Responsibility for crime always lies with the criminal. But crime has a context. And we must not shy away from it.

I have said before that there is a major problem in our society with children growing up not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.

In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with; let alone what they are doing.

The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

Let’s come back to social theory, Tory style, shortly. But first, let’s survey some of the ‘responses’ to the riots.

What we’ve seen is an orchestrated attempt at the centre of the state to have magistrates ignore sentencing guidelines, resulting in strangely disproportionate sentences like four years for a tasteless drunken Facebook joke, and six months for stealing a bottle of water.

We’ve seen plans to take a huge byte out of Blackberry data, all the better to criminalise texting. We’ve seen murmurings about banning some people from Twitter and Facebook (and on this, see Axel Bruns).

We’ve seen the philosophy of collective punishment come to the fore, with Councils being encouraged to evict the families of rioters from social housing, and cut off their benefits.

We’ve seen what is in effect a lot of dog whistling about “zero tolerance”.

We’ve seen David Cameron racialise crime, at the same time as the media highlights the arrest and sentencing of white kids and black kids with degrees, making all of it seem more like Cameron’s culture of contagion than any other or actual social cause.

And we’ve seen the interpretive battle over the meaning of the disorder won pretty comprehensively by the Tories, with the “sheer criminality” explanation prevailing. That despite the fact that it fails to account for “why here, why now?”.

Owen Hatherley:

Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice. It has just faced its largest strikes for decades. Its lawmakers were recently found fiddling their mortgages en masse. Its press was caught phone tapping hundreds of private citizens and politicians, with little hindrance from the police.

Meanwhile, members of that police force had killed a bystander at one protest, and were criticised for violence and intimidation at another. Then, they shot a man, wrongly claimed he’d shot at them first, and young people across the country rioted, setting fire to police cars, attacking police stations, looting high streets and retail parks. After that, courts worked through the night; in Manchester, a mother-of-two got five months for accepting a looted pair of shorts from a friend and a young man got six months for pinching a bottle of water. Finally, these young people’s families started to be issued with eviction orders from their social accommodation; a form of housing which said government had already committed itself to dismantling. The prime minister claimed this would help break up criminal gangs.

Put like that, the UK sounds much like what the rest of the world must surely see us as, by now – akin to some post-Soviet Republic about to undergo a “colour revolution’” maybe, or a Mediterranean ex-dictatorship convulsed by civil unrest. Imagine the fundraisers and the Facebook declarations of solidarity were it so.

Indeed.

Now, Guy Rundle discusses social and economic theory, Tory style:

Homo oeconomicus becomes replaced by homo sociologicus — an understanding of social life and subjectivity that was once the hallmark of the left becomes a set of tools for the right. Industrial capitalism demanded the management of objects — steel from the mills, flowing to factories for cars. Post-industrial capitalism demands the management of subjects — it frankly accepts, whether it will admit it or not, that running Western economies in a neo-liberal fashion involves managing large numbers of people who are surplus to requirements — hence one talks not of “layabouts” but of “welfare dependency”, not of the “feckless” but of the excluded. Hence the sneaky, piecemeal way in which the Cameron government has introduced cuts — as a series of broken promises about what would not be cut, about tuition fees and the like. In adapting the language and techniques of sociology to their cause, they concede a basic and fundamental point to the left,and fight on our terrain.

However, the sociologisation of the Right occurs with one crucial and defining omission — it shears off any critical account of the effects of the market, of social inequality, of commodification, consumerism and advertising, and their effects on social life and subjectivity. Indeed, the whole purpose of adapting sociological thinking on the Right is to find tools to compensate for the corrosive effects of the market — while rendering those effects invisible. In many cases this is not done consciously — it is simply a product of the ideology that is pumped through PPE courses, right-wing think tanks, etc, etc. Thus, the smooth-cheeked Cameroonians emerge knowing that the market may have deleterious effects that must be compensated for in the interests of social management — but will not or cannot concede that the core of the system is doing the social, cultural and psychological damage.

Indeed.

Owen Hatherley’s piece, cited twice above, describes a logic to the evictions. They progress an agenda of clearing potentially desirable property of undesirable citizens. That’s something even Boris Johnson has been critical of.

Similarly, the collective punishment aspect of benefit cuts and evictions for the families of rioters is in a straight line from the philosophy that inspires “income management” in Australia, and Noel Pearson-esque community tribunals to decide which parents are worthy of welfare and which are not.

It masquerades as a philosophy of individual responsibility, but its truth is one of collective exclusion and social control.

NB: Comments should be responsive to this post, please. Earlier discussion of the English riots on LP can be found here.

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.

This is part of the passage Blair read:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Thirteen years later, Tony Blair is encapsulated by the honomymous phrase – “tinkling symbol”.

He’s shuffling off the stage now. Not with a whimper, but with a book. Guy Rundle, who’s on song lately, says it all for mine, in a piece for Crikey today, which I’m reproducing over the fold with permission.

An empty, hollow man who did so much wrong tries to sing his swansong.

“You know, I of course I feel sorrow for the people who have died, how could you not…” God, there it was again, that voice, pouring out of the radio at 6:30 in the morning, as one of the last sunny days began outside. Tony Blair back from the shadowlands of post-priministerial life, and right in the middle of it all again, to plug his long-awaited memoir, A Journey.

Though it is not being serialised, the doorstopper has become famous before anyone has had the chance to read it, and for reasons evocative of New Labour at its worst. For two weeks now the chatter has all been about the launch and signing Blair will be undertaking at Waterstone’s flagship bookstore on Piccadilly.

The event is being run as a major security operation, and the list of conditions (‘no cameras, no phones, no jackets, your book may not get signed, no talking to Mr Blair’) has turned it into some grim East European parody (‘Comrade Hoxha will be appearing at Borders Ballarat to sign Collected Speeches Vol 52.’), and a magnet for the Socialist Workers Party … sorry, Stop The War Coalition.

Before that there was the gazumping by Peter Mandelson, with his contribution The Third Man, a volume which to call disingenuous would be to, um, diss ingenues?—?‘I was very surprised to find that we were selling peerages for party donations’; ‘I was shocked to find that we had invaded Iraq’; ‘It was 2004 before I learnt of the Millennium Dome’?—?and last and least the change from the allegedly messianic The Journey to the apparently unobjectionably self-obsessed A Journey. Two words, two lies.

But no amount of foreshadowing can prepare you for the return of Mr Tony. The disastrous radioactive tan and pseudo-American accent are gone, thank God in the election, standing glowing at the podium in Sedgefield Labour Club he looked like a trophy he was awarding to himself. But there is still the smooth alien head, the eyes stretched back to the side of his head, the mouth a rictus grin.

And the cover photo is bizarre, a dead ringer for a B-movie serial killer promo, and all the more alarming when you realise that this, by definition, was the one that made him look the most engaging and inspiring. God knows what the discards looked like.

This is Blair’s farewell to British politics,and he means to do it proper?—?the book is everywhere. The absence of serialisation has sent journos scurrying for juicy, easily-digested tid-bits. So we’ve heard how Blair now thinks it was a mistake to ban fox-hunting, which permanently alienated a swathe of marginal country seats; how he can’t believe he was so stupid as to introduce a Freedom Of Information Act; that Brown threatened the nuclear option; calling an inquiry into the cash-for-peerages scandal from within government if Blair tried to reduce pensions; and that the relationship became so toxic that Mr Tony took to the bottle and “became worried about his own drinking”.

God knows what problem drinking is for a man like Blair; a second half-glass of white wine, given his government’s definition of binge drinking, but it has the same half-truth of much else of what he’s saying. Blair never had much chance of avoiding that one; the Labour leadership always hated the hunting ban, but the party was largely in favour of it, and it came up through a private members bill. The FOI bill was a manifesto promise, and the effects that Blair describes that makes it impossible to have both open-debate and proper documentation within government as a “huge shock” could both be expected, to a degree, and are highly exaggerated. Drinking, thinking and hunting?—?not hugely important in themselves but indicative of the way in which Blair manages to avoid inventing reality, but succeeds in bending it to the shape he wants.

That tendency comes out perforce in the two big topics: Iraq, and that man Brown. Ever since his oleaginous performance at the Chilcot Inquiry, in which he wriggled around the word ‘regret’ while giving an account of a war unpurposed and out of control from the start, and his subsequent consultancies, including that for a Korean oil concession in Iraq, has produced something amounting to disgust with him from many people, including those who had supported the war.

Blair has attempted to assuage that despite by the no-strings-attached donation of his book advance (4.6 million pounds, $A9.5 million) to facilities for injured soldiers, but it’s indicative of his lack of understanding that none of the money went to any bloody Iraqis. To do so would be to admit some guilt.

A Journey continues Blair’s long career of obfuscation over the blatantly deceitful, amoral and chaotic lead up to the war, with Blair refining the idea that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program that could be restarted quite rapidly as a casus belli. That was not the case that was presented, of course?—?we were told that Iraq had WMDs ready for use within 45 minutes of attack.

Despite the fact the British intelligence ‘dodgy’ dossier contained, inter alia, a masters degree taken off the internet and presented as intelligence, or that former inspectors such as Scott Ritter had set out the clear proof that Iraq did not have WMDs, it is clear that war had been on the agenda since 2002 and possibly since before 9/11. In his major publicity piece, an hour-long BBC interview with Andrew Marr, mention of the ‘45 second claim’ was the closest Blair got to losing his ability to dissemble or even speak at all. Unsurprisingly, because it was a barefaced lie.

For the rest of it, it’s the vaguely mad circularity whereby Blair restates the need for the West to reshape the Middle East, and then warns the struggle may become more bitter and wider, because the Middle East seems to be so full of people who unaccountably hate the West.

But of course, the Iraq years were for Blair about the struggle with a malign tyrant of ceaseless energy and cunning. Apparently it was only in the final years the relationship with Brown fell apart. For Blair, what gave the rationale to welch on his deal to hand over to Brown within two terms, was his suspicion that Brown would not follow through on the ‘new Labour’ agenda. This apparently was not futile wars, but public service reform in terms of choice, service delivery, etc.

But even here Blair seems to be seeing the whole debate in the rear-view mirror. His passion was for various forms of quasi-private schools academies even though (like charter schools in the US) they have underperformed state schools on a pound for pound basis. He claims at one point that the NHS wasn’t an issue in 2010 because “Labour had basically solved it”, which will be news to anyone who has had to wait four days for a GP appointment in a 1948-era front-end system that genuinely was in need of reform, and didn’t get it. About 70% of people wanted the privatised oligopoly of the railway renationalised?—?hardly possible but giving a license to shake them up. And on and on.

Indeed what Blair appears to have meant by public service reform is cutting back welfare in a neo-Thatcherite manner, something which Brown prevented him from doing, thus making him, in Blair’s eyes, unfit to govern. Whether public service reform was ever the vote winner Blair thinks it was, arguing that lack of it cost the 2010 election remains to be seen after the ‘08 crash. Blair would have been dumped too. But Brown’s refusal to let Labour start the cutting may well have given some bulwark to the poorest against the Lib-Con condominium. Blair’s verdict was that Brown was unfit to be PM because of this and because he had “an emotional intelligence of nil. Strange guy.”

Strange guy indeed. Brown himself moved pretty far to the Right, with his enthusiasm for finance-led ‘endogenous growth’ and neo-Victorian moralists like Gertrude Himmelfarb, but Blair simply became a global imperialist, for whom domestic concerns in a shitty little island loomed ever less interesting with each new invasion. He helped sow hate and chaos in the whole geographical middle of the world, and he offers more of the same as a response to what he had created.

He sacrificed a genuinely modernised Britain on the char-blackened altar of a naivete about the West that can only come as the product of being a deeply shallow person. Blair’s new Labour did improve the lives of the poor, but it never got around to attacking inequality of opportunity, before the martial drums began to sound. Had he not committed to that slaughter, and those to come, we could assess him as a middling successful social market reformer?—?and one who might still be in power, accepting the thanks of a grateful nation for avoiding the Bush-era quagmire.

Instead we have a man who reduced hospital waiting queues in one country, while filling the morgues of another?—?and then argued that each act inhered in the other. No wonder his face has the perennial tension of a man who is forever trying to stop his skull from breaking through his skin. No wonder he is loathed, even by his colleagues, supporters and friends. Farewell to him, as he wanders between the winds of ‘interfaith dialogue’ and speeches for Exxon, in perpetual self-justification and fear of a warrant.

All I hope is that there are no more mornings when I wake again to his voice on the airwaves, Narcissus triumphant, all echo and no psyche.

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.

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.

Of particular interest are her comments on the contrast made between Kevin Rudd’s allegedly autocratic style of governance, and Gillard’s putative consensus approach. This also goes to the question of the reaction to the overthrow of a first term PM, and the reasons why the manner of her installation is problematic for many.

There’s lots to talk about here, but I want to focus on the question of presidential style politics.

As I said in the comments thread at Hoyden, one interesting point in terms of tigtog’s argument about the quasi-presidential system is the way Julia Gillard has gone about distancing herself and the government from Kevin Rudd. Her manner of proceeding, and the way it’s been framed, has been precisely aimed to suggest that a new leader implies a new policy direction, and to gloss over the continuities with ALP policy under Rudd which tigtog identifies (although I do think it’s significant that the rhetoric has moved rightwards so quickly). The (quickly shattered) expectations among people that policy would shift in areas like same sex marriage and the net filter also fit neatly into the presidential box.

I also think the Timor kerfuffle demonstrates that “consultative” leadership is not the panacea that many claimed it was. We can see that from the fact that the decision was obviously taken quickly, the ground not prepared, and dominated by conceptions of political strategy and spin (as with her remarks about so-called political correctness). Waiting for a “consensus” to emerge on climate change is also a recipe for inaction in the short term and disaster in the long term.

We’re also witnessing a meme emerge that it’s difficult to judge Gillard’s actions on the basis of her rhetoric, given that she will have been PM for only a short period of time before we vote. This is to ignore the fact that governance, these days, largely proceeds in train with politics, and that the public articulation and framing of policy issues is absolutely key to what then occurs. This view has the effect of focusing our attention, as we decide how to vote, more on Gillard’s personality than what the actual record of the government in which she has been a crucial player for almost three years is, and thus reinforces both the presidential “new slate” and persona driven themes. It also tends to exempt Gillard from legitimate criticism.

I think there was an element of wishful thinking in the belief by some that the ascension of a PM from Labor’s left might see an about turn on precisely the issues that many have problems with in Labor’s policy record. Similarly, I think it’s unlikely that a re-elected Gillard government would suddenly reverse course on the key areas she’s identified as needing to be “fixed” – tax, asylum seekers and climate change. I think it’s much more likely that she would proceed as she’s begun.

This goes to the concentration on personality politics which bedevils a presidential style of governance. At a structural level, Guy Rundle is right to say that Labor’s left is effectively dead. Tigtog is also right to say that Kevin Rudd’s not being a traditional Labor figure was part of his strength, and one of the reasons we had a lot invested in him, as well as a large part of the ostensible reason for his political demise. Here we are not talking about ‘Saint Kevin’, as some would have it, but about the fact that late modern Labor is not fit for purpose, if the purpose is to advance a progressive politics.

By buying into fantasies about a revival of a progressive politics under a new leader working within the same old party structure, and advised by the same old focus group and poll obsessed apparat, we’re stuck in exactly the same paradigm where politics becomes all about individuals and not about much broader trends. That’s where, paradoxically, I think a broader form of democratic input into the selection of party leaders could shift things.

British Labour has seen 30 000 new party members join since the defeat of the Brown government. That’s remarkable for a party which was viewed as exhausted by a long term in power, and which was said to have run out of ideas and impetus. It’s by no means a perfect exemplar of participatory democracy, or public reasoning, but the Labour leadership contest has enabled a real refocusing on what the party stands for. That’s what we do not get in Australia with a change of leadership, or after election defeats. If we were to discuss, and deliberate on where progressive politics should go, and how to revive the progressive impulse, instead of projecting fantasies on leaders past and present, then I think we’d be better off.

The fact that the Coalition have chosen to focus in on these concerns is not a reason not to discuss them (for fear of giving some sort of aid and comfort to partisan enemies, as some would have it) but just a reflection that opposition politicians can read the public mood as well as Government members. We do have a real problem of democratic legitimacy in this country, at a time when the social bases of parties has atrophied and they have turned their backs on participatory democracy, choosing rather to privilege a narrow range of members of a political caste, whose reward for failure is often a highly paid corporate gig.

I myself would like to see both primaries for candidate selection (trialled at state level by the Nationals in New South Wales and Labor in Victoria) and an electoral college for the Leaders of the major parties. I think that there is no doubt that a narrow basis for selection within caucus and party room leaves leaders more vulnerable to the shifting sands of polls (often misinterpreted by the media) and to campaigns mounted by powerful vested interests.

It may well be, as Guy Rundle argues, that – as in the case of Gordon Brown – a model such as UK Labour’s makes it unduly difficult to remove a leader who’s proved to be a failure. But Brown’s problems stemmed as much from the fact that his legitimacy suffered because he had been anointed in an uncontested leadership election. One could easily envisage a less complex method of revisiting a leadership decision which nevertheless still enjoys greater legitimacy. And, crucially, I’d argue, making the electorate for party leadership broader and less reliant on the climate created by the media noise machine and by the fears and herd mentality of MPs would reset expectations of leadership, and create a different political situation.

I believe it would be a better system.

Julia Gillard could leave a lasting legacy by moving to involve the Australian people and party supporters in a much more direct way in the grave question of who leads us.

The UK Labour Party’s electoral college processes are outlined in this House of Commons Library research brief.

I think these matters are worthy of serious discussion, at some remove now from the extraordinary events of last Wednesday and Thursday. As an additional prompt for debate, I’ve excerpted some of a piece by Ben Eltham published at The Drum today, which I think encapsulates nicely what’s at stake. Read on over the fold.

If you need a snapshot of where politics is at in Australia in 2010, consider this: while top mining executives have the phone numbers of senior government ministers, ordinary voters don’t even get to vote on who the Prime Minister is.

You can of course quibble with my analysis by pointing to Australia’s Westminster tradition, in which the convention holds that Prime Minister must enjoy the support of a majority of the Parliament. On this measure, Julia Gillard clearly has a constitutional right to hold office.

But this ignores the fact that Australian election campaigns get more presidential every term. Political parties might reserve the right to change leaders at their whim, but when it comes around to election time, they campaign hard on the leadership qualities of their key figurehead. In 2007, it was the Australian Labor Party that created and championed “Kevin07″, and it was Labor who made much of the ambiguity created by John Howard’s announcement he would step down for Peter Costello sometime before 2010. Hypocrisy is often taken for granted in politics, but we should remember that every lie and every deception subtracts a little more trust in our democracy.

It’s a point made well recently by Jeff Sparrow, when he writes that “ordinary people are more disenfranchised from the political process than in any time in a generation. The institutions and structures that once allowed Joe and Jane Sixpack a degree of policy engagement beyond a few minutes in a ballot box have been atrophying for years.”

While the grassroots of political parties wither, the vested institutional and corporate interests within them continue to flourish. The Constitutional role of the Senate, for instance, was originally framed as a chamber of states’ rights and executive review. Nowadays it is the easiest path to power for machine politicians from the major parties, who can scheme their way to an unassailable spot on a Senate ticket, thus giving a Nick Minchin or a Mark Arbib a six-year seat in Parliament without the tedium of representing a district in the House.

If last week’s events show anything, they show the need for renewed efforts towards constitutional and electoral reform in Australia, particularly the need for primary elections for political candidates and more opportunities for direct democracy. Whatever the other flaws of US democracy, at least there voters have the right to directly choose their head of state. Registered voters can also participate in primaries to select their party political candidate for a particular election. It’s a far cry from the branch stacking and backroom machinations so favoured by the New South Wales Labor Party.

… we must now ask ourselves whether politics as usual allows any leader to wrestle with the great moral challenges of our time.

Because those challenges are not going away, even as the timescale of the Twitterverse and the 24 hour news machine rolls relentlessly on to another moment of the present.

One of the article’s themes was that the professionalisation of politics – its disconnect from most people’s lives, and the relentless drum beat of the always on media cycle make it nigh on impossible for any political leader truly to address the diabolical problems we all face.

In seeking to explain Kevin Rudd’s political demise with reference to factors that go beyond the quotidian, I was not alone. Jeff Sparrow wrote an excellent piece about the personalisation of politics (originally inspired by David Marr’s Quarterly Essay), and why the focus on leaders’ personalities arises as a symptom of an absent politics. Now [via tigtog] there’s another angle on the same question – Guy Rundle’s excellent post on the reasons for the sudden collapse in legitimacy many politicians have experienced, and the associated collapse in mainstream politics:

The coup against Kevin Rudd was seen by all commentators to be a remarkable occurrence, as for example would a dancing building. It is only when you realise that there’s an earthquake moving underneath it, that it starts to make sense.

If you haven’t read Sparrow or Rundle, and you want to step back and consider the destruction of Kevin Rudd and the ascension of Julia Gillard in a much broader context, you really should take the time to do so. Both pieces are far superior to anything you’ll read in newsprint.

Guy Rundle disagrees. In a powerful post at The Stump, he argues that the languages and practices of late modern managerialism created an atmosphere where the consequences of the fires – deaths, which as he says were truly horrible (and some possibly avoidable) – were depersonalised and treated as the objects of a bureaucratic machine, which failed to do what it should have done because of the lack of leadership.

In other words, the leader was following the followers, who were clearly in need of some leadership – which is in essence, creating a new situation, imposing human collective will on an unfolding process.

Could dynamic leadership have saved lives? We don’t know, but we do know that there wasn’t any of it in place.

Right across the board there should have been resignations after Black Saturday – Nixon, the whole CFA leadership, others. Some might have been re-appointed, but the important thing was surely to acknowledge that something had happened, that there had been a breach in reality.

Instead we get the opposite – an elite and interconnected political class, made up of the higher echelons of the ALP, the police, the bureaucracy. Overwhelmingly conformist people, eager to fit in with whatever ridiculous managerialist mantra rules the roost, living in perpetual fear of a situation that others would welcome. Such groups become reinforcing – once they dominate a party like the ALP, the political leadership ‘populates the map’ with mirror-men and women.

Avoidance of reality, he suggests, was the dominant mode of apprehending the fires.

Is Rundle right? Could it be the case that state governments, denuded of any real responsibility for things that matter, have become the ultimate domain for what Max Weber called “the administration of things”? That state politics has become the sphere of petty partisan politics, not a vehicle for realising a collective will? And, if so, what should we do about it?

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.

There’s a close consonance between the shift in political sentiment in Australia and the economy. The assumption that we’re ‘out of the woods’ allows the Opposition to gain traction with its debt message, and that message also builds on the resonances of the false equation between household and state balance sheets. The implication – the point at which it ‘cuts through’ – is that over-geared citizens feel that they’re still very exposed to any further economic turbulence, and the analogy with the government is supposed to be plain.

Keane concludes:

For once, the Government can’t be accused of reacting too late. As a Labor MP told me, there’s a reason why Kevin Rudd endlessly reiterated “we’re not out of the woods yet”. It’s because the Government actually believed it, and conditions are now suggesting it was right to. Like the RBA, the Government has major decisions to make about the level of stimulus it keeps providing. And the data on which it has to make those decisions isn’t at all clear yet.

In his most recent commentary, Immanuel Wallerstein writes of “Chaos As An Everyday Thing”:

As a result, governments are faced with impossible choices, and individuals even more impossible choices. They cannot predict what is likely to happen. They become ever more frantic. They lash out by being protectionist or xenophobic or demagogic. But of course, this solves little.

He concludes:

So, this is what everyday chaos is like – a situation that is not predictable in the short run, even less in the middle run. It is therefore a situation in which the economic, political, and cultural fluctuations are large and rapid. And that is frightening for most people.

Kevin Rudd’s political success last year was built on the dialectic of fear of uncertainty and reassurance. Tony Abbott’s political message this year rests on the same foundations – ‘yes, we’re out of the woods, but if the government goes on spending, things might yet go horribly wrong’. But if external shocks and weak private sector activity are the ingredients of the political economy of an election year, to whom do worried voters turn?

It’s not immediately obvious how either side frames its message in a climate of economic uncertainty and everyday worry. But that’s one of the underlying dynamics of the political contest this year.

Elsewhere: A sociology of global chaos.