Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy:

Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant reasoning of a terrorist.

If the result of his massive disruption of the Australian transport system is the further shredding of the Qantas brand, which began under Geoff Dixon and which has accelerated rapidly under his Irish successor, and leads to further service cuts as Australians turns their back on the airline, that’s fine.

It will merely expedite his plans to offshore-by-stealth Qantas, wrecking the Australian-based operation while he sets about establishing lower-cost, more competitive foreign-based services.

To this end, a furious reaction against the airline for its act of malice toward Australian travellers is a price well worth paying; indeed, it may be part of the longer-term plan.

Joyce’s actions and motivations are almost a parody of the globalising logic that profits are all, workers, customers and any notion of public service or good nothing. And it’s in that quality of excess, in the gamble for high stakes, that his house of cards has the real potential to come tumbling down.

It shouldn’t escape notice that the Chair of the Qantas Board, Leigh Clifford, hails from Rio Tinto, a company long known for its overt deunionisation strategy. There is undoubtedly an element of union busting in all this, as well as a broader push from the more militant elements of the Australia corpocracy to smash the Fair Work Act. Peter Reith’s high profile interventions have to be seen in this context.

Hence, Qantas’ other play here, through keeping its cards close to its chest and failing to inform the government of the planned lockout (let alone passengers), was to force the government to bring the dispute before Fair Work Australia. Hence, too, Anthony Albanese’ fury.

But, as Bernard Keane also observes, there is real opportunity for the government.

There is no doubt that Qantas’ public relations offensive has failed. Essential Research found last week that 43% of respondents supported renationalisation of the airline, a large number blamed Qantas management rather than workers, and very large majorities opposed offshoring and thought Joyce’s remuneration too high.

The polling is not unambiguous, but there’s a plethora of pointers to how Joyce’s sneak attack has resonated, from a Facebook protest page which garnered almost 4000 likes in less than 24 hours, to the reaction on Twitter. The timing, coming on top of his huge pay rise on Friday, and the massive disruption and frustration caused to passengers on a Saturday afternoon, is so stupid as to beggar belief.

Joyce has exemplified the mindset of the 1% at a time when the Occupy X movement has successfully put systemic critique back on the agenda.

So, how does all this have the potential to backfire on Joyce?

First, it’s being discussed by many as the most spectacular example of management aggression since Patrick’s locked out its workers on the docks in 1998. Unlike the waterfront dispute, the impact on the public is much more palpable and much more direct.

Secondly, as Ben Schneiders correctly observes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, there is the potential for Fair Work Australia to arbitrate the dispute, a power now rarely used, and only available to the tribunal in the case of significant disruption to the national economy. The Minister, Chris Evans, could also make orders to both sides to cease industrial action, though that would be a last resort. The Fair Work Act emphasises bargaining in good faith, and it may well be that the tribunal will find that Qantas has not been. Then, there are legal questions over whether extending the lockout to employees who were not engaging in industrial action, and standing down others, is lawful.

Given that Qantas is seeking to put FWA on trial, and that the legislation is so closely identified with Julia Gillard, the arguments put by the Commonwealth will repay close watching. It would also be surprising if there were not pressure to tighten the provisions whereby management (unlike unions) does not have to give genuine notice of its intent to pursue industrial action. Qantas’ actions in grounding its fleet immediately, and alleging that the lockout would not begin on Monday, are specious in the extreme.

It’s crucial to remember that Joyce, far from pulling his fleet from the sky as a “response to union action”, has himself, according to the legal definition, taken industrial action.

More broadly, as Schneiders comments, there may be momentum for a broader use of the arbitration power, to protect the public interest.

Thirdly, Qantas faces some pointed questioning over its obligations under the Qantas Act which enabled privatisation. There are specific provisions, reflected in the airline’s own constitution, which require it to maintain its operations in Australia, and restrict it from flying internationally under another name. The unions have corresponded with Qantas about this, and the management line has been that subsidiaries are not bound. But Senate hearings have been examining legislation introduced by Nick Xenophon and Greens Leader Bob Brown which would close off this option. If such amendments were to be supported by the government, we would be in a very interesting place indeed.

And finally, as Bernard Keane writes:

Voters, it seems, just want their old Qantas back. In the view of Joyce and the Qantas board, they can’t get it back in the airline’s current form, not given continuing strong competition from government-subsidised foreign airlines and the high dollar. The only way to get the old Qantas back may indeed be to nationalise it and subsidise it, or to return to the days when competition from foreign airlines was even more tightly restricted than it is now.

And no one in federal politics is pushing those options. Well, not yet.

In a climate when the recklessness and contempt of corporate power reveals its naked face, the government would have little to lose, and much to gain, from reining it in. We shall see.

Alan Joyce is being crazy brave. So, too, should Julia Gillard be.

NB: To keep comments focused, please leave your response on Helen’s open thread. Comments on this post are closed.

Update: Laura Tingle.

Rudd’s silence could resonate with those embattled backbenchers whose future is being threatened by the clubs’ campaign. They are increasingly fearful for their seats and resentful of not only the legislation that Wilkie has forced on Labor, but that the government itself is being held hostage by him.

The argument could run: install Rudd in the leadership early next year and have an election before the pokies legislation comes to a crunch. Few would think the government itself would be saved but quite a number might believe their own seats could be.

Yes, the pokies lobby is whinging mightily. Yes, the government is unpopular at the moment. But the publicly-available evidence suggests the two are largely unrelated.

As Bernard Keane (H/T Kim in comments on an earlier story) points out at Crikey, the publicly-available polling on the matter suggests that pokie reform is actually pretty damn popular. Essential Report’s most recent polls show that around two-thirds of voters support the precommitment legislation.

However, just because a policy is broadly popular, doesn’t mean it’s electorally advantageous. I suppose it’s possible that in some NSW and Queensland seats, particularly, the threat to having one’s weekly massive slab of rump steak paid for by gambling addicts is resonating more powerfully.

But is there any actual evidence for this proposition, or is it just more noise from a congenitally cowardly backbench confusing colour and movement from the clubs for actual effect?

Politically, of course, as Bernard Keane observes today, the impact of the decision really is to drive another nail into the Gillard government’s coffin.

It is very puzzling that, given that Ministers would no doubt have been supplied with excellent advice from the Commonwealth Solicitor-General, this result wasn’t foreseen. It really does point up the desperation and short term media cycle driven horizons which have bedevilled the Gillard government, ironically to a degree greater than they bedevilled the Rudd government. The incompetence narrative seems to reflect truth.

We are not going to see a legislative fix to the issues identified by the Court, because The Greens, independents and Coalition, for very different reasons, will not support one. And nor should one be advanced.

In commenting on the ramifications of the Court’s decision at Troppo, Ken Parish writes:

The Gillard government should now accept the inevitability of its forthcoming election defeat and concentrate on putting in place asylum seeker processes that are as sound as possible from a policy (rather than short term populist) perspective. As I’ve argued previously, a policy based on community accommodation, rather than mandatory detention, of asylum seekers once initial health and security clearances have been passed, is clearly preferable from a policy viewpoint. It will almost certainly result in a measurable upsurge in arrival numbers, but that is unlikely to result in total numbers that Australia will be unable effectively to absorb.

I could not agree more.

When I was discussing the Centre for Policy Development’s paper, Breaking the stalemate on asylum seekers and refugees, I wrote:

It would not be too hard to argue for a completely different path. It would take courage. But Labor has very little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain, by doing the right thing.

It is very hard to see a path for the Gillard government to be re-elected. But outcomes are not pre-determined. If Ministers have not read the CPD Report, they should be doing just that as a matter of immediate pragmatic political priority.

If the ALP is to lose anyway, the paradox might be that by regaining its soul, it might just avoid its fate. If not, then it might just provide a path by which Labor could return to opposition demonstrating that it actually stands for something.

It really should be very clear now that playing defence on a turf shaped by its political opponents and the media is absolutely and fatally counter-productive.

…the motivating force behind these groups appears to be more about expressing resentment about social and economic change in recent decades, and particularly because such changes have delivered nothing but difficulties for the demographics we’re talking about: social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heteros-xual people and males in particular, and, in the Australian context, economic changes have squeezed them, along with everyone else, into a far more competitive, market-based economy that no longer delivers the sort of certainty they grew up with and that Generation X, in particular, never had.

For such people, Gillard’s gender (and unmarried status) or Obama’s race are not so much a problem as a high-profile, indeed inescapable, symbol of how much the world has changed and changed in ways that deliver nothing but pain for such people.

I think there’s probably an aspect of the phenomenon he identifies in the second para, but I am very far from being as confident as he is that racism and sexism are not a big part of the picture.

He’s also spot on about the ludicrous claims about ‘censorship’. And about the way the Coalition is essentially using this diffuse ressentiment to contribute to its recreation of the febrile atmosphere of 1975.

The Federal Government has confirmed Treasury secretary Ken Henry is resigning from his role.

He will finish up early in the new year and will be replaced by Climate Change Department secretary Martin Parkinson.

Confirming Dr Henry’s resignation this morning, Prime Minister Julia Gillard called him “one of the greatest of all Treasury secretaries”.

Bernard Keane at Crikey summarizes his career. Keane is clearly a big fan, reserving his biggest praise for Henry’s work (along with that of the RBA) during the global financial crisis:

But hundreds of thousands of Australians have jobs that wouldn’t have them if Henry, Stevens and their teams had repeated the errors of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – chiefly using the levers of monetary and fiscal policy too late and ineffectively.

Hundreds of thousands of people in jobs. While he may not get the public recognition, it’s hard to think of a more fitting legacy for Australia’s most senior financial public servant.

Update: And while we’re doing resignations, let’s note that John Brumby has resigned from Parliament, effective immediately. Both as Treasurer and Premier, he ran a government that, while not without its flaws, did more things right than not.

What will be most interesting over the next few days and weeks will be whether the Australian commentary machine’s momentum finally switches – an actual event has occurred, but the minute by minute “analysis” powers on, and the perpetual tweeting favours noise over signal.

There’s still a lot of noise and not much signal, I think, because literally nothing much is happening (publicly).

Bernard Keane wrote a neat piece for Crikey today, which I’ve excerpted over the fold. He could have added that elements in the media are laying the foundations for a vicious campaign against The Greens, and the rural independents should they align with Labor on confidence and supply.

Paul Kelly was particularly petulant in this morning’s Australian:

the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours

They cannot run, hide or dissemble with meaningless chatter about fresh opportunities unique to mankind. They must decide for Labor or Coalition. They must defend this decision before the national media, offer a coherent explanation to the Australian people and, above all, justify their decision to their electorates. Yes, that’s how you get stability.

Aside from the fact that what he sees as orthodoxy, and the natural order of things, has been disrupted – thus requiring febrile defence – Kelly is no doubt peeved that his Grand Narrative about Patriotic (neo-liberal) Reform has sunk further into the sludge of actual politics. In truth, it’s been a long time since the Australian people showed any enthusiasm for big picture economic reform, and its final collapse probably dates to the related events of Paul Keating’s defeat and Pauline Hanson’s rise. Leaving aside the GST, which is better seen as a bit of fiscal housekeeping, and WorkChoices, which of course ensured John Howard’s political demise, that is. Although it would be right to criticise our current political economy on the grounds of distributional justice, underemployment, lack of social mobility and many other things: for most people, as long as it delivers the necessities of a decent life, they’re distinctly unlikely to be wooed by the evangelists of global capitalism.

Neo-liberal acolytes such as Kelly are curiously reticent about spelling out what sort of “reform” they’d actually like to see, either because they don’t know, or because whatever they would propose is likely to be politically unpalatable, if not toxic. Yet we still see the cliches about “uncertainty” dragged out, and a demand from big business and its media mouthpieces for “strong government”. It never seems to occur to them that the only real economic reform most Australians would like to see – climate change policy – failed to be delivered by a parliament which had a majority government with a mandate, and that it’s in part the prostitution of the political process by corporate lobbies which has failed to ensure “certainty”.

Ironies abound.

Here’s Keane on the media:

With nothing much to report, and the nation seemingly grandly indifferent to the spot in which it has left its elected representatives, the press gallery has taken to obsessing over vote counts. Some, in the circumstances, decidedly mild criticisms within Labor of the campaign have been elevated to the status of civil war (you wonder how today’s media would have covered the Labor split in the ’50s). Every word from the independents is carefully analysed by journalists, who dissect them like ancient priests considering entrails in an effort to divine coming events. Rob Oakeshott’s thought bubble about a unity government sent journalists haring off in all directions (although, speaking ex cathedra today, Michelle Grattan pronounced it “naive”). The best moment was journalists reporting Tony Abbott’s embrace of a “kinder, gentler polity”?—?it was the remark he made just before launching an attack on Labor and the Greens?—?with straight faces.

Luckily there’s Bob Katter, for whom the phrase “good copy” might have been invented. Thank goodness for the Member for Kennedy, and his hat, which is surely about to get its own reality TV show. Having been ignored, or indeed treated as a rather lengthy joke by the media until now, Katter is well within his rights to be bemused about his suddenly elevated media profile and the media’s rather inconsistent attention to the issues he regards as important.

The urge to call the winner first, to project vote trends, to extrapolate from past policy which way the independents will lean, is strong, and wholly unnecessary. The AEC will determine the winners and losers in the doubtful seats in good time. Some, please note, are likely to end up in litigation. The five?—?as seems likely?—?independents will negotiate a deal with one side or the other. With whom is not clear at this point, probably not even to them, although I’ve yet to see any compelling reasons why they wouldn’t back the Coalition, given their backgrounds.

Meanwhile, the actual business of government ticks over. Australians go about their business, oblivious to the allegedly dire impacts of “uncertainty” from the interregnum. How much do they care about politics? They were monumentally disengaged during the campaign, and there was a big rise in what appeared to be deliberate informal votes, a direct act of rebellion against a preferential voting system that delivers your democratic choice to parties you may well loathe.

It’s a tough call for the political media, which has difficulty enough hanging on to what mainstream media space and resources it has now. Any recognition that Australians are uninterested in what they report is dangerous in a media environment where resources are diminishing all the time. That, perhaps, is why journalists have tried to maintain the breathless campaign pace of what Jay Rosen calls “horse race journalism” into the interregnum, when literally nothing is happening except the slow, methodical counting of votes and some pre-negotiation positioning by the key players. Perhaps some outlets can get some pollsters out in the field and give us an opinion poll to discuss.

The time might more usefully be spent considering just why the electorate behaved as it did. There’s an assumption that a new election would put it all to rights, and somehow fix the mistake voters made on Saturday by providing a majority government. What’s to say that’s what would happen? Voters are clearly unhappy with Australian politics. Why would that be about to change?

But Labor is in trouble. Its problems aren’t so much, as was suggested by some commentators, that it is being squeezed by the Coalition appeal to blue-collar conservatives on one side and the Greens’ appeal to inner-city types on the other — although that’s not helpful — but the party’s culture. As Guy Rundle has elsewhere pointed out, the growing absence of a core philosophy and its replacement by an assemblage of carefully-targeted micro-policies is not sustainable over the long term.

At best, you can win the battles but eventually you lose the war, particularly against an opponent like Tony Abbott who is more remorselessly negative and permitted by the mainstream media to get away with minimal actual policies on critical issues. Labor’s campaign foci of aiming money at Family Tax Benefit A recipients, appealing to the irrationality of outer-suburban voters and in effect campaigning against Rudd-era Labor was a collection of tactics masquerading as a strategy. And in the end it couldn’t even win the battles, let alone the war.

Worse, the deadening effect of this approach was to silence Julia Gillard, until late June one of Federal Labor’s most formidable communicators, and replace her with a mannequin usually capable only of repeating the day’s talking points. Forget the Ruddbut, the campaign trail was stalked by the Gillardroid. But if voters had wanted a mind-numbingly boring female politician with a glue-like adherence to talking points instead of a political philosophy, they would have made Penny Wong Prime Minister.

Only rarely did “real Julia” break out, and it had nothing to do with the fake “Real Julia” launched with all the dexterity of New Coke in the third week of the campaign. The Gillard on display when she fired up after the leak, or toward the end when fatigue made her less amenable to staying on message, was the real Julia, the one that voters liked, and Labor strategists’ failure to capitalise on that popularity must, along with their decision to dump the CPRS, remain one of the most mysteriously inept decisions in a year full of them from Labor.

Regardless of whether it goes into opposition or clings on to minority government, Labor must start fixing its culture, and start applying a reality check to the advice offered by the likes of Arbib, Bitar, Shorten and the other powerbrokers who have guided Labor into such a dire electoral position. It must also, somehow, bring in at the highest level some experienced strategists and media people who understand that effective political communication doesn’t consist of asking what Malcolm Tucker would do.

That seems about right to me.

Morris Iemma, who should know something about it, called for Karl Bitar to resign today.

It also seems bad timing that Australian Story tonight features a show on the “Labor powerbroker”, Paul Howes.

A hung parliament and a new Senate in which the Greens will have the balance of power and, most likely, a presence of which few of their number would have dared dream.

The mainstream media have been curiously reticent to say it, but the electorate lurched sharply to the Left yesterday. Labor bled just more than 5% of its vote, but most of it — 3.6% — went to the Greens. The Coalition picked up the scraps.

That’s why Labor is still jockeying for government today and hasn’t been obliterated, and why the Greens will have nine senators next year.

Here we come back to Bernard Keane’s lament that blame for the sorry state of Australian politics lies with the public. I sympathise with his frustration, but when you start blaming the people (and demanding that they be deposed and a new people installed, so the Party will not be let down), then it’s a fair bet that you’re barking up the wrong decision-tree. Far better to try and analyse what has occurred, why at some point, a decisive gap developed between political process and mass social life?—?developed, and then became a yawning chasm.

Twenty years ago, we?—?or the political elites?—?made a decision to shift the centre of gravity from public to private life, in a whole range of areas, from social expenditure, to pensions, to the question of work hours and wages, in every conceivable field. That is, of course, but of a larger global process?—?and one, to a degree beyond the control of individual governments?—?but we really ram-rodded it here, off a fairly collective base.

The result has been a certain type of society in which both the space for public life, and the means by which people without much social power could project themselves into it, has been diminished. Where in the 1980s we were talking?—?briefly?—?of the 35-hour week, we are now heading towards the 48-hour week (and two salaries, to afford a house), performed by people living in spec-built suburbs with little amenity, in under-serviced cities, and in conditions of diminishing, not increasing, social mobility for themselves and their children.

In these circumstances, the private choice?—?the cable TV, the McMansion, the retreat to the home space and to the defiant, antinomian cry (much heard in the UK election) “I don’t do politics”?—?becomes overdetermined, becomes the only real choice there is. Yet even as people pursue their lives in the wilderness of plasmas, they are privy to a never-ending cascade of information informing them that a) the current way of life is politically, economically, and ecologically unsustainable and b) the gap between their lives and the levers of power is so huge there’s bugger all they an do about it in the current framework.

Those things that need a public sphere in order to exist?—?such as the res publica, and a genuinely pluralist media?—?lapse into a non-democratic condition, the res publica as the realm of a caste of political professionals, the media as driven by cynical and self-defeating idea of “content delivery”. The parties narrow down to a core of pollsters and heavies, the public is further alienated, they become less interested in anything in the media which might be a little more expansive, which means the media stops challenging the parties, who then become yet more … and round it goes.

To blame the public for the changed conditions of their life, and the way that earlier decisions by an elite shaped their lives, is to finger the victim, not the culprit. A series of cave-ins, ducked battles, and soft options by the people who controlled parties, papers and powers, and a refusal to stand up to the genuinely malign, has brought us to this point. It seems distinctive in the world?—?there is a collapse of political legitimacy everywhere, but only in Australia have I seen this degree of total exasperation and frustration, combined with an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way.

It was interesting to watch, just now on ABC News 24, the press conference which followed the PM’s education policy announcements. I was somewhat heartened to see that all the questions focused on education policy, rather than on the usual “narrative” stuff. It was something of a rejoinder to Annabel Crabb’s claim that it was unduly difficult for journos to brief themselves sufficiently on policy, something I thought was far fetched, given that any intelligent listener who’s been following public debate can usually think up some salient lines of questioning (if they’re not too busy tweeting and texting).

Earlier, in the campaign, a post by GrogsGamut on the performance of the media stimulated an interchange between journos and bloggers on Twitter, something Mark wrote about here, and which journo James Massola reflected on in a piece published on Saturday.

There was less interchange on Twitter on Saturday, after a number of very forceful critiques were published in the blogosphere and alternative media of the appalling “body language”/Latham press conference in Brisbane (see Pavlov’s Cat’s guest post here, which entirely occluded any discussion of important announcements on seniors’ income support.

Some journos reacted defensively, but silence was largely the result.

I wonder, though, if the critique refracted by Twitter had some influence on the press pack improving its game today, and according to Bernard Keane, yesterday.

Update: Margaret Simons on the media’s coverage of policy.