Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop.

It was hardly the first time a Coalition had been formed to implement an austerity agenda. The National Government of the Depression years is one exemplar.

Labour sits on the sidelines, with some doubt that its party processes will enable a left alternative to be considered in its leadership election, and its ability to present a viable opposition somewhat diminished by the wholesale adoption of New Labour themes by Cameron’s Red Tory-ism, to the degree that communitarian project has any substance.

In Australia, too, we have the spectre of public disillusion with the two major parties, but an electoral system which will minimise any expression of a desire for a third alternative, with The Greens effectively relegated to Upper House redoubts.

One of the most interesting reflections on the state of Labour in the UK, in the light of the 2010 poll, is from Jeremy Gilbert, writing in Open Democracy.

Gilbert argues that Labour avoided a wipe out because it showed surprising resilience in constituencies where an activist campaigning base persisted, and in regions where local or regional governments had been able to demonstrate the meaningfulness of social democratic initiatives to everyday lives.

In politics, Gilbert argues, content follows form:

Probably the best term ever coined to describe that strategy was Anthony Barnett’s phrase ‘corporate populism’. New Labour was based on the idea that a new kind of popular politics had to imitate the organisational and communications techniques of corporations, while pursuing a political programme which tried to align the interests of voters with those of actual corporations. When reflecting on this history, it’s striking to consider that New Labour’s full embrace of market liberalism came some time after its adoption of this approach as its own basic organisational mode.

Long before it became clear that New Labour wouldn’t break in any serious way with Thatcherite economics, while Blair still tantalised his supporters with references to Christian Socialism, ethical communitarianism, and the ‘stakeholder society’, the organisational form of New Labour prefigured the models and the value that it would later try to impose on the state, the public sector, and the country at large.

The basic organisational idea of New Labour was that the party membership were the problem and not the solution.

He further argues that the modern culture of expert messaging, organisational centralisation and Spin is broken.

New Labour only ever understood one part of the story about the decline of old political forms. While they may have been right that the 19th / 20th century model of mass political campaigning was reaching its end, they failed to notice the extent to which the coming era would present new opportunities for community-building and for democratic action, and new problems for any attempt to stifle democracy and debate. The success and growing political importance of the blogosphere and of sites like this one is just one sign of this!

A “command-and-control communications strategy” should not drive out political energies, Gilbert contends:

a complete overhaul and reinvention of the Labour Party for the 21st century is the only thing that could achieve this end. In the era of ‘we-think’ and network culture, the collective intelligence of the membership – including the 12,000 who have rushed to join now that the age of New Labour looks likely to have ended – is the greatest possible resource that the otherwise-impoverished party has at its disposal.

In our part of the world, we’ve seen the nexus between the Labor party’s aging and diminished membership and its commanding heights much fractured over recent decades. The Greens, by contrast, have demonstrated what’s possible with an activist and democratised base. But there are limits to the possible success of The Greens, under our antiquated electoral and party systems, and I think every progressive should welcome a democratisation of Australian Labor. It may not occur until the party goes back into opposition, which I hope is a long way away. But it’s a vital precondition for a revival of responsiveness and hope in our democracy, and not just for those on the left.

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, which enable millions of citizens to share ideas, to build campaigns and to communicate across great distances, the idea that a handful of professional politicians touring the TV studios of central London can be an adequate substitute for democratic politics looks clunky and forlorn.

There’s a great line up of speakers, including Professor John Quiggin, Peter Simpson of the Queensland ETU and Dr Patricia Ranald from the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, as well as myself.

Proceedings start at the Brisbane Workers’ Community Centre at Paddington at 1pm, Saturday 10 April. More details here.

Update: Text of my talk posted here.

I’m not sure I agree.

White’s alternative messages focus on the ineffectuality of the filter, and its expense. However, that’s not, in my view, a persuasive theme for a public campaign. A lot of what the government does is ineffectual and expensive, and pointing this out also doesn’t necessarily create a public. It’s really just akin to the everyday niggling of oppositions and newspapers.

Any campaign does need an overarching theme, and this angle should be a subsidiary message.

The other question that needs to be posed is that of the audience. It’s no doubt right that few votes will shift in the right places to enable an argument to be made about an adverse electoral impact on Labor. White cites Possum and Bernard Keane. More broadly, findings from the AES over many years suggest that even the biggest issues only account for a few percentage points in vote switching at elections. For instance, the final data on the impact of WorkChoices (an issue which connects with lived experience, if there was ever one) on 2007 voting patterns hasn’t been fully analysed, but it’s unlikely to have been worth more than a couple of percent of the vote to the ALP. Labor strategists and pollies are well aware of this sort of thing.

The actual target for the No Clean Feed campaign needs to be non-Labor Senators. There, the issues of civil liberties and censorship are well chosen for their resonance with small l Liberals and The Greens. It’s also necessary to demonstrate that concern exists in the community beyond those who are active in the campaign itself, but this doesn’t need to be a clincher argument about seats falling in droves, which no one would believe. Rather, a point of connection with the messages particular parties want to send is necessary, and the best way to find that theme is to test it via polling and focus groups rather than speculate in a vacuum. The dilemma, though, that this causes for the campaign is that the most germane themes may not be the ones that resonate with activists in the campaign itself. So that needs to be balanced as well.

It’s a bit of a case study on the limitations, as well as the benefits, of crowdsourced campaigning.

Update: Colin Jacobs of the EFA responds on LP.

As we move into 2010, the feeling of many people across this country seems to be that now is the time to give up on large-scale politics, and focus on small local-level solutions to the outstanding problems of our age, such as manmade climate change (the Transition movement, which began in Totnes and is slowly spreading worldwide, is an outstanding example of such ‘localist’ solution-seeking). It is natural that in the wake of Copenhagen’s failure many people are turning to ways that they as individuals can best contribute.

A series of letters to the Observer, published under the heading ‘Think global, act local after Copenhagen’, are among many striking examples. Professor Colin Campbell of York suggests that individual towns take the initiative in reducing emissions to compensate for increases in ‘twinned’ cities in the developing world. Jim McCluskey of Twickenham seconds Ed Miliband’s emphasis on the role of green NGOs and the public, as opposed to his own government. Duncan Kerr, MD of A Climate 4 Change, writes that “a groundswell of actions by individual communities led by local authorities, supported in turn by national government, is surely the most effective way of creating the climate for change that would tip our leaders into action.”

However, it is quite wrong to think that such contributions can possibly be enough. The problem, in a globalised economic system, as James Hansen among others has clearly recognised, is that if you burning less fossil fuel, others who are less eco-conscious will receive a price-signal that it is just fine to burn more fossil fuels. (Thus blunting much of the effect of your individual action.) Thus well-intentioned individuals and localities alone – or, indeed, this kingdom alone – cannot make a major contribution to preventing runaway climate change because, however well we do, our effectiveness will be partly cancelled out by the corresponding actions (or inaction) of others.

There is enough fossil fuel still in the ground to cook the planet. So the only solution is global constraint of others’ carbon emissions, as well as of your own. There simply has to be a replacement for the stalled COP15 process. If we as a species are not to die, politics cannot be dead.

What troubles me particularly about the end game at Copenhagen and about widespread assumptions about how COP15 might now move forward is the idea – the implausible assumption – that any workable proposal will emerge from or be initiated by the EU, US or China. For why not approach this deadlock from the other end? A proposal initiated by the G77 countries and the small island states (such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, which have actually emerged from the Copenhagen debacle with a huge amount of credit and public sympathy) would be one which the rich countries could then be challenged to buy into to avoid being held responsible for initiating ecocide – the gradual mass suicide of our species. And we – the conscious citizenry of those countries – could apply the pressure to make our leaders sign. Some such global political strategy is essential, if we are to bequeath a liveable planet to our children. I think it would have much more credibility if it came first from the poorest, rather than from the richest and the biggest emitters.

So: 2010 must be a year of climate politics, and ought, I suggest, to be a year in which such politics comes from the bottom up not in the sense only of local or individual action, but in the sense of action coming from the countries that have traditionally been at the bottom of the heap, globally. In this context, Evo Morales’ new call for a summit of movements on climate and capitalism is a hopeful development, pointing in just the right direction.

A clear summary of the proposals made by various nations at COP15 can be found at the Beyond Copenhagen blog. The proposal from Tuvalu is the closest we have to a workable climate-solution. Perhaps the key ‘bottom-up’ strategy needed now is for more and more of the world to get behind something like the Tuvalu proposal, and gradually prevent the developed countries (and India and China) from stymieing the climate-progress we need and can believe in.

If our low-energy lightbulbs and our Transition Towns and so on are going to mean anything, then we need also to get behind climate-initiatives such as that of Tuvalu which could provide the needed international framework to solve this unavoidably global problem.

1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the message out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and “are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee” (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don’t write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.

I’m not certain that anyone has been writing off the MSM coverage in toto. It’s very rare that Australian media organisations these days fund good foreign correspondents, but clearly the quality of the reporting from a number of media outlets, particularly some of the British ones, is very high. It seems to me a mistake on either side to reduce this sort of thing to a dichotomised opposition between journalists working in the media and citizen activists and those who mediate their contributions. I think also this sort of dichotomy tends to get confused and conflated in value judgements made about the respective validity of bloggers and citizen journalists in countries with repressive regimes and countries like this one. That’s the case both on the left – say, with Antony Lowenstein to some degree, and certainly on the right – as with David Burchell.

One of the cautions worth noting with this event is that while there is validity in the argument that blogs and social media can play a really positive role in countries with repressive regimes, we also tend to miss the fact that a lot of blogs (for example in Egypt) are full of misogynistic, violent and narrow minded ranting, which would be most distasteful to most Western readers. There’s a tendency to pick up on the ones written by educated middle class folk, particularly those that express themselves in English. It would be wise to exercise some prudence in extrapolating only from those blogs, or from the Twittersphere.

There is actually a lot of dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad outside the middle class for basically economic reasons. But I’d be wary about making too quick a judgement about whether the protesters, twitterers etc. are representative of Iranian opinion more generally. That, of course, is not to say that their cause, insofar as that cause can be identified with democratisation and liberty, is not worthy of our support. Of course, it is.

The other comment I’d make is that Netanyahu would be quite happy to have Ahmadinejad stay, because the ability to portray him as a dangerous lunatic actually serves the interests of the Israeli state, and for that matter, those other governments who want strong action on the nuclear issue. International realpolitik also needs factoring into the analysis of any political upheaval.

Related post on LP: Open and links post on the Iranian election.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.

Update: Via Terry Flew, an article in the Graudian about the reliability and ambiguity of the information coming from Iran through social media.

Frequent guest poster on cultural policy stuff, Marcus Westbury, is talking about technology, new media and creativity on a panel on Friday night at 6pm.

And another LP guest poster and CPD Director Miriam Lyons will be discussing how technology is mediating the social engagement with democracy with some other think tank folk on Saturday arvo at 4pm.

There is no truth to the rumour that her doppelganger Myriam Lyons has usurped her role in this session!

Barry Saunders, from Gatewatching and Democratic Renewal Coordinator at the CPD, will be facilitating a workshop on using open access tools to interface with government on Saturday at 1pm.

I’m sure there’s lots of other interesting and worthy stuff going on! As usual at the moment, I’m crazily busy, though, so won’t necessarily be around for it – but the whole program can be accessed here.

Possum on Turnbull’s dissatisfaction ratings:

Turnbull has lost 25% of his uncommitted voters in a single polling cycle and, on net, they have all moved against him.

So much for all those online “polls” on News Ltd sites, and the wisdom of Messrs Andrew Bolt and Dennis Shanahan.

Incidentally, that viral Facebook group we discussed the other day now has 60,270 members.

Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger.