More at Still Life With Cat.

The ‘flexibility’ of the labour market is, of course, something that is extremely unlikely to be revisited (although it’s very disappointing that so little has been done in the terms of the Labor governments to rethink how employment safety and a social right to employment could be created, which is eminently possible even in a flexible labour market). It’s this job insecurity, a consequence of how neo-liberal economies are supposed to work, which establishes the conditions for a ‘carbon tax = job losses’ message to be so powerful.

Yet there’s something a bit strange about seeing every last job as sacred, an attitude best exemplified by the rhetoric of Paul Howes.

Part of the relative failure of the political strategy to sell the carbon price plan (which I discussed on Saturday) is the inability to deepen the message about a low-carbon economy future having the ability to create good jobs. Indeed, in my own mind, I’ve had something of a question mark as to whether there’s evidence to support that contention.

As the Brookings Institution comments:

The “green” or “clean” or low-carbon economy—defined as the sector of the economy that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit—remains at once a compelling aspiration and an enigma.

That’s by way of introduction to an extremely interesting research report which sought to quantify and measure the composition of employment in the ‘clean economy’, and to make comparisons with the US economy as a whole, and with jobs in polluting industries.

In a post at Ethicaljobs.com.au, the report’s findings are summarised:

…jobs in US-based environmental industries have now overtaken fossil fuel-based jobs in sheer numbers, and that they also offer median wages that are 13% higher than other industries.

The research found 2.7 million green jobs in 100 US cities in a large diversity of industries, from organic food and farming jobs, through manufacturing (solar panels, wind turbines etc) through to public transport jobs.

Not only did the report find that jobs in these industries are on average 13% better paid, it also found that “the clean economy offers more [job] opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole . . . [since] a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.”

For jobs in clean technology specifically, the research showed that median wages were even higher – 20% higher than in other parts of the economy. Median wages for such clean technology jobs were $46,343, compared with $38,616 for all other occupations across the country.

Over the period studied – 2003-2010 – clean-technology jobs in the US also grew faster than the rest of the US economy – by 8.3% per year, compared with 4.2% a year for other occupations.

The report also found that environmental jobs employed more people across the country than fossil fuel industries – 2.7 million employees compared with just 2.4 million in dirty industries like coal and oil.

I haven’t had the chance, for time reasons this morning, to read the full report so I’d be interested to see whether there is also a direct comparison between clean jobs and jobs in polluting industries on income, as well as one with the median wage across the US labour market. Another caveat might be that a tendency for wages to decline over time has been observed in older ‘new’ industries – IT being the most telling example. But the relative maturity of some of the firms and sectors in the US might allay such a concern.

It does strike me as very interesting indeed that many of these jobs have been created in manufacturing and export-oriented sectors.

The report also, implicitly, highlights the fact that a number of US states have emissions trading schemes in place and a number have achieved significant emissions reductions (even allowing for decreased emissions stemming from the GFC and lower economic activity).

Someone ought to commission similar research in Australia!

Turnbull made a strong case both for the absurdity of denialism and for the real stakes of the climate change debate. He compared climate change skepticism to a pub conversation where smoking is alleged to be harmless because Uncle Ernie puffed like the proverbial chimney and lived to be 95:

And this is actually — this war on science and on scientists which is being conducted is much worse than the case of person who ignores his doctor’s advice and follows the advice of his friend down the pub, drawing on the life experience of the fortunate Uncle Ernie.

Because the consequences of getting our response to climate change wrong will not likely be felt too severely by us, or at least not most of us, but will be felt painfully and cruelly by the generations ahead of us. And the people in the world who will suffer the most cruelly will be the poorest and the people who have contributed the least to the problem. There is an enormous injustice here. When people try and suggest to you that climate change is not a moral issue, they are wrong. It is an intensely moral issue raising grave moral issues.

Those of us who do not believe the CSIRO is part of an international Green conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation or do not believe that leading scientists like Will Steffen are subversives should not be afraid to speak out, and loudly, on behalf of our scientists and our science. We must not allow ourselves to be deluded on this issue.

Interestingly, Essential Research found this week, in a question commissioned by Channel Ten, that 46% of respondents are more concerned than they were two years ago about the environmental effects of global warming.

At the same time, of course, public opinion has moved strongly against carbon pricing, or at least against the Gillard government’s carbon price plan. (It would be interesting to see if there were more support for carbon pricing in the abstract, though in practice hard to separate that out from the actual carbon tax proposals on the table).

What accounts for this?

It is largely a matter, I’d suggest, of communications errors from the government (and to a lesser degree from other advocates of carbon pricing). It’s not just the litany of reasons why Julia Gillard has a trust problem (most of which are traceable back to the manner of her ascension to the top job). It goes deeper than that.

Three fundamental strategic errors have been made.

The first was to switch the conversation away from the deleterious effects of global warming. Perhaps this was a response to the noise of the so-called ‘debate on the science’. But it’s had the effect of sundering measures to mitigate climate change from the issue itself. Turnbull, rightly, talks about the moral challenges of climate change. Labor, since Kevin Rudd dropped the ball, is unable to.

A related error is to be reactive and frame the plan in terms of economic reform. This stems from the usual round of criticism from newspapers and commentators that the Labor government pales into insignificance compared to Hawke and Keating. But playing the game in terms of tax feeds the critique. So, when the Clean Energy Future detail was released, everyone rushed to the online calculator to see if they’d be ‘better off’ or ‘worse off’. It became all about short term gain and pain, and reinforced the narrative that Labor was ignoring cost of living pressures.

Again, an own goal.

(Incidentally, it was very regrettable that more effort wasn’t made to make it clear that the modelling which produced the numbers about ‘cost to households’ made the assumption that there would be no changes to consumption patterns. Choosing cleaner energy, which will be able to be done off the grid as well as by installing solar panels or whatever, could well, and in fact should over time, reduce costs.)

And here’s the third error; another one where strategy has been shaped by being to reactive to the agenda of carbon pricing opponents. Releasing modelling, and highlighting it so much, renders the debate both abstract and static. Talk of % increases in employment or whatever pales against the putative reality of lost jobs (and the employment insecurity which drives those concerns). It would have been much better to communicate some concrete examples of people working in ‘Green Jobs’, to highlight the skills needed to re-equip workers and re-equip kids for prosperous and sustainable futures, and generally to shape a message which resonates with the everyday. And makes a contrast with a positive future and what lies ahead for us if nothing is done.

What to do? Turnbull has actually pointed the way. Whether Labor is or is not capable of taking a leaf out of his book is moot. But Labor is not the only force involved in the climate change and carbon price debates. Others should take heed.

Update: Cross-posted at The Drum.

If you sit back and take the longer view, reality is actually shaping policy – the reality of climate change, the reality of female workforce participation, the reality of changing attitudes to gender equality, the reality of an impending end to dirty and unrenewable fuel… and same-sex marriage can’t be far off.

And the forces of reaction have nothing to peddle but fear. The peddling of that fear, in terms of public opinion, has of course, been spectacularly successful. To date.

But there may be another tipping point – the decline into collapse of industrial media. Given that the NotW scandal has now seen it suggested, plausibly, that the Murdoch family may lose control of News, I’ve seen it argued, also plausibly, that come the next election, there may be no Australian to run its “campaigning journalism”. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Thinking, though, that everything will always be the same in the Australian mediascape is almost certainly also out of step with reality. We may be seeing the end of newspapers as we know them.

Elsewhere: On some of the issues tossed around concerning mooted and current media reviews, Mr Denmore at The Failed Estate. Anthony Burnett has an interesting UK take at Open Democracy.

NB: Earlier Murdochracy discussion on LP is here.

Tony Abbott’s response has been to incite a revolt against the government because petrol prices may rise by 6.5c/L under at $26/t scenario. Seriously.

Meanwhile, the threat of an actual people’s revolt against the brutal Libyan dictatorship may see petrol prices rise by 30c – about five times that much.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Which begs the question of why. Why chose the term ‘people’s revolt’ in the midst of a once in a generation flowering of democracy in the middle east?

Partisanship for its own sake is politics de jour in our national capital, and has been for at least the past couple decades. Rather than speculating on why that is, I would rather draw attention to the content of Abbott’s message – or rather its lack. By rallying Liberals behind ‘Gillard has broken a promise! Great big tax!’ Abbott gives himself room to manoeuvre without having to actually justify why the details of the proposal are bad.

In some respects, the MPCCC proposal for emissions trading is actually more Ordoliberal than Neoliberal. Whereas Neoliberals were united by their opposition to Keynesianism, and the application of economic principles to sociological domains like crime, the Ordoliberals internalized the Weberian desire for “a re-enchanted world, filled with shared meaning for all, embodied in great public figures or works.” Think of Christine Milne’s promotion of great ‘renewable energy’ projects like solar thermal stations. However, scarred by the vital politics of the Nazi state, the Ordoliberals developed an idea of the market as a device to explicitly temper the growth of the state – hence the reliance on a carbon price, and anxiety about ‘picking winners’.

In contrast, Abbott’s demanded rage from voters without recourse to reflection or justification. The squalid invocation of the term ‘people’s revolt’ was nihilistic to the extent that it relied on an empty, blind rage. No morality. This was simply the ‘hacker ethos’ transplanted into the field of climate policy.

Hayek noticed a ‘double truth’ to liberalism. As one commentator has summarized it: an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy while, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of ‘rolling back the nanny state’ and being ‘free to choose’

Breathlessly eliding Libyan oil with the pathetic quasi-libertarian grammar of ‘great big tax’ put both sides of that truth on graphic display today.

Update: (Mea Culpa – this is from 2009, so think of it as a timely reminder)Turnbull savages Abbott over climate ‘bullshit’

Former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has unleashed an attack on his successor Tony Abbott, describing his climate change position as “bullshit”.

In a strongly-worded blog entry posted this morning, Mr Turnbull personally attacks Mr Abbott for putting the party’s integrity on the line, saying Coalition climate change policy has descended into “farce”, because it does not have a policy.

He vows to cross the floor and vote for the Government’s emissions trading scheme and urges his colleagues to follow him.

Elsewhere: Very strong posts from Ben Eltham at New Matilda, Grog and Bernard Keane

Eltham notes that “carbon wars are back and despite the wishes of scientists and environmentalists, this round will be all about politics — not policy, not evidence, and certainly not science.”

Keane focuses on one message within this politics- the seemingly arbitrary fluctuations within the Liberals’ electricity price rise scare campaign. He wonders whether “… voters are more likely to see the Government’s move as a breach of faith or a reversal of an extraordinarily dumb decision? And have we all got the emotional energy to reach the same heights of hysteria as in 2009?”

Grog has carefully dissected the announcement, noting Gillard’s emphasis on efficacy and fairness.

Update: Sophie Mirabella “If Gillard thinks we want this carbon tax she is delusional as Colonel “my people love me” Gaddafi.”

Here’s one of the key sections of the interview – though, unsurprisingly given the interview panel of Kelly, Shanahan, Ackerman, and an Onselen, they kept on coming back to this and the awful threat of the Greens to all that is free-tradey and laissez-faire:

Paul Kelly: One of the big features of the global trade debate is the argument particularly coming from Europe that there should be trade retaliation against those countries that aren’t prepared to price carbon. To what extent do you think this is likely to materialise in coming years? And what’s your response to this sort of threat?

Dr. Craig Emerson: It is an emerging threat, there’s no doubt about it. There are early signs of this already happening. We won’t cop governments cloaking protectionism in this sort of green cloak of respectability, where it’s just old protectionism. It’s just designed in fact to protect their own domestic industries and they say now “but this is all so that we can have a cleaner environment”. Let’s understand what this is and what motivates is. What it actually is is all those old protectionist instincts coming out, and we will use whatever trading rules there are through the WTO to fight against the use of these devices to protect industries in Europe or anywhere else against competition.

Paul Kelly: Is this a serious threat to Australia?

Dr. Craig Emerson: It’s an emerging threat and we are watching it very carefully and we are obviously campaigning against it. You’ve got Martin Ferguson, the Resources, Energy and Tourism Minister, who’s onto this. We will use whatever capacity we have under the World Trade Organisation rules to rail against this, to work against this. Of course we are committed to putting a price on carbon, but let’s not believe that this is all about climate change. There is a very clear European old protectionist instinct under this green cloak of respectability, and we won’t cop it.

I don’t whether it’s true, as the Bolter believes, that Emerson really is a climate change skeptic. But Emerson has a) a long history of outspoken defence of free trade, and b) a long history of deep skepticism towards environmentalism. It is also true that Europe does have a history of sneaking protectionism in through other means – as indeed Australia does through our food quarantine laws. And if you accept that free trade is generally a good idea, it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of anyone proposing new grounds for restricting it.

However, with Emerson, you do rather get the sense that free trade is an end in itself, not a means to a better world. If climate change mitigation gets in the way of free trade, he seems to be perfectly content to discard mitigation.

And that’s been Labor’s problem all along. Whenever climate change mitigation has run into competing policy or political goals, they’ve been happy to ditch mitigation. And not only has that been a bad thing for the climate, it’s been a terrible thing for Labor.

Something similar will operate for electoral and donations reform.

To the degree that these processes are positive, and of course they’re obviously conditional on the ALP forming government, they have the potential to move beyond purely procedural improvements to the working of Parliament (for instance, time-limited answers and supplementary questions in House of Representatives Question Time) towards a more deliberative style of policy formulation. That holds true for private members’ bills, wrongly characterised in some media as merely an opportunity for local interests to be debated. Actually the presentation and debate of bills on such issues as same-sex marriage has the potential to widen the scope of debate and policy action beyond the very narrow set of concerns walled off usually by the politico-media complex.

(As an aside, I found it extremely interesting indeed that same-sex marriage became a fairly prominent issue in the campaign through a combination of agenda setting by The Greens and civil society movements, and media attention through question and answer forums such as Q&A and the Rooty and Red Hill events.)

So I think we can definitely see signs of what I pointed to in a previous post: a real widening of the hitherto circumscribed boundaries of political debate and policy action.

We can take this one step further by advocating for a holistic approach to donations reform. It’s properly seen as not so much a corruption of the democratic process (although it certainly is) but, more significantly, a privatisation of the public commons of political action.

It’s all interlinked. The professionalisation of politics rests on the existence of career paths which take major party members from staffer to Member to lobbyist, or straight from staffer to lobbyist. “Government relations” or “public affairs” staff grease the wheels which are further oiled through donations, and the existence of Labor or Coalition aligned consultants, think tanks, economic advisors, law firms and so on. The media uncritically reports a host of advocacy research, done only because it provides talking points intended to influence the policy process through both personal contact and framing public debate. And so it goes on, making a mockery of both evidence based policy and the public interest.

If we were to ban all donations from corporate groups (including unions, as Senator John Faulkner has advocated), and utilise the Parliamentary Budget Office agreed on by the Labor Party and The Greens to validate or invalidate “studies” done by industry lobbies and thinktanks seeking to influence public policy, there’s potential for a powerful shift away from the privatisation and corporatisation of our politics.

That’s a matter of process, then, but one that holds out the possibility of enabling a more open and genuine politics.

Elsewhere: Left Flank.

So what should a Gillard minority government look like?

Policy making would have to proceed in a very different fashion – and here both the Prime Minister’s negotiating skills and stated desire to reach out for consensus might be key enablers of a successful approach to governance in a new political landscape. With the executive losing control of both houses of parliament, a more deliberative process to policy formulation would be both necessary and desirable; and it’s here that I find Rob Oakeshott’s suggestions most interesting. There would perforce be more involvement by backbenchers, Ministers would need to be more open and transparent about policy aims, and it may be necessary to loosen Cabinet solidarity.

If we were to have a governance and parliamentary process something like this, it would come as a mighty shock both to our accustomed modes of doing politics as usual, and also media management. The media are most happy reporting on partisan conflict, and treating any suggestion that policy might be debated as an opportunity to go hunting for the “disunity” narrative. A minority government would need to be much more relaxed about being off message, much more comfortable leading public opinion through debate and exposition, and would have to eschew both the policy by focus group approach and the soundbite style of political communication.

It may also be that a minority government would need to be bolder in grappling with the big issues. It’s right to point out that a large reason why nothing positive has happened on climate change has been the related phenomena of its use as a partisan weapon by the Rudd government, the restriction of the policy process to a narrow range of interests – and the failure to persuade citizens of why an ETS was worth doing, and how it would operate.

A more inclusive process could work, if the policy goals were clearly articulated, and well communicated.

None of this is remotely consistent with the dominant Sussex Street style of doing politics, and the temptation to set things up for another election in short order would be deeply counter-productive. As would the temptation to try to control and orchestrate everything.

But the faux-populist/micro-messaging/electoralist style of campaigning – and of governing – met its Waterloo on Saturday.

We do have something of an opportunity here to forge a much more responsive style of governing. But we shouldn’t underestimate the forces arraigned against it, and the force of sheer inertia in how things are customarily done. But it might be Julia Gillard’s singular contribution to Australian politics to lead us to such a place.

LEIGH SALES: Okay, on asylum seekers, particularly those who come by boat, what’s your view on offshore processing?

ROB OAKESHOTT: I’ve been very loud in my electorate that we are the moat people. The very fact people have to come here by boat says we’ve got a huge strategic advantage in dealing with this.

They’ve normally come through three or four countries where those countries don’t even know that people have passed through their borders. So I think we can manage this and manage it in a strategic sense. Our offshore processing is about $470 million a year of taxpayers’ money.

I’m not fussed about Nauru, Christmas Island, East Timor but I would ask that at least we consider onshore processing under UN conventions and 90 day rules. I’m sure we could find a mayor or a council in the North or Northwest of Australia who would be very interested in the 350 jobs that we’re currently exporting to Christmas Island because we are driven by some sort of fear of dealing with this issue on the mainland.

And they’re 350 well paying jobs. They’re Defence. They’re ASIO. They’re Customs.

So you know, I think we need to put fear in the back pocket, deal with it strategically, deal with it on a regional basis, stick to UNHCR guidelines and targets and really step up and deal with the issue on the mainland as much as trying to farm the problem out to some regional neighbour.

LEIGH SALES: And very briefly, climate change. You want an ETS back on the agenda?

ROB OAKESHOTT: Yeah. Look, I think if we are serious about the job we do, there were people who dedicated their lives to the science who said there’s a problem. The response was to get eminent economist Ross Garnaut to write up a report about how we turn the science into an economic model and the whole thing went to mush after that.

I’d ask this Parliament to at least consider going back to the Garnaut Report, and see whether we can lay a platform for delivering on and fulfilling our duty of finishing the process that’s gone from the science to the economics. Let’s get it through the politics and let’s deliver something for this nation.

But, in fact, if you think about it, what both these debates are doing is positioning Australia literally as an insular nation, one that seeks to insulate itself from its global environment; the latter being perceived as a source of fear and uncertainty.

Similarly, we’re doing our level best as a nation to pretend that climate change is something that can be somehow contained by very modest efforts towards emissions reduction – it’s as if we are solely in control of our own destiny, and it’s as if the global negotiations on climate change have disappeared down a rabbit hole.

All this might be one reason why John Quiggin, writing on this occasion for the largely American and British audience of the prominent academic group blog Crooked Timber, headlines his post – “Small election in Australia, not many interested”.

So how does our Antipodean effort to bury our heads in the sand look from afar?

John McTernan, a former advisor to Tony Blair and a thinker-in-residence for the Victorian Government, wrote a fascinating piece for the Financial Times [registration required]. “The west can see its future on planet Australia”, argues McTernan.

From his vantage point, although it’s not articulated clearly by any of the parties, the election campaign reveals an enormous amount of anxiety about climate change, living standards, and our place in the global economy, much of it displaced onto other themes and issues.

In the case of climate change, I’d add that we’ve moved – as a nation – from arguing over the science to a more profound form of denial. We’ve resolved, it would seem, not to even think about it. Climate change is not just the elephant in the room, that elephant is such an ominous beast, it would seem, that we feel the need to avert our eyes completely.

McTernan concludes:

Whoever wins on Saturday, these issues at first seem very Australian pre-occupations. But they represent a toxic and introspective political mix. The desire to enjoy growth while defending our lifestyles against outsiders, accepting climate change intellectually while rejecting its implications for our behaviour, and a nagging concern about the rise of China – all are issues which will quickly move up the agenda in Europe and North America. Eventually what’s going on down under could turn our world upside down too.

We’ve had a campaign dominated by the dichotomy of fear and security.

But, on August 22, when we awake hungover from this self indulgent debate about the small, we’ll find that nothing has been resolved, and none of our problems have been solved.

We simply cannot insulate ourselves from a multitude of global forces, and we need to let go of the fantasy that we can control them, or wish them away. Only by doing that will we be able to successfully navigate the troubled seas of a disturbing world.

Sadly, and perhaps tragically, there’s no sign on the horizon of any leader who genuinely desires to take this necessary path.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.