia, and the exhaustion of both Queensland Labor political culture and the New Labor style of state governance and politics. For me, the most important question, which I think could only be answered by Bligh and her crew in sound bite speak, would be what exactly the purpose of the Queensland Labor party is.
III
It’s not as widely known as it should be that, far from being the red neck state of Joh era mythos, Queensland has a very radical past. The work of writers such as Carole Ferrier and historians such as Ray Evans, and in particular their co-edited book Radical Brisbane and Evans’ History of Queensland, documents a continuing tradition of radicalism. Queensland saw the first Labor government in the world, Brisbane experienced a General Strike in 1912, T. J. Ryan was the only leader in the British Empire to oppose Conscription in 1916 and 1917. This state was the first in Australia to have free public hospitals, women’s activism dates back to the 1870s, and even the dispute which brought down the Gair government in the Split of 1957 was over a substantive issue of the extension of workers’ rights.
Space prevents me from developing this argument in full, but my contention would be that the Queensland Labor tradition was a far more properly democratic socialist one than the experience of NSW Labor, for instance, an obvious comparator.
IV
So, where does the State Labor government stand today?
It’s simplifying things a bit, of course, but it seems to me that Labor does three things in government:
(a) Acts as cheerleader for and enabler of fractions of local and global capital; from the ever present developers to international coal. Little attempt is made to question the virtue of development in general, or specific developments in particular – including those which will do much harm to the government’s purported climate change abatement strategy. Anna Bligh appears captive and supine in the face of business interests, caught up in a spiral of zero sum competition with other Premiers, reliant on a drip feed of donations and jobs from resources industries and others to implement her ostensible economic aims;
(b) Plays to the worst in the communitarian New Labor text book; using “nudge” ideas to govern the soul, to shape our behaviour in the face of risks perceived or beaten up by the Sunday Mail or talkback radio. There’s a puritan element to Labor administration, which runs directly counter to a Left tradition I’d like to see revived; that of enhancing and facilitating the ability of citizens to develop autonomous capacities for self government and for using leisure time for self development and other directed activity in the family, friendship networks and local and wider communities.
Struggles over working time – to free the capacities of citizens through both greater leisure and a high standard of employment rights – have been displaced by a narrow economism which celebrates jobs and growth for their own sake.
(c) Ducks for cover when anything goes wrong in the services the state still has responsibility for delivering to its citizens. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Ministers on the ABC tv news throw up their hands and say “but the Department didn’t tell me!”.
IV
Much of this futile activity, shaped by a now well established set of political tactics (“Labor has a plan!”, “Jobs, jobs, jobs!”, etc), takes place in a context where state governments have little power to stucture really distinctive outcomes outside service delivery. Even ten years ago, let alone fifty or a hundred, their influence was much greater. For example, the pay equity reforms, on which I worked as a consultant in 2000, held out the possibility of a real reconfiguration not just of conditions but also of social relations in a gendered workforce. And the Beattie government, perhaps suffused in something of a nostalgic glow now that we know what came next, pioneered an industry policy agenda based around human capital and endogenous growth theory, emblazoned as ‘The Smart State’. Much of this strategy, though continuing to influence the thinking of Rudd Labor, and Wayne Swan in particular, was dismantled by the Bligh regime.
Peter Beattie also understood, in resisting the push from powerful quarters for the privatisation of QR, that jobs were worth more to individuals, families and communities than a matter of mere calculation. There’s no question that he was right to be sceptical of PPPs, and to reject privatisation and the attack on working conditions and jobs which will follow in its wake. He had some awareness of both the dignity of labour, and the way in which public economic power could be leveraged for social purposes.
The Queensland government now stands empty of promise, displaying an inability to unify its areas of residual responsibility with any theme other than anodyne slogans, often ones imported – via the temporary return of Mike Kaiser – from a strategy which supposedly reinvigorated NSW Labor. We all know how that turned out.
And in its own domain, decades of managerialism have ensconced a drive for constant re-organisation in the public sector, a make work culture of reports on reports and the cult of the Excel spreadsheet, where productive activity is secondary to the reduction of all of us to worker bees in the public part of the capitalist hive, dreaming only of a credit card driven escape. Corporatisation and managerialism pave the road to privatisation, and the attendant adoption of a narrow balance sheet mentality (seen also by the fixation on numbers – numbers of jobs, billions of export dollars) which is what passes for thinking among some Ministers.
Purpose is lost.
V
Much could also be said, and will be said by others today, of the significance of global flows of investment, capital and exports. I’d prefer to emphasise, though, the sociological force of homogenisation as a globalising factor. Queensland becomes more like everywhere else, content, or apparently content to feed on the scraps of the resources buck; an increasingly deracinated and featureless landscape.
This homogenisation, which is also a social force, has huge implications for the evisceration of tradition and any vision of an alternative future; any ability to conceive of something different which blends the best of the old and the new. Another world is possible, but not here.
VI
So, too, we see homogenisation in politics. One State Labor government is much like another. Queensland’s distinctive culture is lost, and no real vision advanced of a future for its citizens which would be both transformational and liberatory. The irony of the late arrival of the privatisation push in the Sunshine State is that it’s a reflex of the dying New Labor beast – as if the government were saying, we’ve done everything else except privatise. Decades on from Thatcher and the first throes of neo-liberalism, it’s a perverse form of modernisation, in a register heavily ironic. To privatise is what New Labor governments do, so let’s do it!
Here, if we had more time, we could focus more on the precise trajectory by which the links with past left tradition, with the labour movement and with public culture have become attenuated; the particular pattern where a governing impetus becomes deformed into the routine action of a political class, with all its connections into finance capital, and resources capital.
But, the central contention for me is that Queensland Labor has forgotten what it’s for. I doubt, I’d reiterate, that anyone in Cabinet really knows, beyond their own dreams of endless power. It’s this evisceration of purpose, driven by the diminution of responsibility and the globalisation of the same, which really explains the privatisation push. Ideology, stripped of ideas and a social purpose, reveals itself as irrationality, venality and stupidity.
VII
So, what is to be done?
For me, one of the greatest irony in a litany thereof, was Anna Bligh’s supposedly knock down argument, delivered as part of her half-hearted defence of the privatisations, that it may have been appropriate for Labor to run State Hotels and Butcher’s Shops in the 1920s, but not in 2010. I’m not defending State Hotels per se, though perhaps they might stay open longer than Bligh’s wowserish desire to ensure that we can’t enjoy a drink because we can’t be trusted to do so implies. But there’s a significance in the trashing of the Queensland Labor tradition by its current leader which goes to a total failure of purpose and imagination, and a failure to see that public purposes have a role to play in socialising the benefits of economic life.
What we need now, I’d contend, is to start to reimagine what our forebears saw as the purpose of state government; to extend to the citizens the fruits of their labours, and to develop capacities for personal, civic and communal action beyond the narrow repetition of the same which is work in late capitalism. We need to start thinking of what public services are for, what democratic management of enterprise means, and what we can do, collectively, to both articulate and realise a dream of a more socially just and sustainable State.
In the wake of the GFC, and the exhaustion of neo-liberalism whose parallel is to be seen in the exhaustion of Labor’s purpose, I feel hopeful that we can actually begin to articulate such an agenda, and begin to dream big dreams again.
Elsewhere: John Quiggin’s talk at the same event.
Previous discussion on LP here.
“Anna Bligh appears captive and supine in the face of business interests, caught up in a spiral of zero sum competition with other Premiers, reliant on a drip feed of donations and jobs from resources industries and others to implement her ostensible economic aims;”
Amen! If it weren’t for coal, we Queenslanders could advance past the Carbon Age and its fallacy of high employment.
Mark, Excellent, right on the money.
It really is time for governments to work out what needs to be done and do it, the tinkering at the edges and softly softly stuff is getting us nowhere if not sending us backwards.
In a way, we really don’t help. We have an idea on what could be done about it but we aren’t really doing anything, but what do we do exactly?
Well, maybe a discussion for another day. Either way, good work and I look forward to hearing more.
PinkyOz
A beautiful polemic, Prof Q. I particularly love the bit
How true! In my own agency we’re now required to have weekly meetings to discuss the week’s achievements in relation to the agency ‘score card’. Each meeting takes of course time to prepare, time to write up minutes, time to follow up actions arising etc etc. In other words, a 20% reduction in actual work done.
In terms of where the privatisation mania has come from, I suspect it’s a rational calculation that the developers and miners have the resources to buy an election for their favoured political party. Against this analysis it must be said that the miners are less than happy that their rail infrastructure is to be made a private monopoly that they don’t control. Look for a softening of the conditions of sale so as to pander to their preferences.
The recent near disaster on the GBR, with the consequences of pandering to the coal lobby’s deregulatory whims on display, may lead to some public questioning of the wisdom of the bipartisan minerals cargo cult. However with the Murdoch media and the Queensland ABC the sole media outlets for political discussion, I’m pessimistic.
The sole purpose of winning office in Queensland for the ALP is now to secure the advancement and then comfortable retirements of its leaders and cronies, with the payoff being secured by smooth baton handovers. As a now comfortably retired minister once remarked to me, when I raised the issue of party member discontent, ‘f**k the members!’. Peter Beattie and Terry Mackenroth set the standard that others are keen to emulate.
In the end, the main outcome of two decades of ALP administration in George St will be seen as the division and emasculation of the impressive political, industrial and social coalition that ousted the Bjelke-Petersen regime. It will take decades to recover.
Thank you Mark.
Mark I have only read half so far, so much to do, but I really like to see women get to the top spots in politics especially because as the voting public they seem to prefer the left side according to polls. It is quite disappointing therefore when they get there and succumb to undemocratic pressures just the same as the men do.
Probably the numbers of women in politics aren’t there yet for them to make a real difference towards family, lifestyle, health and quality of life over economics.
Its possibly even a little easier to work out than youve put forward.
Privatise something and upset 10% of your core vote, who will then vote greens/other. Nearly all those preferences flow back to you anyway.
Raise taxes in other areas to pay for long term investment, upset 100% of your swinging voters who will vote for lib/nat to get you out.
Another attraction of option 1 is you can then accuse the lib/nat of bing “wreckers” when they do the same thing. You then get that 10% of your core back, and appear to have “Labor values”.
Mole
Not so, Mole. As Prof Q points out, the optional preferential voting system in Qld renders this calculation risky at best.
A really, really good analysis. Congratulations.
As for:
That resonates. So many created jobs filled by so many cronies. FGS, Bredhauer as Trade Commissioner re the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam as well as a lobbyist for – whoever.
@3 and 7 – this is the text of my talk, Hal9000, not John Quiggin’s. His is linked at the end of the post.
That was like a Van Gogh painting-well thought through ad presented,watch that ear though!
@9 Oops, Mark. As others have said, congratulations.
I rally must learn not to skip over the introductory paragraphs.
Certainly I always admired the fact that not only didn’t Peter Beattie go after the spiv PPP story – as good a touchstone of economic illiteracy as you can find (It’s amazing who tried to sell this smelly cat – most Aust state premiers, quite a few US states and Tony Blair! Very sad, and it’s hard to think of charitable explanations as to why they got up to it – were they knaves or fools?). Beattie actually talked about investing Qld’s capital in other states – at the inflated rates of return the PPP partners were requiring to make the investments which was quite a nice way of showing them up.
In spades!
Hal9000
Thanks for pointing that out I misread what that meant in the article.Not a bad idea that optional preferences.
Or is there a downside to that Im unaware of?
Mole, from the POV of voters I think it’s all good. It means you don’t have to express a preference for candidates you think would be entirely unsuitable in government (assuming of course that there is at least one on offer who passes muster).
Except Brian@13 and Mark above, that ideology is always an expression ideas, social purposes and associated cultural practice. Every cultural practice of humans is in one sense or another ideological. The idea of an “ideology” without ideas seems perverse on the face of it. One need go no further than the structure of the term to see that.
To derogate something as irrational, venal and stupid is to assert the possibility of reason and altruism and at the same time, to assert that these embody virtue where the others entail or instantiate vice. Whether one is entitled to describe a competing set of cultural assumptions in these terms or not, neither thesis nor antithesis spring from nowhere. Both are rooted in human usage and driven by conceptions of virtue in private conduct and public policy. That one body of practice may appear incoherent and unsustainable doesn’t and can’t arise from it being free of social purpose or ideas.
Even the most profoundly socially destructive and corrosive policies had some ideas and social purpose behind them.
Good one Mark. It helps to look beyond the incompetent/right wing crazy discussion.
The irony is that Joh would have resolved the financial problem by either putting up coal mining royalties or the charges for railing coal. He was smart enough to understand that the coal industry was not going to collapse as a result of increased charges and that most voters believed the coal mining companies were ripping off the state anyway.
I was working in central Qld when Wayne Goss silly enough cut rail charges to the coal miners. The outcome was a cut in export prices. So the Japanese got cheaper coal, the company profits remained the same. the mine workers got nothing and the state had less money to spend on services. This is part of the problem with Labor. It has become so concerned about demonstrating that it is business friendly and is going to keep Qld the “low tax state” that it has forgotten why its supporters voted for them in the first place.
It is interesting to look at summaries of what various governments have achieved. What stands out in these summaries is just how much the Whitlam government compared with other governments that had much longer tenures. The lesson for Bligh et al is that it is what is achieved rather than how long you can get paid for doing little that counts in the long term.
I was there and I applauded Mark and John Q (and Pat Ranald, and Peter Simpson). I take the opportunity to do so again.
Quite so. In place of the “Smart State” strategy there is a notional State strategy called Tomorrow’s Queensland or Q2 which is basically a shopping list of worthy aspirations which don’t really seem to have had much influence on major State government decisions under the current Premier.
Thanks, folks, I appreciate the comments, and I’m very glad that people have found my thoughts worthwhile. I thought it was a positive event, though it’s also important not to discount the full force of the anger and disillusionment felt, particularly among union members and those who’ve been active in the Labour movement and/or Labor Party over a long period of time. But I was very heartened that there was a general feeling that some positives can come out of this imbroglio, and that campaigns around it need not be purely defensive. I’m also heartened by some chats after the event which hold out the promise of further developing the agenda I sketched in the last part of the talk.
I’ll also flag the fact that I intend to come back and reply to some of the individual contributions made on this thread when I have more time free of work demands.
Mark
In your opinion is there any chance some of the unions might start to seriously look at transferring their alegience/funding over to the greens on issues like this.
At a purely state level I mean.
Other than that I cant see effective pressure being brought on the State government?
Ted Theodore would be another great example of someone from Queensland Labor who was unafraid of putting forward radical policies.
“State governments have little power to stucture really distinctive outcomes outside service delivery.” I’d like to respectfully disagree with this. There are a large number of options within the powers of state governments that pay for themselves, have positive social outcomes and are investment friendly. Examples include promoting more green, medium density housing, probably by implementing an unimproved land value tax, levying higher and more transparent royalties on natural resources after the manner of Alaska with the Alaska Permanent Fund, levying more Pigouvian taxes (e.g. higher excise on tobacco, alcohol and gambling and taxes on waste and pollution generally), and, on the tax relief and freedom side, abolishing payroll tax (a disincentive to employment), stamp duty (a disincentive to housing investment), and legalising recreational pharmaceuticals that don’t promote aggressive behaviour, such as marijuana and ecstacy (which would be excised). Introducing an unimproved land value tax also makes swathes of building regulation and restricted land releases less necessary as it creates financial disincentives for shoddy development.
As far as I can tell these are all state government level policy decisions. The Green Tax Shift is within the reach of any state government with a modicum of vision, i.e. none of them.
As a general comment I can’t help seeing parallels between the theme Guy Rundle was attempting to raise (pithily, if entertainingly, as is GR’s style) on the earlier thread regarding apparent systemic management failures during Black Saturday, and the points Mark raises rather more eloquently here.
This “failure of imagination” and an inability to invisage change seems to me to be a key issue, I think. It informs a sense of general powerlessness, for not only modern politics and the public service that supports it, but for the general public at times as well (global warming anyone?).
I hadn’t caught up with the official abandonment of the Smart State strategy (though it was obvious in practical terms). Confirms me in my view that it’s time to give Labor a spell in Opposition where they can do some rethinking.
John, strictly speaking Smart State hasn’t been officially abandoned as in theory the Smart State Strategy 2008-2012 is still in place. However it’s telling that there have been no Smart State progress reports since 2007, the Smart State website has not been updated since 2008 and there have been no Smart State newsletters since 2008. Like the central character in Johnny Got His Gun, Smart State has been wheeled downstairs and out of sight of the living into a hospital basement on drip feed.
Great read Mark. Great focus and impetus for all of us concerned about how this government is trampling our present and writing off our future – for the sake of what?
Unfortunately the LNP (heaven forbid they ever become a Qld government at any time!), can sit back and let Anna B take the flak for privatizing. They hope they pick up government after we, the citizens, finally trash her electorally. And they can rest easy as privatization will then be a fact of life.
Love your reminder about Qld being a world leader in so many progressive ways.
Let’s hope we can do it again.
Great piece, Mark.
@25 and 26 – the thing with the trashing of the Smart State strategy is also that it sends a pretty negative message to those of us who aren’t idiots or rapacious vultures willing to feed on the crums from the resource industry table and would also actually like to lead a creative and productive and satisfying life in this State.
The role of the premier in QLD is not that of a state governor or official, it is now a role of balancing the coal industry with popular opinion while keeping the books out of the red. The role is unclear, and it is attracting unsuitable candidates.
Dumb to the Smart State and blind to the Sunshine in the State.
Not taking anything away from the other speakers’ efforts, but for me the most interesting bit was Dr Patricia Ranald (Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network) telling how it is that we, via Hpward, having signed on to Free Trade Agreements, the AUSFTA in particular, means that after privatisation it would be illegal for the state to direct that, for example, there be a certain proactive minimum level of employment by the company in the regions. I gather that as long as the firms are still in ‘public’ hands, they are exempt from these FTA strictures, and the state has some discretionary powers.
The example Dr Ranald used was the mooted privatisation ( by Vic, NSW, and the Feds) of the Snowy Maountains Hydro business. Howard backed down from the plan under figleaf cover of a “There is overwhelming feeling in the community that the Snowy is an icon” arguement, when in fact it had more to do with legal opinion that government claims they could and would restrict foreign ownership was just so much pissing in the wind.
Howard walked away from the deal rather than have to admit and expose the repercussions of his signing the AUSFTA.
We all better hope health care provision systems don’t ever get piratised, otherwise we will be bound to having a US style worst practice ( except in terms of operators profits) model thrust upon us.