Some very mixed signals were sent over the weekend about the future of the Nationals. Their huge defeat in Lyne will have been disheartening, not so much because it happened, but because Rob Oakeshott won so overwhelmingly with a primary of 64%. The result will encourage Indepedents to try to cherry pick their remaining nine seats. Outside Queensland, where the LNP deal will protect sitting members from Liberal competition and where their three seats are reasonably safe against Labor, the Nats also face potential threats from the Liberal Party when seats fall vacant, and there are some seats which are also potentially vulnerable to Labor. But in the meantime, Labor’s majority in the Reps over the Coalition has increased, and Brendan Nelson can’t take much comfort from a poor campaign in Mayo where the Liberal Party only just held off a challenge from The Greens in a blue-ribbon seat.
But over in the West, Brendon Grylls’ strategy has worked a treat, with the Nats improving their vote and holding the balance of power in both houses. At state level, agrarian socialism and the politics of pork barrelling and extortionate negotiation seems to be a viable strategy for the party. So both Warren Truss and Barnaby Joyce have been contemplating an exit from the federal Coalition. As Andrew Bartlett points out, this is pretty weird for two Queenslanders who are supporting a merged entity at state level. The Nats, of course, don’t see the dissonance, because they’ve effectively swallowed up the Queensland Libs, and are happily preselecting their own members as LNP candidates in state seats which the Liberals had a better chance of winning in, and claiming that the “new face of Queensland” comprises a frontbench where the Borg has only one Brisbane member. Meanwhile, some former Liberals sit on the sidelines, hoping to resurrect their party if the LNP bombs at its first electoral outing when Anna Bligh goes to the polls.
Interesting stuff happening in the two federal by-elections tonight. It’s all over red rover for the Nats candidate in Mark Vaile’s old seat of Lyne, Rob Drew, who’s on about 22% of the primary vote - a swing against the Nationals of over 30%. With two thirds of the vote counted, Independent Rob Oakeshott has romped in with nearly 64% of the primary vote counted so far.
The Nats are now down to a historic low of nine seats in the House of Representatives.
In Mayo, there’s a swing against the Liberals of around 11%, with the Greens’ Lynton Vonow polling strongly. So are former Liberal Bob Day and Independent Di Bell. The Libs’ primary is just over 40% and around 20% of the vote has been counted. I don’t know enough about the electorate to say anything about which booths have reported, but you could foresee a scenario where the Libs lose or are run close with a primary like that. It doesn’t appear to have changed much with more booths reporting since I’ve been watching. At the time of writing, the AEC is putting the 2PP at 52/48 Liberals - Greens.
It looks like a smart tactical decision for Labor not to run in either of these safe conservative electorates, and although no doubt local factors are the key to the results, it’ll be fascinating to see how the results are spun tomorrow, particularly since they’re probably going to be roped in with the WA result, whatever that turns out to be. I wonder whether Brendan Nelson spent much time campaigning in Mayo.
You can follow the count at the AEC’s virtual tally room - for Lyne and for Mayo. The Poll Bludger has open threads as well - for Lyne and Mayo respectively.
Update: The Liberals have claimed victory in Mayo. It’s possible but unlikely that postals and other pre-poll and absentee votes might change the picture if Independent Di Bell can get ahead of the Greens’ Lynton Vonow. On votes counted to date the Liberals have 51.74% of the 2PP vote, with the Greens on 48.26%. It’s a big slap in the face for the Libs, whichever way you look at it.
[Update: {by Kim} Garnaut has recommended a low target - 10% by 2020. Details in the press release here, and the address can be downloaded here. Links to pdfs.]
Ross Garnaut will be at the National Press Club in Canberra today at 12.30pm to release his next report - on Targets and Trajectories.
There’s been a fair degree of speculation around that he will recommend a low target. Bernard Keane wrote in Crikey the other day:
Ross Garnaut’s Supplementary Draft Report to be released on Friday will propose a carbon reduction trajectory based on a 0-15% reduction on 2000 emission levels by 2020, according to sources close to the review. The Report is based on extensive modelling by Treasury and Garnaut’s review team, which has been delayed on several occasions.
Senator Christine Milne at GreensBlog makes the argument that the policy shouldn’t just be seen through the “economic reform” frame, which is squarely where the government has attempted to position it (for a range of reasons - including a previous round of responses to arguments that it lacks a “narrative”). It needs to be recalled that big business is not the only interlocutor in the policy debate, and it was surely significant that a research report from Crosby/Textor of all people released this week suggested that the public wanted to see business make sacrifices to address an urgent issue.
I was going to write a post last night about the demos in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention and the extraordinary levels of repression and police violence, but tiredness got the better of me. But never mind, tigtog’s been thinking on the same lines and has put up a great post at Hoyden. She quotes Glenn Greenwald:
Yet how is our own Government’s behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation’s establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?
What I found interesting about the reporting of these incidents is that there’s a great use of citizen photojournalism from Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise. Beyerstein was there, and she’s posted this photo - of the Poor People’s March - on her blog, with the telling caption:
Do these people look like a ravening mob to you? A few minutes later, the police tear gassed the whole block after pushed the crowd back about a block or two.
You can see all Beyerstein’s photos of the march at her Flickr page.
As Dennis Atkins observes, Brendan Nelson yesterday took what appeared to be a calculated gamble in breaking the convention that senior pollies don’t comment on the Reserve Bank’s interest rate decisions. Nelson called for a cut of 50 points in the cash rate.
I suspect this was some sort of pre-emptive strike to try to forestall any credit claiming by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan if (as expected) the cash rate is cut by 25 points later today. The politics haven’t played out to script, with Nelson’s comments that he wouldn’t make such a call in government playing into Rudd’s hands.
But it was interesting to hear Nelson’s justification on Lateline last night. Nelson argued that he was reflecting what “many Australians” thought. For those who’ve been paying any attention to what he’s had to say since he became leader, that’s typical. He appears to regard himself as some sort of transmission belt. Hence all the emo-ting. It’s an intriguing view of political leadership because it completely eviscerates the notion of leadership itself. Perhaps it’s one reason why his own leadership is in so much trouble.
There’s no doubt that electoral systems structure party competition - something that will become very obvious to us when we start to focus on the New Zealand election. The American system is one of the great contributors to the anti-democratic lack of choice between the two major parties, and to the inflated emphasis on personalities among the candidates. Continental PR systems consistently develop coalitions and reflect a social fabric which emphasises a degree of consensus you don’t find in adversarial single member systems, and the resulting politics is decried by neoliberals for eschewing “economic reforms”.
Writing in the Centre for Policy Development’s Insight, Bill Bowtell takes a look at our electoral system:
I thought this comment from Guy Rundle in Crikey yesterday was incredibly astute:
Part of his appeal is that he put together a new sort of political career from the standard chaos of a postmodern life — tens of millions of younger people recognise in him the same bewildering wander through college, a couple of different dead-ends, a bit of going-back-to-the-roots, etc. All they’ve lacked is his adamantine, albeit well-concealed, will.
An interesting point of identification in a world where you have to work to construct an identity? I think there’s a lot more insight in there about the appeal of Obama’s persona than all the “cosmopolitan background” stuff or for that matter the official script from the Democratic Convention - “lived in a log cabin in Hawaii with his single mother” etc.
Image courtesy of Funkadelic at deviantart. Click through and click on full view for a higher res version.
Regular LP readers might recall that I’ve been emphasising for some time now research evidence which suggests that the “apathetic youth” narrative is nonsense. Just because no one’s marching in the street, doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. Further evidence for that case comes from a literature review prepared for the Whitlam Institute by Philippa Colin - Young People Imagining a New Democracy [link to pdf]. Colin finds that engagement is migrating online, and that it’s much more likely to be issues or cause based than the “citizen oriented repertoires” of involvement in political parties. The review also suggests significant disengagement with the formal practices of citizenship coincides with idealism and engagement around issues and networks.
This report was discussed in the most stereotypical possible way on last week’s Q&A (where most of the panel wanted to diss blogging and those intertubes). Doing it justice might force us to answer the question of what’s wrong with our democracy, rather than squeeze it into the most tedious and condescending media frame of what’s wrong with teh yoof… In many ways, one could argue that disengagement from an unresponsive and elitist “democracy” is an eminently rational choice. That might be something the professionally cynical pundits and pollies might wish to ponder.
Ok, so I’m totally not getting why anyone dislikes River Song. Can anyone enlighten me?
Update: Particularly given the big hints about the nature of River Song’s relationship with the Doctor, I thought sending her off to a world where she looks after made up children was a big disappointment. She should have been liberated to be a scholar adventurer in another timestream (h/t Shakira) or if there wasn’t enough of her to save, to have had adventures in all the books in all the world (h/t P). It was a library after all!
[As the astute will note, discussion of this ep is proceeding on FB and gchat… We need a fanfic revolution!]
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
On Friday night, I went along with some friends to the opening of the Brisbane Artists Run Initiatives Festival at Jugglers Art Space. And a good night it was. And last night I saw the wonderful Linda E and Poly Toxic @ the Powerhouse as part of the Pasifika Festival.
Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption - that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Among the many bills the Coalition are committed to opposing in the new Senate is the legislation to change the threshold where a higher level of Medicare levy cuts in for those who don’t have private hospital insurance from 50k to 100k. The bill, introduced in May, was referred to the Senate Economics Committee which held extensive hearings and took submissions. The report [link to pdf] is out in time for the Senate’s spring sitting.
The majority report from the Labor Senators is careful to quote several comments from Peter Costello in his second reading speech back in 1996 and the explanatory memorandum in order to demonstrate that its stated purpose was to provide an incentive only to higher income earners. However, the grounds for defending the levy have shifted, reflecting over a decade of Howard era support for the private health industry. We’re now told that it would have a catastrophic impact on health funds. These concerns are largely dispelled by evidence from health policy experts and health economists cited in the report. There’s scepticism that the much heralded exodus from private health will actually take place, for two reasons - that the life time cover provisions are likely to provide the stronger disincentive, and that those who actually value private health won’t leave. In addition, the best estimate is that the costs to the public sector would be around 1.6% of inpatient expenditure, an increase relatively easy to absorb.
The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…
Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday - that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’
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At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in 
Muting a generation
mute a generation by ~funkadelic on deviantART
Image courtesy of Funkadelic at deviantart. Click through and click on full view for a higher res version.
Regular LP readers might recall that I’ve been emphasising for some time now research evidence which suggests that the “apathetic youth” narrative is nonsense. Just because no one’s marching in the street, doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. Further evidence for that case comes from a literature review prepared for the Whitlam Institute by Philippa Colin - Young People Imagining a New Democracy [link to pdf]. Colin finds that engagement is migrating online, and that it’s much more likely to be issues or cause based than the “citizen oriented repertoires” of involvement in political parties. The review also suggests significant disengagement with the formal practices of citizenship coincides with idealism and engagement around issues and networks.
This report was discussed in the most stereotypical possible way on last week’s Q&A (where most of the panel wanted to diss blogging and those intertubes). Doing it justice might force us to answer the question of what’s wrong with our democracy, rather than squeeze it into the most tedious and condescending media frame of what’s wrong with teh yoof… In many ways, one could argue that disengagement from an unresponsive and elitist “democracy” is an eminently rational choice. That might be something the professionally cynical pundits and pollies might wish to ponder.