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’
One of the most interesting teaching assignments I’ve had for a while is tutoring in a course in New Communications Technologies offered through the School of Humanities at Griffith. Some of the class discussions we’ve had so far this semester have been really interesting – confirming some hunches I have about the fallacies of the ‘Digital Natives’ discourse among other things. But one of the most intriguing aspects of our interchanges has been the articulation of differing views on and revelation of different levels of knowledge about the issue of privacy in the use of social media, and particularly social networking sites such as Facebook (whose use is now so ubiquitous that like Google, it’s morphed from a proper noun into a verb).
It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:
…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.
Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.
There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. Continue reading ‘Facebook, social media, subjectivity and workplace privacy’
Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
Continue reading ‘On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?’
Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.
Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book – Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?
Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.
Continue reading ‘What is the purpose of World Youth Day?’
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