Ross Garnaut gave an address at Melbourne Uni last night:
Political leaders and parties can associate themselves with national interest objectives, or align themselves with special interests. If they align with special interests, they can catch a ride on the advantage that concentrations of capital have in marketing a distorted perception of the national interest. These opportunities expand with sophisticated modern analysis of opinion and influence.
The vested interests have large advantages, but they don’t hold all the cards. The big card in the hand of the public interest is the community’s capacity and tendency to respond to leadership. An able leader’s articulation of his or her conception of the national interest can elicit powerful responses, capable of overcoming loyalty to private interests, and of swamping the appeals to perceptions of the national interest that have been distorted by sectional interests.
It’s long, but worth reading in full.
Ha … I just posted a link to the PDF in Saturday Salon …
He makes it seem so obvious. I still have a visceral negative reaction to his strong market focus, but despite that what he says does make sense. especially the comments about sectional interests overriding strong public support for good policy. I’m amused to see the tobacco companies trying to jump on that bandwagon. Hopefully with less success than the miners.
Now, if we just had a leader with some gumption available to actually lead.
There is a great deal of great value in this address which sets current social democratic goals.
Message to the miners and those in the ALP who are unaware of the tradition of social democracy:
But who are those people in the ALP who are unaware of theory social democratic traditon?Mark Aarons’ interview with Tony Jones(Lateline 05/08/2010) makes it plain:
Aarons goes on the suggest that Rudd failed to follow through with leadership on climate change and that, unbelievably, Gillard has done the same based on the same advice provided by the same advisers whose appalling advice to Rudd on climate change saw his poll ratings plummet.
However, it is not merely, as Aarons puts it, that the current crop of union secretaries are “hollow men” who “bend with the wind”. It is more that the union secretaries, who he has previously singled out(seeLabor’s ties that grindSMH, 2008) as the source of structural obstacle to democracy within the ALP, overwhelmingly represent the interests of male, blue collar workers.
The sacking of Rudd and his replacement with a compliant Gillard at the behest of a panicked aggregation of elite union secretaries represents a most dangerous alignment between highly trained and highly paid blue collar male workers and the mining sector on whom the former’s wealth and gendered authority depend.
Garnaut claims that human society, our polity, has never before faced a change as significant as climate change. Despite this:
Except, it seems, for the coal and extractive industries and their employees who are prepared to sack an elected Labor PM in the interests of forming a class alliance that will protect them and theirs for at best three generations but will send the planet to hell in the meantime.
Credit to Garnaut for the ability to survey the big picture national interest. My current favorite grand theory in this vein, which seems to agree on most points with Garnaut, is from Michael Heller, who integrates Weber and Schumpeter. It’s worth reading:
http://sites.google.com/site/impersonalcapitalism/
A couple of problems with Garnaut’s approach is that it tends to be a little bit too airily confident of what’s required and too econocratic.
A couple of examples:
On overconfidence: in the debate over the resources tax Garnaut was convinced that the Treasury was basically correct, except for a couple of quibbles over the rate at which deductible expenses would be increased. This didn’t give sufficient due to the concerns over the process by which the tax announcement was made and the lack of consultation. I’m inclined to say that a legal background would have made him more appreciative of those concerns, but it’s not true – many economists who are experts in tax reform arrived at the same view.
On technocracy – what about this from his speech: “Whatever their values, citizens share interests in … efficient distribution to achieve specified equity goals at the lowest possible cost”
Where on earth do the “specified equity goals” come from if not from values? I suspect I’m missing some post-Mirrlees quirk of welfare economics, but I’m not convinced this sleight-of-hand is possible.
However, overall I’m left with the impression that Garnaut is essentially right, which is disappointing. Australia is probably lacking the political leadership and the media that it needs for the future.
[citation needed] or at least a recent example, because the politics of this century sure hasn’t thrown up any of this kind of leadership.
Correction: re my example of Garnaut’s technocratic bent, I now see his point. He was making a distinction between “values” and “interests”. That is, even if you dissent from the majority’s values on income redistribution, you have an interest in seeing that redistribution achieved as efficiently as possible.
On the other hand, now that I better understand him I don’t think this point is particularly profound.
Taylor, its part of the explantion for why Abbott produces nothing worthwhile, and why Gillard and before her Rudd, couldn’t or can’t adress the most serious issues of all and why politicians avoid issues of substance, including ecological/economic sustainability and efficient distribution of global resources where/when actually needed (eg third world, for start).
We are operating in a pomo era where the interests of locales and their communties are denied democratic input, unless synergic with capital interests in a locale. Government “policy” and “governance” framed and imposed from without through a mechanism that shabby and obscured documents like AUSFTA and so called defence and intelligence” commitments” involving foreign powers, enaqble. This includes, incidentally, ruining public broadcasting by purging investigation of corporatist government and its big business controllers in favour of “entertainment”.
It continues with the simultaneous
“harmonising of intelligence, sedition and security laws to straight-jacketed Britain and the US under the pretext of “national security”, which just so coincidentally allows for the ending of a democracies ability to “see, “remember” and therefore think and decide, in exercising its rights for individual and community self determination.