Tag Archive for 'ideology'

Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 3 days ago
in Economics, Feminism, Howardia, Industrial Relations, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 144 Comments

A lot has been said about Tony Abbott’s parental leave speech yesterday and today on this blog, on these two threads. As I suspected would occur, most of the qualifications and the actual non-policy aspect of the policy were not reported in today’s press, and the general line was that Abbott’s scheme was ‘better’, because it offered income support for a longer period and at a replacement level of income, rather than the minimum wage.

That’s highly questionable – or rather, it would be ‘better’ for those who are already relatively advantaged, and worse for many who are not.

Let’s put some facts on the table.

Continue reading ‘Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Ethics, Industrial Relations, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 46 Comments

Tony Abbott has chosen to mark International Women’s Day which is, to his mind, of course, all about “benefits… provided to families with children”, by announcing a policy for six months’ paid parental leave at actual salary levels, funded by a levy on big business.

Or has he?

That’s the impression given on the tv news tonight, but a reading of Abbott’s actual speech shows that it’s not a policy announcement.

Rather, Abbott is determined to show that a Liberal government would:

let people know what it has in mind well before positions are finalized because the job of government is to make the best decisions, not to pretend to have all the answers from the beginning.

So, what’s been reported is actually not firm, and is supposed to be some sort of example of Abbott’s idea of the policy making process, to provide a point of contrast with what he alleges the Labor government’s approach to policy to be. This is something he has in mind, rather than an announcement, and it will be subject to consultation and further reflection, and so on. It will be interesting to see if this is the way it’s reported, and whether all the qualifications, musing and speculation in his speech make it into the papers. Continue reading ‘Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Activism, Culture, Feminism, History, International, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 30 Comments

There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin’s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.

The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.

[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]

I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.

It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.

It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.

Quiggin concludes his post: Continue reading ‘John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology’

Torquemada in Lycra

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Federal Elections and Politics
. 32 Comments

Tony Abbott, we’re told, is “real”. Able to mix with the battlers (just like Joe Hockey, another product of the North Shore Jesuit Fathers, and just like yet another, Barnaby Joyce, the accountant in the Akubra), he’s “authentic”.

Kevin Rudd is real too. He really is a wonky, nerdy bureaucrat. Perish the thought that we would want to vote for someone who knew something about policy?

But why is it assumed that the persona doesn’t mask something else? Could Tony Abbott be the one spinning a web of symbolism? Wasn’t George W. Bush the candidate we’d rather have a beer with?

[Rhetorical questions in the mode of KRudd.]

Now, I haven’t read Tony’s tome. Be interested to hear from anyone who has. But, Geoffrey Barker has, and he wrote this in the Fin Review today:

Continue reading ‘Torquemada in Lycra’

“The poor will always be with us”; Abbott’s Brutopia

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Authoritarianism, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 149 Comments

It must be ‘write an op/ed for Fairfax about something a political leader said to me’ week. First, Nina Funnell, and now Michael Perusco:

I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government’s goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no.

In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ”The poor will always be with us,” he said, and referred to the fact there is little a government can do for people who choose to be homeless.

Perusco, the Chief Executive of Melbourne’s Sacred Heart Mission, goes on to refute Abbott’s claim that homelessness is a choice, and to underline how vital action in this area is.

It’s instructive to compare Abbott’s remarks, which he presumably didn’t think would end up in The Age, with this piece of puffery from Senator George Brandis in The Australian: Continue reading ‘“The poor will always be with us”; Abbott’s Brutopia’

What does a conservative leader of the Liberal party look like?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Economics, Elections, Howardia, Markets, Philosophy, Policy and Politics
. 16 Comments

… and no, I won’t be posting a photo of Tony Abbott in any form of swimwear to answer that question. But it’s interesting to observe the blue thread that runs through all of Abbott’s pronouncements – a mindset that Father Knows Best. The answer to the question posed by Ben Eltham in New Matilda, writing on the Coalition’s climate change policy [see this post for LP discussion] – “have the Libs lost faith in the market?” – is surely that conservatives don’t necessarily have faith in it. The Howard government’s practice, in many respects, was as much conservative as neo-liberal, if not more – an increasingly large state, a dirigiste approach to doling out public money to corporations, all manner of attempted pro-family social engineering, and so forth. To some degree, the era of 80s bipartisanship on ‘economic reform’ left an institutional and legal bias towards economic liberalism in state institutions; Treasury, the Productivity Commission, competition law, and so on. But with a lazy Treasurer, for most of the time, Howardism only used economic liberalism as a fig leaf.

I think what we’re seeing now, with Tony Abbott, is that fig leaf being discarded.

We’re back to old fashioned paternalism – faith, country, and trust in your betters. And in the economic sphere, Abbott, who knows nothing much of economics, is happy for the state to sit down and carve up the pie in consultation with his preferred interest groups. All this is really classic National Party stuff.

What’s perhaps astonishing on the surface, at least, is how little we’re hearing from the so-called libertarians and classical liberals about Abbott’s lack of faith in the market. Could it be that they’re mostly more interested in anti-Labor partisanship than their own ostensible creed?

Limits to growth?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Consumerism, Economics, Energy, International, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 51 Comments

The New Economics Foundation in the UK has released a major report – Growth Isn’t Possible. The Foundation, whose motto is ‘economics as if people and the planet mattered’, questions whether exponential economic growth is possible in the face of the disjunction between its imperatives and the limits of the planet’s biocapacity. The authors, Andrew Simms and Victoria Johnson, observe that the language of orthodoxy and heresy is a significant one in economic discourse; among other things, I’d add, the political imperative to focus on redistribution rather than the justice of distribution (and thus the inequality inherent in capitalist society) itself constrains questioning. Yet the thesis that growth has its limits is the pure province of neither 70s faddism or heterodox Marxists. John Stuart Mill proposed in 1848:

… the increase in wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.

The NEF report is summarised in this blog post by its co-author and the Foundation’s policy director, Andrew Simms. The report itself is clearly and well written, and marshals an impressive range of evidence and argument about the economics and politics of energy usage. It’s not a quick read, but I’d strongly urge a perusal of, at least, the introductory and concluding chapters. Many won’t want to have the debate it foresees about limits to growth, but it’s one I am sure will not go away.

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, International, Markets and USA
. 71 Comments

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 15 Comments

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. Continue reading ‘Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt’

Keeping the New Labour faith, even unto death

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Elections, Federal Elections, Foreign Elections, International, Politics and State/Territory Elections
. 10 Comments

2010 is going to be a year of elections. In Australia, we have three state elections – Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, and almost certainly a federal poll*. In Britain, the Labour party’s future is on the line; the same party which was variously cited as inspired by the Hawke/Keating government and an inspiration for the ALP in opposition.

Writing in The Guardian, Seamus Milne has an interesting piece on the failed coup attempt against Gordon Brown last week. Theatrics aside, he sees it as a contest for the future of the party, with the Blairite forces trying to enforce the New Labour line through a proxy contest over personalities and electoral tactics:

But by exploiting the coup attempt to demand a change of direction, and making the prime minister’s closest ally, Ed Balls, their fall guy, the cabinet’s anti-Brown majority has unmistakably called time on the Keynesian-inspired and progressive tax measures that have won public support but caused such alarm in the City, Treasury and media.

Milne goes on to argue that the (now) Brownite position makes more economic and political sense.

There’s a big irony here, given that New Labour’s success derived from an argument that the Labour party had sacrificed electoral success on the altar of ideological purity.

There’s also an Australian parallel, as the Coalition appear determined to avoid competing for the centre at any costs, all in the name of ‘defending the legacy’ and ‘differentiation’. So, it seems that the tendency for parties to curl up in an ideological ball in the face of defeat afflicts those of the right, as well as those of the left.

*In theory, Rudd doesn’t have to go to the polls til April 2011.

Elsewhere: Ben Eltham on the year ahead in politics.

Rebranding capitalism

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Language, Markets and Politics
. 46 Comments

There’s an interesting link in a recent post by John Quiggin; discussion among folks he terms market liberals about eschewing the term ‘capitalism’. I can well remember when it came back into fashion as a descriptor beloved of triumphalist neo-liberals, and I think Quiggin is spot on with these observations:

It seems pretty clear that these developments are related to the global financial crisis and related events. The adoption as a badge of pride by Forbes magazine and others of the previously pejorative term “capitalism” was one of the most extreme manifestations of market liberal triumphalism in the 1990s. But, in the wake of the crisis, “capitalism” is a much more problematic term. It works well enough as a generic term covering all advanced economies in which private capital plays a leading role, but one that is, as we have seen, ultimately dependent on government action for sustainability. We can then say that the relatively unregulated, finance-dominated form of capitalism that has held sway for the last 30 years is being supplanted by a different form in which the role of government as ultimate risk manager is more direct and obvious. But this has little rhetorical value for market liberals.

The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Authoritarianism, Climate change, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, History, International, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Technology
. 146 Comments

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

Continue reading ‘The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary’

After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, International, Policy, Politics and USA
. 26 Comments

A predictable response to the Copenhagen fail has been calls from Australian business for *even more* ‘compensation’ as a condition for continued support of the Rudd government’s ETS. I’ll save the domestic politics of the Copenhagen washup for a later post, but I think it’s also worth reflecting on what underlies the sort of political and policy thinking which leads to bills such as the CPRS.

In my previous post, I reproduced Brian Davey’s piece from Open Democracy, which expressed skepticism about the capacities of the political system to deal with complex phenomena, permeating all sectors of the economy and lifeworld, such as climate change. I agree with the diagnosis, but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions.

There are three similarities between the design of the CPRS and the American Health bill (and for that matter, the US cap and trade bills):

(a) Both started out with an ambit, seeking to find the limits of giveaways and concessions to political and particularly corporate constituencies; rather than from the position of a solution;

(b) Similarly, both come with implicit rhetoric that any action is a good start, and a messy compromise can later be made purer and more effective;

(c) Both seek to accommodate existing interests and shift behaviour only at the margins, rather than constructing a new frame which would require actors to reconfigure behaviours, and create new actors (and destroy or reshape old ones).

In short, this sort of approach to governance is inherently conservative, in that it seeks to match political imperatives to already existing situations, rather than to transform the situation politically. This tends not to work, for reasons which are fairly obvious. Yet, notions like ‘nudge’ and using quasi-markets to achieve social ends are the hallmarks of postmodern progressive policy wonk-dom.

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?’

“Bring it on”

Published
by
Mark
3 months ago
in Howardia, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 50 Comments

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been preoccupied with festive socialising and the fact that you haven’t bought any Christmas presents yet. But, in the rarefied circles of political tragedy, there’s a frisson of excitement, or perhaps manic enthusiasm, unrelated to the upcoming holidays. About Tony Abbott.

Yesterday, we had a ‘fighting speech’ described as ‘Churchillian’. Winston must be turning over in his grave, or at least reaching for another scotch.

Today, we’ve got an op/ed from John Howard’s chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, which certainly fits the description of excitable. Abbott isn’t Churchill today, he’s Spartacus. Make of that what you will. It’s effortlessly deconstructed by Andrew Elder.

This mad boosterism about Tony Abbott’s pugilistic style has one purpose, and one purpose only. (Fantasies about armies of tradies who know all too well the Rudd stimulus has kept them in work adopting Abbott as the new messiah are just that; there’s no sensible electoral calculus in the Liberals’ current positioning.)

If money follows the polls then the Liberals are buggered. If you were on a corporate board you’d have Mr Abbott to lunch as a matter of courtesy, and listen to him describe cutlery as namby-pamby and elitist. Then, you’d send a donation to the ALP to keep in sweet with Senator Arbib.

Both Abbott’s speech and Sinodinos’ piece are really just fundraising letters. The Liberals are broke, deserted by big business. The policy suggestions, such as they are, are also premised on a fantasy – that Labor really is a socialist wolf in sheep’s clothing, with mad skills in disguising its intent to tax everything in the cause of redistribution.

Kicking the union can again is also significant.

Abbott does have an ideological position, one akin to Barnaby Joyce’s. He’s the voice of the petit bourgeois mentality, the populist appeal to those who feel themselves under siege in a fast moving world. It’s Pauline Hanson politics without the racism. Irrational, driven by affect, and projection. It’s the pure cry of the aptly named ‘anti-Labor forces’, and has no resonance or point of connection with the reality most of the electorate see.

It’s capable of attracting all sorts of folks driven by ressentiment, though, so it might bring in a buck or two. Here’s a tip, though: polls to stay around 56/44 in Labor’s favour.

Turnbull to found a new party?

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Politics
. 128 Comments

I mentioned in my previous post that a lot of speculation has now turned to Malcolm Turnbull’s intentions should he lose the leadership tomorrow.

I also linked to the thoughts of Christopher Joye of Business Spectator. This paragraph is particularly interesting:

Perhaps following this fracas the big fella will throw caution to the wind and found his own political party…I am thinking of the Australian Republican Party with an unconditional commitment to combating climate change and reinvigorating the dormant republican movement. Now that would be sure to split the Liberal Party vote.

While we shouldn’t get carried away and underestimate the barriers any new party faces in the Australian political system (or the powerful forces of inertia and ambition which work against individual MPs and Senators splitting from the Libs), this prospect is being taken seriously, I’m informed by a number of sources this morning.

Given the difficulties that the Liberals have had in unifying their disparate bases (and as I’ve commented previously, the problems Labor might potentially have as well with its soft liberal constituency), such a development, if seriously pursued, would have the potential to be something of a game changer. And Malcolm Turnbull could certainly fund a social and economically liberal party out of his own resources, at least for one election campaign.

I’m told there may be more coming out on this later in the week. And today’s Crikey email might be worth a look. Continue reading ‘Turnbull to found a new party?’