Writing in Crikey yesterday, Guy Rundle described the Greek imbroglio as the second wave of the Global Financial Crisis:
So let’s try and make it as clear as possible — the second wave of the 2008 GFC has begun, and Greece is where it started from. The first wave was prompted by the collapse of a series of private investment banks, starting with Lehman Brothers. The second is starting with the deep problems occasioned by the indebtedness of sovereign nations using the broad security of the euro, to be entrepreneurial with their budgets. That’s entrepreneurial in a political sense — thus Greece’s centre-right New Democrats left the nation’s finances unreformed as a way of giving the illusion that the wave of post euro-entry prosperity was solidly backed. Instead the country has simply wildly over-borrowed from its future.
That much is Greece’s problem primarily, and Europe’s secondarily. It becomes a global matter when the degree of exposure of the global banking system becomes clear — hot on the heels of the last crunch, and with nothing resembling a real recovery in-between.
Writing in Crikey today, Bernard Keane concluded that things may not be as rosy as we’d thought in Australia:
The euphoria that Australia has avoided a recession is now giving way to the realisation that as the Government’s stimulus withdraws, there are real questions about just how strong the private-sector growth needed to replace it is.
And the threat from overseas, and particularly the impact of sovereign debt and sluggish economic growth on financial and currency markets, has placed a big question mark over external demand.
Continue reading ‘The politics of risk and uncertainty in an election year’
I referred in an earlier post to Paul Kelly’s style of commentary – a mix of oracular pronouncement and portentous ponderings about the primacy of narrative. I actually read his March of Patriots a while back, and planned to review it. But one hardly knows where to start. Almost everyone – bar the in house cheer squad – referred at the time of its release to the stretch involved in equating Paul Keating and John Howard’s visions as if they formed some unified patriotic project. Obliged, obviously, to deal with their animosity, Kelly sought to square the circle by implicitly positing some sort of distinction between surface events and historical forces, which of course then falls in a heap because his analysis can’t get much beyond the personal and quotidian. The claim that Howard and Keating were some sort of generational throwbacks – exemplars of ‘authenticity’ – contains something of insight, but a dash more of the forcing of categories of which Kelly is so fond.
I could go on, but instead, I’ll refer the interested reader to Guy Rundle’s comprehensive review, which is well worth a read.
Aside from his deft skewering of the position of the Insider Kelly loves to adopt, Rundle is spot on about the almost complete absence of any social and cultural context for the events and decisions Kelly narrates. It’s as if ‘the people’ – that abstraction par excellence – only shuffle onto the stage by proxy; as figures in the ubiquitous Newspoll.
Kelly is trying to write something a little more profound than the ‘first draft of history’ traditionally assigned to the journalist’s pen. There’s more than a tip of the hat to John Howard’s nationalistic view of history’s uses. But he ends up writing solely about politicians, and not all that much about Australia at all. That’s a symptom of a broader disease in the political class, which is also a sort of provincialism. In this, Kelly really is an exemplar.
In a second piece of good news to come from the Federal government today, the Productivity Commission’s mooted changes to the import regime for books have not been accepted.
The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported reduction in prices would have been small (and well run public libraries exist precisely to stock books for those for whom marginal prices are a real impact), and the effect would have been to reduce the range of titles available – both because it would have enabled large retailers to further dominate the market and because of its impact on local publishers.
Nevertheless, Guy Rundle is right to say that the interests of authors and publishers are separable, and to highlight the fact that it’s the provisions in the US-Australia free trade agreement preventing particular support for Australian literary production which are the real – but largely ignored – issue.
However, it should be very pleasing to see that governments are not so prone to accepting all free market ideological arguments on trust. And to see the Labor backbench able to influence government policy.
It also might be an appropriate moment to consider what good the Productivity Commission actually serves.
Update: Spike.
The French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has died, aged 100. Levi-Strauss was one of the towering intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. At Crikey, Guy Rundle provides an appreciation, and contextualises Levi-Strauss’ thought and influence for our times.
Lateline last night featured the best and worst of public debate. On one hand, Melbourne lawyer and refugee advocate Jessie Taylor was interviewed about her own footage of the conditions under which asylum seekers in Indonesia are attained. In a way, Taylor was acting as a citizen journalist with the emphasis on citizenship in the best sense of the word. Conversely, viewers must have been scratching their head at the alarming spectacle of Tony Abbott taking a pseudo-humanitarian line in criticising the Rudd government over the detention of children… following on from news vision of a visibly angry Philip Ruddock defending his honour over the Howard government’s treatment of refugees in Parliament.
The disjunction between the facts presented passionately and the dispassionate observation of the mad contradictions of the political debate between Labor and the Liberals over asylum seekers was telling.
What was interesting as well was a clue to why the debate is playing itself out differently this time around, despite the Liberals’ apparent belief that boat people were some sort of eternal return to the land of Howardia (“we determine…” etc). The fact that Abbott was batting on the government’s pitch should have enlightened the dullest observer to the truth that the issue is now framed differently – because both the government and public sentiment have shifted.
As Guy Rundle observed last week, the way in which the media, after lurching madly in search of an angle, has begun to apply what is objectively pressure from the left on immigration policy, is testament to that shift, even if its recognition has been both belated and (I suspect) unconscious. The context for highlighting humanitarian concerns is now quite different, and Andrew Bartlett is right to discern a tipping point in the policy debate.
We live in more interesting times than some people seem to think.
Elsewhere: Rundle on Abbott.
The Greens are running Clive Hamilton in Higgins.
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.
As a conclusion to his series provoked by The Australian’s “What’s Left” op/ed fest, Guy Rundle has proposed a positive vision of the future from the left. [For my previous LP posts on this theme, see here.]
I’ll post the whole piece over the fold (with permission), but I want to zero in on this point and add a few of my own thoughts:
Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions…
Read that together with another observation:
Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.
It’s precisely, I think, because a certain blockage to thought has now fractured with the Global Financial Crisis’ destruction of the legitimacy of ideological capital (and Slavoj Žižek may be right that this is the second ‘end of history’; the first being the implosion of Soviet Marxism), that we can begin to think a future outside the “no alternatives” terrain of both neo-liberalism and its anodyne Third way echoes. The term “social democracy”, in and of itself, doesn’t imply an economistic orientation, and it should not. What we’re actually seeing, I would argue (and more on this later), is a return of suppressed conceptions of value and values in the popular mind, which create the building blocks on which a vision of the future can be scaffolded, even if the foundation must rest on shards.
In short, and this was a theme of my doctoral thesis, what we need to do – collectively – is to revive our ability to imagine life otherwise. That works better if we allow critique its place – to render what appears natural strange – but also if we ground our thoughts of the future in what we can see around us, and orient our presents to a future hope. A certain utopian sensibility is required – but one which is open to the invention of utopias in a plural and a minor key.
Continue reading ‘Left futures’
As a sequel to my post on The Australian’s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.
Update: Quadrant piles on.
Continue reading ‘Rundle on the recent history of the left’
On Saturday, I penned some thoughts on the series in The Australian on the Australian left, riffing off the first article by Tim Soutphommasane.
Among other things, I queried the practice of addressing a discourse about left politics to the presumed centres of power, describing those who do that sort of thing as “court philosophers”. I also suggested that labourism might be a better place to look for an explanation of how the left has shaped Australian society and politics than social democracy.
Guy Rundle has taken up the torch, reviewing the full series of articles in today’s Crikey, and going where none of the “left thinkers” dared to tread – propounding an “idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose.”
Read his piece (reproduced with permission) over the fold. Continue reading ‘The Australian’s series on the left’
We haven’t had a defence-related thread for a while, so it’s worth rounding up some of the more interesting stories.
Brendan Nelson, in his extended “I was right about everything” valedictory speech, included the much-debated Super Hornet purchase in the collection of things he was right about. Frankly, I remain unconvinced. If it was such a good piece of planning, why didn’t we make sure that the legacy Hornet and the Super Hornets fire the same missiles? That said, the cruise missile we are intending to fit to the legacy Hornets is suffering severe reliability problems, and some reports claiming that the missile might be cancelled (though it’s hard to know how credible those are).
But the big story doing the rounds at the moment is Greg Combet’s announcement of a plan to conduct a new study of performance requirements for various roles in the armed forces, with a view to removing outright gender bans and placing restrictions based on the physical demands of the role:
Mr Combet, a former ACTU national secretary, told parliament yesterday the Defence Science and Technology Organisation would develop a new set of physical employment standards for the army that would accurately measure a person’s ability to perform the broad variety of jobs in the modern defence force. “A priority of the government is to improve the recruitment and retention of women in the ADF,” he said. “My own view is that all categories should be open to women. The only exceptions should be where the physical demands cannot be met according to criteria that are determined on the basis of scientific analysis, rather than assumptions about gender.”
Continue reading ‘Women in close-combat roles in Australian Army?’
In Fairfax’s relaunched National Times, Guy Rundle has a perceptive but inconsistent piece on the unsustainability of parallel importation restrictions (often abbreviated to PIR) for Australian books:
Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their tame flacks, the main game in terms of radically cheapening and improving the flow of information and culture should be the abolition of territorial controls altogether.
History shows new and wider modes of circulating knowledge, debate and information are the means by which entrenched power and unquestioned authority is challenged. Just as the printing press destroyed the monasteries, and made possible the Reformation.
This seems genuinely liberatory, so why are so many of the cultural left against it?
Continue reading ‘Guy Rundle on parallel import restrictions for books’
In today’s Crikey, Guy Rundle segues from the latest round of “Nats should leave the Coalition” talk (refracted, this time, if The Australian is to be believed, predictably through the Malcolm Turnbull leadership prism) to a consideration of the impact of environmental crisis on rural voters.
It’s always been the case that rural or farmers’ parties have had a chance of survival in modern Western polities precisely because there are cultural differences which are much more deep seated than often grasped between rural and urban dwellers. In many ways, to live rurally is still to partake in the legacies of a culture which literally goes back to a time immemorial – one closely tied to the rhythms of time, nature and the fruits of the land. There’s a different time sense, and a different set of values, based not just on a different core factor of production, but on a culture where nature is not so distinct.
For us, in the cities, and in Australia that’s most of us, we really do live in a quite distinct world where things like our food supply are far more abstract and thus far less prominent concerns (that is, they’re naturalised in a different sense of the term – backgrounded, rendered relatively invisible and subject to a routinisation which doesn’t prompt reflection).
Hence the sort of validity – though sometimes the motives are suspect – of identification claims made by farmers with Indigenous custodianship (and the very closeness of some cultural motifs leads to an unreasonable and exaggerated fear of the Other).
Rundle’s argument is that the Nats can get serious by taking their constituents’ interweaving with the environment seriously. But he also suggests that the Greens’ ties to a heap of social stands aren’t necessary, nor necessarily fruitful for them. I’m not sure if Rundle knows that there are some Greens in Queensland who certainly don’t perceive themselves as on the left. I myself have never been convinced that there’s a logical link between ecological and left wing politics, speaking as an advocate of left wing politics.
Continue reading ‘Rundle: Greens should drop watermelon party’
Guy Rundle has written an excellent piece on the human and political dimensions of Utegate, which I’m reproducing from Crikey, with permission, over the fold.
NB: Previous discussion of Utegate at LP can be accessed here.
Continue reading ‘Godwin Grech and the creepy pod people’
Quoth Jim Turnour, Labor MP for Leichardt, in Federal Parliament yesterday.
As Utegate stumbles to a halt, it’s becoming apparent that the more important questions go to the suitability of Malcolm Turnbull for political leadership.
Guy Rundle’s article in Crikey today is an interesting and important contribution to this debate, and I’ve reproduced it (with permission) over the fold.
Continue reading ‘“Malcolm Turnbull is the Coalition’s Mark Latham”’
Asylum seekers and Indonesia
Lateline last night featured the best and worst of public debate. On one hand, Melbourne lawyer and refugee advocate Jessie Taylor was interviewed about her own footage of the conditions under which asylum seekers in Indonesia are attained. In a way, Taylor was acting as a citizen journalist with the emphasis on citizenship in the best sense of the word. Conversely, viewers must have been scratching their head at the alarming spectacle of Tony Abbott taking a pseudo-humanitarian line in criticising the Rudd government over the detention of children… following on from news vision of a visibly angry Philip Ruddock defending his honour over the Howard government’s treatment of refugees in Parliament.
The disjunction between the facts presented passionately and the dispassionate observation of the mad contradictions of the political debate between Labor and the Liberals over asylum seekers was telling.
What was interesting as well was a clue to why the debate is playing itself out differently this time around, despite the Liberals’ apparent belief that boat people were some sort of eternal return to the land of Howardia (“we determine…” etc). The fact that Abbott was batting on the government’s pitch should have enlightened the dullest observer to the truth that the issue is now framed differently – because both the government and public sentiment have shifted.
As Guy Rundle observed last week, the way in which the media, after lurching madly in search of an angle, has begun to apply what is objectively pressure from the left on immigration policy, is testament to that shift, even if its recognition has been both belated and (I suspect) unconscious. The context for highlighting humanitarian concerns is now quite different, and Andrew Bartlett is right to discern a tipping point in the policy debate.
We live in more interesting times than some people seem to think.
Elsewhere: Rundle on Abbott.