Tag Archive for 'Authoritarianism'

What does a conservative leader of the Liberal party look like?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Economics, Elections, Howardia, Markets, Philosophy, Policy and Politics
. 16 Comments

… and no, I won’t be posting a photo of Tony Abbott in any form of swimwear to answer that question. But it’s interesting to observe the blue thread that runs through all of Abbott’s pronouncements – a mindset that Father Knows Best. The answer to the question posed by Ben Eltham in New Matilda, writing on the Coalition’s climate change policy [see this post for LP discussion] – “have the Libs lost faith in the market?” – is surely that conservatives don’t necessarily have faith in it. The Howard government’s practice, in many respects, was as much conservative as neo-liberal, if not more – an increasingly large state, a dirigiste approach to doling out public money to corporations, all manner of attempted pro-family social engineering, and so forth. To some degree, the era of 80s bipartisanship on ‘economic reform’ left an institutional and legal bias towards economic liberalism in state institutions; Treasury, the Productivity Commission, competition law, and so on. But with a lazy Treasurer, for most of the time, Howardism only used economic liberalism as a fig leaf.

I think what we’re seeing now, with Tony Abbott, is that fig leaf being discarded.

We’re back to old fashioned paternalism – faith, country, and trust in your betters. And in the economic sphere, Abbott, who knows nothing much of economics, is happy for the state to sit down and carve up the pie in consultation with his preferred interest groups. All this is really classic National Party stuff.

What’s perhaps astonishing on the surface, at least, is how little we’re hearing from the so-called libertarians and classical liberals about Abbott’s lack of faith in the market. Could it be that they’re mostly more interested in anti-Labor partisanship than their own ostensible creed?

Senator Kate Lundy speaks out against mandatory filtering

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Activism, Authoritarianism, Politics and The Web
. 21 Comments

Jason Whittaker has an article in today’s Crikey, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. Continue reading ‘Senator Kate Lundy speaks out against mandatory filtering’

Open Democracy’s retrospective and prospective look at the decade/s

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, International, Markets, Politics, Security, Sociology, Terrorism, The Web and War
. 12 Comments

Open Democracy has asked a range of its contributors to answer the following questions:

A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

Of pimps, prostitutes, dealers and freedom: guest post by Rewi Lyall

Published
by
Anna Winter
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism and Law
. 97 Comments

Rewi blogs at Oqurum and this post was originally posted there.

In an earlier post I briefly discussed the issue of civil rights in Australia, particularly as to how we justify infringing rights in order to deal with specific segments of society. It’s a distinctly worrying trend, but when the decision of the Western Australian government to grant police the power to stop and search citizens without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing is cast in terms of ‘cleaning-up the streets’ to the benefit of ‘decent families’, as opposed to violent thugs, it’s pretty hard to say ‘Hang on a minute’ without being accused of being with the terrorists.

But… hang on a minute.

The trend in Western Australia, and Australia generally, should be alarming its citizens. This isn’t just about physical intervention by police forces, but an active campaign of intimidation designed to inculcate a compliant population.

And it appears to be working.

As of 2004 Perth was home to the largest single closed-circuit television surveillance system in Australia. CCTV isn’t about catching crooks; its advocates argue that it is meant to act as a deterrent to crime. Much could be written about the value of deterrents in criminology, but let’s skip that for now. In this instance, deterrence can only mean one thing: intimidation. CCTV exists to intimidate citizens into obeying the law. As does the newly increased use of sniffer dogs in police patrols through the city.

But which laws?

Continue reading ‘Of pimps, prostitutes, dealers and freedom: guest post by Rewi Lyall’

The Mad Monk

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Books, Writers & Writing and Politics
. 121 Comments

I’ve got a feeling that the mix of a seemingly random collection of crazy authoritarian policy ideas (covenant marriage, raising the pension age to 70, bringing back WorkChoices, the federal government taking over everything) and arrogant self-congratulation that appear to make up the content of Tony Abbott’s book based on the extracts that have appeared is not doing him or the Liberal Party any good.

And will anyone actually buy the thing?

Possibly the only winner in this publishing deal is Labor (and maybe News Limited…)

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.

Power, poverty and democracy

Published
by
Brian
9 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Environment and Politics
. 16 Comments

Via Counterpoint last week I heard about the new book by Paul Collier entitled Wars, guns and votes. Collier, an African specialist, is concerned about solutions rather than simply investigating problems. Discussing his ideas about solutions really requires reading the book. I found his ideas about how power, poverty and level of economic development relate to democracy and authoritarianism intriguing.

What Collier found in brief outline is that below a per capita GDP of $2,700 the adoption of democratic forms actually leads to more violence, civil strife, corruption and indeed civil war than democracy.

Above that level authoritarian forms of government are more likely to lead to strife. Beware China which passed that level some little while ago. On this list China comes in at $6,000. There are 59 countries below $2,700.

Continue reading ‘Power, poverty and democracy’

Strange affiliations: the Clean Feed’s political trajectory

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Howardia, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Sexuality and The Web
. 17 Comments

Over at Catallaxy, Jason Soon links to Kerry Miller’s article in Spiked about Clive Hamilton’s influence in the propagation of the idea of the “Clean Feed” web censorship plan. There are some strange alliances around this issue, and Miller, who writes for the Maoist site Strange Times (formally, as The Last Superpower, about the only actually existing Australian example of the pro-Bush “Decent Left”) can’t resist a side swipe at us “pseudo-leftists” even when we’re on the same page. There’s also a bit of a contradiction in her piece. She argues that Hamilton is a “communitarian” – which I think is to give him too much credit and in light of his views on other issues, somewhat inaccurate. But nevertheless, the moral authoritarianism of communitarianism is certainly in play in the censorship stakes. Miller claims:

The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.

I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.

Continue reading ‘Strange affiliations: the Clean Feed’s political trajectory’