Quoth Abbott:

The public no longer support immigration the way they did under the Howard Government. We’ve got to rebuild support for the immigration program, as happened under John Howard.

Oh really? Not if you believe a Morgan poll taken this month. Read why at Andrew Norton’s blog.

Predictably, this disclosure has added fuel to the fire of complaints from the right about its evils.

In the circles Tony Abbott moves in, redistribution is a dirty word.

That, of course, ignores the fact that everything governments do in tax, benefits, and allowances of whatever kind is redistributive. That includes all the Howard era tax/welfare transfers. It’s not as though Labor has some sort of evil socialist agenda and Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are socialist wolves in sheep’s clothing, much as some might like to entertain such fantasies.

It’s no doubt right to say, as Andrew Norton does, that Abbott’s shift in the Coalition’s position to opposition to the CPRS (matched with vague promises of costless emissions savings) exposes the detail of the ETS to more debate. That may not be a bad thing, though it would also be a good thing if its ineffectiveness in achieving its ostensible aims were the focus of the debate. That’s not likely to be the case in the headline election year debate, as Abbott’s move switches attention to hip pockets.

However, anyone who followed the design of the CPRS from the start would be well aware that the government had already anticipated this line of attack. As the modelling Peter Garrett released shows, Kevin Rudd deliberately ensured that compensation for low income earners was much more generous, and ongoing, than similar Howard era packages; the GST, for instance.

Secondly, unlike income tax (though somewhat similarly to the GST), the effects on household finances are variable, depending on consumption patterns. This, after all (again leaving aside the failure of the CPRS to materially affect corporate emissions, at least in the short term), is the point – a price signal on emissions across the economy, including to the household sector.

Politically, as Garrett’s rhetoric today indicates, it’s designed to allow higher income earners who may have some cost increases to feel either warm and fuzzy about ‘doing their bit for the planet’, or to modify their consumption patterns. Those who will see it as a nasty impost in this demographic are probably already Coalition voters, and my suspicion is that the responses to polling questions about making a financial sacrifice are more likely to be genuine among upper middle to high income earners.

Many of Abbott’s ‘battlers’ will actually make a buck.

In short, I wouldn’t be jumping to any conclusions that flicking the switch to an argument over the affects of the CPRS on individual and household balance sheets necessarily gives the Coalition the advantage most commentators seem to have been assuming it does.

In my previous post, I reproduced Brian Davey’s piece from Open Democracy, which expressed skepticism about the capacities of the political system to deal with complex phenomena, permeating all sectors of the economy and lifeworld, such as climate change. I agree with the diagnosis, but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions.

There are three similarities between the design of the CPRS and the American Health bill (and for that matter, the US cap and trade bills):

(a) Both started out with an ambit, seeking to find the limits of giveaways and concessions to political and particularly corporate constituencies; rather than from the position of a solution;

(b) Similarly, both come with implicit rhetoric that any action is a good start, and a messy compromise can later be made purer and more effective;

(c) Both seek to accommodate existing interests and shift behaviour only at the margins, rather than constructing a new frame which would require actors to reconfigure behaviours, and create new actors (and destroy or reshape old ones).

In short, this sort of approach to governance is inherently conservative, in that it seeks to match political imperatives to already existing situations, rather than to transform the situation politically. This tends not to work, for reasons which are fairly obvious. Yet, notions like ‘nudge’ and using quasi-markets to achieve social ends are the hallmarks of postmodern progressive policy wonk-dom.

In an interesting parallel, Andrew Norton recently typologised different sets of beliefs on the Australian right, while a number of writers in Salon, riffing off Ed Kilgore’s article in The New Republic, pointed to an ideological split in the American centre-left. However variously characterised, there’s a difference between what Glenn Greenwald calls corporatism and social democracy. Kevin Rudd has often described himself as a social democrat. But I think he’s more of an undifferentiated statist, with a vague notion that the power of the state should be used for doing good. Hence, we don’t have any particularly strong political direction from Labor on climate change (the actual choice, domestically, now lies between The Greens and the Coalition, as the middle path of tinkering begins to fall to bits).

Among other things, the lesson we should learn from the failure of Copenhagen is that a weak and conciliatory strategy designed to buy off as many special interests as possible (particularly through compensation for the right to future profits, which is now – quite bizarrely – represented as if it were a property right) leads not just to a milquetoast solution but also to political failure.

Michael Lind is quite right to suggest that American progressives need to reflect on their ideological differences, exposed by the defeat of Bush, and I think we need to, as well. In so doing, we also need to recover a sense of the possibilities of progressive politics, and not to rest content with a vaguely progressive desire to steer social and economic forces and actors this way or that. The times demand something much more urgent, and something which would require the spending of political capital, some of which needs to be used to take on the vested interests of polluters. But if Australian progressives were to frame the choices more sharply, and offer genuine action on climate change, my bet would be that would pay a political dividend.

Update: The third part of the ‘After Copenhagen’ series, on domestic politics, has now been posted here.

As Andrew Norton observes, Hamilton criticising seems to be a politically ecumenical practice in the blogosphere.

Guy Rundle puts a contrary view.

I’m by no means enamoured of some of the ideas Hamilton has put forward over the years, but I don’t know that judging him on that basis is necessarily the most appropriate mode of evaluating his prospects as a political representative. I was also struck by Guy Beres‘ comment:

It’s all a bit incestuous when you think about it. The Greens famously courted Peter Garrett on numerous occasions before his controversial decision during the (pre-explosion) Latham era to join the Labor Party. In years past, high-profile players within the Labor Party organisation seriously entertained the idea of Malcolm Turnbull joining the ALP’s ranks. One does wonder whether Clive Hamilton would be considered an asset as a candidate by the Labor Party. Clearly his strong views on the nature of modern capitalism, climate change and stringent opposition to nuclear power paint him as more of a natural Greens candidate. Leaving aside the much debated travails of Peter Garrett for a moment, just what sort of impact could a few high-profile leftish intellectuals have on the parliamentary Labor party?

My other observation would be that I’m not sure that high profile candidates necessarily fare better in by-elections, where the name of the game isn’t really to attract national media attention, but grass roots campaigning on the ground. I have no knowledge of the degree to which Hamilton has or has not been involved in community politics and campaigning on a local level in the suburbs encompassed by Higgins, but my general view would be that such a candidate would be a good bet for an increased vote. In light of the commentary around the Higgins by-election as a barometer on climate change policy, The Greens might have been thinking that’s the better tack to take.

It’s going to be an interesting contest, whichever way it pans out.

Previously on LP: A couple of earlier posts on the Higgins contest.

Update: Legal Eagle.

Update: Hamilton on Hamilton.

Update: En Passant.

Update: Since this post has largely focused on Hamilton rather than electoral strategy and the likely outcomes in Higgins, I’ve put up a new one on that topic, linking to a recent analysis from Antony Green.

Norton disagrees, and something like his position has been put to me recently from another quarter, so I suspect he’s accurately portraying what the opposition think they’re up to:

Simply agreeing with what the government is doing will get the Opposition minimal current credit with the electorate in the short term at the price of a clear long-term message about the Liberal alternative. There is a difference between what Liberal state oppositions have done, which is just ‘constant negative harping’ without a real theme or sense of an alternative, and a strategy which goes against the current mood to establish a message that could resonate at a later time.

There are at least two problems with this.

First, I’m not at all clear that any political alternative is being argued – some musing about ‘Liberal values’ is pretty content free, and doesn’t cut through in any case. Kevin Rudd has framed what the Liberal party stands for at the moment. So pervasive is the ‘back to Howard’ narrative. The Libs have played into this with their obsession with ‘defending the legacy’. It’s backward looking, not carving out some positive territory for a future when Labor goes off the boil. There’s really no getting around the fact that there’s just no political contest whatever at the moment – the Libs may as well be on Rudd’s payroll, as someone remarked here recently.

Secondly, you have to pick your battles in politics. You don’t spray negativity everywhere, in the hope that one of the “risks embedded in current policy” will come to pass. (And while I agree that – naturally – there are such risks, I think Norton’s characterisation of their nature is just more Liberal ideology, frankly.) First impressions last in politics, and Turnbull will find it very very hard to shift perceptions from here on in. Worse, the positives in the public mind about him when he came to the leadership have probably been buried. While Possum’s right that there’s probably not all that much that Turnbull can do from here on in, the Libs do have to get rid of him – which is something of a paradox, but it follows from the other argument that Rudd is completely dominant, and there’s really no evidence that any ground is shifting.

But while most Australians probably had other things on their mind, John Howard’s former Workplace Relations advisor and Alexander Downer’s replacement as Mayo MP, Jamie Briggs, found time on Boxing Day to denounce third party campaigns as a “a growing cancer in our democracy”.

Briggs named GetUp! and the ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign as examples of what he was talking about.

I don’t have any particular problem with disclosure of funding for third party campaigns, though I would object to caps on donations. But the hyperbole from Briggs (and no doubt his views are shared by Nick Minchin and others) is absurd and dangerous. Props to Andrew Norton for sounding the alarm. Norton refers to Briggs’ call for disclosure and observes:

He hasn’t even noticed that they already provide this information, with another report due early February 2009. Last year’s was really not that interesting, telling us a) that political campaigns cost money and that b) left-wing persons and organisations provide that money to left-wing campaigns.

What GetUp! and the ACTU are doing in their campaigns is crystal clear from the campaigns themselves. They are in a very different situation to political parties, which may privately offer favours to donors.

Briggs’ attitude, plus conversations I have had with other Liberals, makes me worried about the Party’s response to the Rudd government’s green paper on election funding and regulation. I fear that they will agree to draconian restrictions on political freedoms in an attempt to control the left’s current political ascendancy. As with the Howard government in its later years, they are too concerned with short-term problems, and show too little interest in the systemic consequences of their actions.

These sorts of surveys demonstrate one of the weaknesses of opinion polling – we’re left to speculate on the reasons. It really would be extremely helpful if polling groups were to supplement such research with qualitative forms of enquiry such as focus groups, or qualitative aspects to the survey instrument.

But since we have to speculate, my guess would be that one or more of the following factors might be in operation:

(a) “The economy” itself is something of an abstraction in most people’s minds, and unless they can feel the impact of economic stats directly or by anecdote then it remains an abstraction. This is exactly the dynamic that explained the failure of various “beautiful sets of numbers” to give John Howard and Peter Costello any traction last year, and for that matter, vitiated the arguments in favour of WorkChoices. So, if there’s something of a lag beween the financial aspects of the crisis and their impact on “the real economy”, then it may be that expectations also show something of a lag;

(b) Relatedly, people tend to extrapolate to the future from the recent past, and more powerfully from their own experience than from history or meta narratives. So we would expect attitudes to employment and the labour market to reflect the most recent patterns, particularly among younger and more skilled workers. It may also be a realistic (at this point) implicit understanding of the fact that “the economy” is a much more disaggregated creature than it once was, with different sectors both occupationally/industrially and geographically more weakly correlated with overall trends. In that sense, if people are aware of continuing tightness in the market for particular jobs in their field, there’s a reasonably rational belief that the underlying skills picture may continue, and/or that their sector may be somewhat insulated from broader nationwide and global developments.

(c) “Unemployment” itself has a different subjective meaning due to the casualisation of the labour market and the increase in contracting. It may be that a recession no longer poses the threat of a non-existent secure permanent job disappearing just like that for many people, but rather a shift in hours or longer gaps between contracts. “Unemployment” as a lived category means something different from both its statistical and legal meanings.