Crikey has a liveblog, and ABC News 24 and News Radio are carrying Bob Katter’s press conference live.

Update: Bernard Keane summarises Katter’s press conference.

Update: Tony Windsor supports Labor.

Funny how political philosophy is being invoked in an actual political context.

And it was funny to hear Rob Oakeshott skewer the piffle on Edmund Burke served up by Professor Kenneth Wiltshire in The Australian yesterday.

You really wonder what purpose these op/ed pieces serve; except maybe to annoy the people they’re supposedly addressing.

Just by the by, while we’re on the topic of News Limited’s partisan campaigns, does anyone expect “ELECTION NOW!” to carry on if the Independents support the Coalition (which, it goes without saying, Goddess forfend!)…

The story is here.

Pearson’s main issue seems to be the Queensland Wild Rivers legislation, which Brian wrote about recently.

As the article notes, this intervention comes on the back of an attack by Pearson on Friday on Labor.

One thing of interest is that Pearson seems to be acting, in this context, as his own local member. That is – his concerns appear to be mainly about his own region, and his common theme of seeing his own ideas implemented elsewhere.

In that vein, there’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of Overland by Chris Graham, which among other things, makes the point that Pearson’s biggest blind spot is his isolation from other Indigenous leaders, and also critiques the policy initiatives he’s seen implemented (largely with Peter Beattie’s support) in Cape York.

The representatives of both wings of the political class – Nick Minchin and Peter Beattie – looked like going into meltdown as Christine Milne and Bob Katter, for somewhat different reasons, denounced the free trade and deregulatory neo-liberal consensus that has dominated our politics for decades.

Minchin came as close as I’ve ever seen him to passion: on the topic of not having tariffs.

(It was also interesting to watch his finger tapping as Bob Katter denounced the Coalition’s record on agriculture. And it was choice to see Katter set Minchin a reading list of De Tocqueville and Mill.)

Minchin’s argument of last resort was to invoke cheap food.

To return to my early 20th century British politics parallels, the Liberal party came to power in 1906, after much agitation for agricultural tariffs from within the Tory party, on a cry of “cheap bread”. At the same time, of course, that line resonated because wages were stagnant or falling, employment insecure, and the legal rights of trade unions under attack.

It’s always worth asking precisely why cheap food is such a pressing concern.

The 2010 episode of “bush leverage” is a result of a backlash by conservatives against a conservative government because rural voters feel that John Howard failed to protect them from the disruptive changes of a deregulated economy.

Picking up on Chan’s article, Gary Sauer-Thompson extracts a number of salient paragraphs from Tony Windsor’s first speech to the federal parliament in 2002:

Some of the rules applying to competition policy, with its economic rationalist approach on many of these issues, have no flexibility in regard to smallness, distance and remoteness. The very policies that are emanating from this place, whether they be fuel policy or aged care policy—even policies relating to country doctors, or the lack thereof—are emanating from that basic policy framework, which has not delivered equity to country constituents in particular…If that policy is not changed to recognise distance, smallness, remoteness and some degree of social equity, you will continue to see a shrinkage of regional Australia, something which should be abhorred.

Sauer-Thompson comments:

He says that the message a neo-liberal mode of governance sends to country communities is to proceed to your nearest major regional centre, go to the coast, go to Sydney or go to buggery.

I think Bob Katter’s wishlist has to be seen in this context as well. Katter’s politics are a blend of agrarian socialism, rural protectionism and regional developmentalism. From being mainstream once (and it’s significant that Katter claims as one of his political heroes Queensland Labor Premier ‘Red Ted’ Theodore), these views now seem radical.

One of the paradoxes of Australia’s turn towards global economic integration is that over time – and particularly since the rejection of Labor reformism with Paul Keating’s defeat in 1996 and the associated rise of Pauline Hanson – the political tendency has been to focus in on some of the losers of globalism in the outer suburbs.

From ‘white flight’ to Lindsay through the rise of casual and insecure work and the decline of manufacturing and blue collar jobs, the outer burbs have been the lodestone of the political class. John Howard’s approach was basically to shovel public money at these voters, mixed with a dollop of rhetoric encouraging them to see themselves as the aspirational entrepreneurs of the service economy.

WorkChoices and the end of easy credit negated this politics.

Barely noticed, probably, by the politicians and journos who were happy to intone mantras about the virtues of small business was the homogenisation of the retail economy. Those businesses not already organised as cartels – as with pharmacy and newsagencies and hotels – were prone to succumb: the corner store, butcher and grocery give way to Coles, the independent bakery to a franchised chain, the hamburger joint to Subway or Maccas. There might be a thriving diversity of retail and food options on inner city main streets, but it’s multinational and franchise central elsewhere – including in regional areas.

Then we have the rise and rise of agribusiness, and the vacuum cleaner effect of the mining industry on regional and rural workforces.

This is just a snapshot of part of a wide ranging economic transformation in rural and regional Australia, which entails a decay in cultural folkways and traditional social patterns too. So Bob Katter’s wishlist is an attempt at an answer to that, and the questions implicit in it have merit, and should be posed, even if opinion legitimately differs on the practicality and desirability of his policy responses.

The Nationals only know how to shovel money in the general direction of their constituents, and how to stir them up with the clownish carry-on of Barnaby Joyce. The prominence now given to figures like Windsor shows them up as yesterday’s men and women.

A bunch of mainstream media commentators might find a policy focus on rural and regional Australia “unedifying”. I don’t agree. I think that we effectively have a three-speed economy in Australia, and we need to start talking about what we can do to change that, and to do so in such a way that fosters equity and sustainability.

The Greens will be an important part of that conversation.

almost unreadable week

Shorter Penbo: narrative broken, must push for Restoration.

But he’s not alone in being all at sea.

A plethora of furphies have been repeated endlessly by the media – one of the most common being that the rural Independents represent “naturally conservative electorates”.

Oh, really?

The Nationals are well aware that the electors of Kennedy, Lyne and New England have made a positive choice not to support them.

And Bob Katter shot a hole in this meme very early on – pointing out that Kennedy had always been held by Labor except when he and his father were on the ballot, and that 4 out of 6 state seats in his electorate have ALP members. Kerry O’Brien appeared dumbstruck. That news had been slow to reach 7.30 Reportland, apparently.

If we think about Lyne and New England, these two seats are experiencing the same sorts of demographic and economic change as the nearby seats of Page and Richmond, once safe Country and then National party fiefdoms, now both held by Labor.

That’s all nicely captured in a great post by Possum, who estimates that 40% of Rob Oakeshott’s voters in Lyne are former Labor supporters, outnumbering the ex-Nats.

Go read.

Yesterday, in her address to the National Press Club [see previous LP discussion here], Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a point of stating that any concessions to the Independents involving expenditure would be funded from savings, and there would be no resulting change to the budget bottom line. She revived her argument made during the election campaign that the Coalition had reached new heights of fiscal irresponsibility, promising a billion a day in un-costed spending.

All this comes as the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor warns of the possibility of a double dip recession, and the latest economic stats show that from the perspective of many regions around the nation, we’re definitely in the two-speed economy space.

Politically, Gillard is tweaking the notion of stability to encompass economic management.

Tony Abbott has refused to match Gillard’s budget pledge.

Gillard has also used her response to Andrew Wilkie’s list of demands, and Bob Katter’s protectionist musings, to underline a claim that Labor does not intend to go on a spendathon to secure government, or to depart from what the ALP believes to be sound principles of economic policy.

These moves in the game highlight the importance of the costings issue, and also represent an attempt to leverage claims about the “unedifying spectacle” of pork-barreling the Indies’ seats – emanating from both business and the media – into a different story about the Coalition’s preparedness to buy its way into office.

The credibility of that particular narrative has been somewhat enhanced by the loud urgings of Nationals MPs and Senators earlier in the week that they get what they see as their rightful share of pork.

Labor, it should be added, is not quite coming to this debate with clean hands. The now notorious Epping-Paramatta rail link certainly didn’t emerge out of the assessment and prioritisation process purportedly driven by Infrastructure Australia. But as Wayne Swan said during the campaign, the Coalition outdid itself in promises directed at particular electorates, many of which appeared not on the website of the Liberal party itself, but only through press releases by Members and candidates. Any tally of those would probably add to the billion dollars a day cost of the opposition’s promises, particularly since no attempt whatsoever was made to identify how they would be funded.

Update: Bob Katter’s demands.

I’d thoroughly endorse some of the arguments made in that post about the narrow limits of the field of political contestation, and the way it’s skewed towards a neo-liberal consensus where many questions just don’t get on the agenda for what passes for public debate. Where I’d take issue with Dr_Tad is the claim that process isn’t political. It may well be the case that none of Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have either a particularly coherent ideological position or an intention to fundamentally transform our politics. But that’s not quite the point – political shifts are very often unintended, and extend beyond the desires of political actors.

That’s potentially the case with the call for a “new politics”, I think.

It’s been interesting this week to see some serious debate about our participation in Afghanistan, questioning about why on shore processing of refugees is so verboten, and around issues to do with rural health and the decline of particular non-urban cultures and modes of economic sustainability. We don’t normally talk about these things – that is, the politico-media complex doesn’t open up a space where such questions can be politicised.

Obviously, I’d also like to see us talking about social mobility, distributional justice and a vision of social justice which transcends what I’ve called, in a piece for The Drumroll, Gillardism. I have some hope that The Greens can stimulate a real debate on such questions, as well as one on those issues which are totemic for the party. But, even in the absence of such a focus from Greens MPs and Senators, the shift of the centre of political discourse and the fracturing of its points of unanimity can only be positive for those wishing to move on those issues, and one hopes, might also bear fruit in something of a revival of social movements.

We’ll see. But I do think that any “rupture in the political fabric” presents new possibilities.

Guy Rundle put it very well indeed when he observed that “the economic question” has been taken off the table in recent decades, and “the political question” displaced onto culture wars. His article for Crikey yesterday discusses these issues more eloquently than I am doing, so I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety over the fold (with permission).

You can tell that something that resembles politics is happening in Australia now, by the chorus of derision that professional insiders are directing at the three rural independents, and any suggestion that this impasse of a result may be an opportunity for the country to stop and think about what sort of political institutions and processes it wants.

With the ‘doughty three’ (like that huh?), releasing their seven point letter to the PM, the establishment commentariat has gone into panicky overdrive in an attempt to head it off. It’s bad enough the Greens have snuck into the Lower House (for a second, not first time), now there’s three possibly, four independents.

And that godamn WA National won’t take the whip. You can see why they’re spitting. Imagine if you had to report politics on your front page, rather than writing a series of memos to party heavies, cunningly disguised as actual news.

Thus Michelle Grattan in The Age:

Rob Oakeshott sees safety in his bold model for consensus politics?—?but others will see naivety. Parliamentary reform is one thing, and much needed … But Oakeshott’s proposals go way beyond ordinary change.

What? Beyond change that can be absorbed back into the system? Noooooooooooo!!!!

This is a terrible election result for Australian foreign policy, Greg Sheets Sheridan wrote, mourning that the man of steel would not be succeeded by the age of Iron. The Greens are less fussed about Afghanistan than they were about Iraq…But they might make the difference in dissuading it from offering any increased help there, or undertaking any new security role either.

God, a prudent foreign policy with checks and balances on war? Nooooooooooo!!!!

None of this will be easy as demonstrated by the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours, Paul Polonius Kelly remarks. Forget the nonsense that party politics has taken a blow or is in retreat.

Not easy? No business as usual? Nooooooooo!!!!

Tim Soutphommasane, the Oz’s pet left philosopher, counselled against ‘educated despair’ by which he meant any meditating on whether things could be done other than through the existing party shells.

And Dennis Shanahan simply wants a new election to be held immediately, and to keep repeating it until we get it Right.

The 2010 election result has offered that rarest and most blessed of things, a rupture and a discontinuity in the process. It’s one that makes it impossible to sell the line that the parliamentary electoral system we are ruled by has some deep-seated pole of wisdom that somehow expresses rather than imposes a political form. What the result is making clear to people is the inherent arbitrariness of the system, its closed nature, and the way in which that is obscured when a party is elected with an unchallengeable majority.

The difficulty for the business as usual crowd, is that they spend so much time celebrating the virtues of the single member electorate system, that when it throws up a number of actual single members, they can’t damn it out of hand.

And when such members begin to suggest that the process by which they were chosen could be reflexively acted on by both MPs and the public, the business-as-usual crowd panic about stability. Weird, isn’t it? Post-election Iraq has been without a government for several months, with no working coalition in sight, and this is an example of democracy at work. Australia has a few days or weeks with no majority party but a process of rational and open negotiation, and it’s a disaster.

What has happened in Australia, in little more than the wink of an eye, is that the political question has been pushed into an entirely new dimension. Ever since the 1970s the economic question has lain moribund as a major political division, no matter what lip service is paid to the gulf separating etc etc, and the occasional flashpoint such as WorkChoices.

The political question who leads, how and through what institutions has barely been regarded as political at all, or cynically manipulated, as in Howard’s handling of the Republic debate.

The virtual stasis of both these questions is one reason why so much political energy flows into cultural questions and why culture wars become the dominant mode of struggle.

Once an interruption such as the 2010 election makes it impossible for that stasis to be maintained, the energy flows back into the political question, and real change can be imagined by all except those whose job depends on nothing changing ever, ie the mainstream commentariat.

Once that happens, the left/right divisions based overwhelmingly on the economic (and social-cultural) question cease to be of primary importance, and there is the possibility of new processes, and new flows which make provisional blocs in different ways. It’s the most imaginative solutions that become the most possible.

Thus, why should we not consider Rob Oakeshott’s idea of a multi-party cabinet? Why is Dennis Shanalamadingdong’s idea of a whole new election the ‘sensible’ idea, while Oakeshott’s idea that the people who actually have been elected form a government seen as the whacky one? The Constitution recognises parliament, the GG as head-of-state, and her/his appointed ministers as government. It has nothing to say about prime ministers or parties.

So Shanahan’s suggestion is that the system has failed because it worked.

What’s happened in this election is that the process of parliamentary electoral politics which is minimally democratic and the party-based politics of interests, which isn’t democratic in the slightest, have come into contradiction, in a situation where the system usually silently serves the interests. The profound cynicism and mild fear of the commentariat have caused them to back the interests against the system.

The process has left many people high and dry, desperate to catch up. Thus Paul Kelly, who disguises his cynical anti-democratic power elitism by sporadic attacks on cultural elites, is desperate for a cozy party system that can be nagged to impose a yet more neoliberal agenda, against the oft-expressed wishes of the mass of the Australian people.

The fetishisation of ‘stability’, as if the country was Bosnia-Herzegovina one heartbeat away from a shooting war, is a con. If we are so pusillanimous as to entirely subordinate our political process to the flickering of the global markets, then we may as well let Goldman Sachs choose the government.

Stability is the very achievement that allows a country the luxury of uncertainty, when isolated outbreaks of actual public will throw up an ensemble capable of creating a new situation. I’m under no illusion that the rural independents are about to put the whole constitution and political apparatus into play. But they don’t need to.

The mere process over the last three days has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power, and their potential (if not straightforward) transformability, than a hundred civics lessons. Other gains, such as an increased role for private members bills, would serve to bang the wedge a little further into the old tree dead.

Stability is not the issue, nor is it the danger. The danger is a politics so deadened that only the most demented and monomaniacal, the Feeneys, Shortens, and Bitars, can stand it, and everyone else retires to their private lives. The more the commentariat shriek in fear, the more interesting the ride.

The independents and minor parties should push this process until the rivets are popping.

The good folk of Western Sydney, it seems, are going to have their concerns ignored because all attention will now be on the bush! Life is rosy in the regions, rents are cheaper, there are no toll roads, etc, etc.

But now, we’re told, the regions will benefit at Western Sydney battlers’ expense.

That’s not because of nice Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott, who are honourable men – though the venal major parties won’t be able to resist pushing pork at them.

But the real villain of the piece is Bob Katter (strangely misdescribed as a “former Howard government Minister”). Perhaps that’s because he gave the press a serve yesterday. Presumably Penberthy missed Tony Windsor’s view that the Daily Telegraph is a joke, and that he had no intention of taking any notice of its bloviating.

But it’s a travesty of democracy, you see!

The conclusion?

The fact that one of these men is waging some war in his own mind on the big cities of Australia is reason enough to go straight back to the polls.

A new election will cost the taxpayers about $170 million. It’s a small price to pay for stability, which is something neither side will be able to deliver as a result of the seemingly insurmountable impasse created by Saturday’s mad result.

How out of touch are these people? Do they really imagine that we’re all sitting around demanding another election now? Really?

The faux-populism aside, this is a very transparent play.

And here’s the Prime Minister’s response.