Firstly though, I wanted to defend Mitchell against Mia Freedman, who is angry because she was quoted, accurately, in the book. Let’s be clear: all of Freedman’s explanations about the subsequent meetings she had with Abbott where she “learned” that she was “mistaken” – all of that is outlined in Mitchell’s book, on pages 123-4. The publishers should not have put the quote on the cover in a way that implies a review of the book. But that is not Mitchell’s fault. If Freedman really believes Abbott’s “charming” explanation that he is not really against all the things he has spent his life opposing, then perhaps she should remind herself of Abbott’s “only if it’s in writing” understanding of truth.

However, that clarification aside, there was a lot to be disappointed in. For instance, seeing Gerard Henderson (ctrl F for “HISTORY CORNER”) correct a feminist writer about the difference between RU486 and the morning after pill, is not fun. Mitchell confuses the two twice, the first time on page 3. This is frankly an unforgivable error in a book that is all about a major threat to women’s reproductive rights. There are a number of other errors outlined in Henderson’s list, such as the dates of Gillard’s swearing in as PM, and the claim that Don Randall is a Queenslander (sadly, we Western Australians get to claim him). These small errors are frustrating because none of them have any impact on the main argument of the book, but they allow Abbott’s supporters to call into question the most important information, which is accurate.

Factual errors aside, the most disappointing aspect of the book is the tone it’s written in, which is snarky, but not very funny. I love snark, but I like it when it adds to the point, rather than just repeating it. For instance, on page 45, Mitchell tells how Abbott missed most of* the birth of his daughter because he chose to play football instead – he sent his mother to be with his wife. This is an appalling story, and nothing is added to that with asides such as: “Eventually, at 3:00am, Louise Abbott was born – without much help from her father.” It’s a small complaint, but the book is full of such asides – they add little to the story, and if they annoyed me, a committed Abbott-hater, then I can’t see how they would be helpful in convincing the undecided.

The tone only gets worse in Mitchell’s conclusion. On page 172 she writes: “Even though he is married with three daughters, he freely admits he has been mostly absent from the housework and childrearing. Is it any wonder that he has no understanding of what Australian women, who are more than 50 per cent of the current population, expect or need from a wannabe prime minister of their country?” Julia Gillard has probably also been mostly absent from housework and childrearing. So have I! Does that mean we are not prime minister material? Abbott has been an MP since 1994, and a government minister for much of that time. Despite a popular conception of MPs as lazy, it is a job that requires long, long hours. Of course he hasn’t pulled his weight around the home. What’s relevant is his view that women are less suited to leadership, not how much housework he happens to do. I’m sure, too, that most women wouldn’t put “knows how to vaccuum” at the top of their list of desirable prime ministerial skills.

I really wanted to write a good review of this book. I’m really glad that it came out now, as a hook to remind people of the kind of nation Abbott would like to mould us into. But this was not the book to do it, sadly. As someone who already sympathises with her thesis, I should have found a polemic against him an enjoyable read. More importantly, for it to achieve its stated aims of warning Australian women who don’t follow politics as closely as I do, it shouldn’t induce sympathy for the subject it seeks to attack. Abbott is a conviction politician, no matter how angry certain commenters may be when I say that. He wants power, yes, and he is ruthless in his pursuit of it. But he wants power for a reason, not just for its own sake. I just hope that the debate this book sparked gets people talking about what those reasons are.

*My bad.

Am I the only person who is thoroughly sick of the neoliberals and right-wingers carping on about the evils of the welfare state? It was, after all, they who invented it. As an unapologetic member of the “left”, I agree wholeheartedly with much of the standard populist critique of welfare. It is psychologically destructive to individuals, families and ultimately society as a whole. It’s effects are corrosive and often multi-generational. It is mostly counter-productive in terms of its stated goals. Far from eliminating need, it actually entrenches it. It represents a colossal waste of human potential. And it is increasingly becoming a form of institutionalised cruelty, as the “tough love” policies of both major political parties ramp up.

Which is why like any good socialist I advocate government wage subsidies and direct employment programs! People need blummin’ jobs, not welfare. Welfare as we currently know it is the direct result of neoliberal ideology. (Note: I am not talking about the old age pension and similar programs. Yes, those were created by left/liberal people. But those aren’t the kind of welfare the right is complaining about in any case. I’m talking about welfare that has its origins in trying to deal with entrenched unemployment.)

The neolibs mandated the deliberate creation and maintenance of a sizeable pool of unemployed in order to “control inflation” (by which they meant, control wage demands and increase their profit share). The success of this inhumane policy is reflected in the ever increasing percentage of the economy that is siphoned into profits. Since the neoliberal era began in the early 80′s, wages have all but stagnated in relative terms, while profits have sky-rocketed and the corrosive income gap has widened ever further.

The creation of this pool of unfortunates, whose role is to suffer and act as a warning to those who would challenge capital (and provide a scapegoat for those who need someone to feel superior to), was the deliberate and intended result of neoliberal policies. The modern welfare state proceeds directly and inevitably from this policy decision. “The left” had nothing to do with it; entombing people in entrenched welfare is a betrayal of everything the old left ever stood for.

The problem is that a generation of “lefties” have grown up defining themselves in the terms of the right. Few self-identified left wingers today have any knowledge of the economics that used to define their politics; in their minds, to be “left wing” is simply to have a humanitarian concern for the victims of neoliberal policies. Like the friend who tends the wounds of an abused spouse without ever intervening in the abuse, we have become enablers of those who stand against our beliefs. This will not change until we become aware of this dynamic, and take steps to end it.

Please bear this in mind the next time you are confronted with a right wing nutter spraying forth on the evils of the unemployed and benefit scroungers. Without neoliberalism, there wouldn’t’ be any. They own this mess.

Chris Dickinson is a member of the Greens (WA). The opinions expressed in these posts are entirely his own.

Intriguingly, this seems to be something that’s very topical. We’ve seen two books specifically addressing how class disdain is expressed through cultural contempt published recently, Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class in the UK, and here in Australia, David Nichols’ The Bogan Delusion.

The topicality of Jones’ work is starkly evident from the way that the denizens of areas which experienced rioting recently have been characterised as if they’re some sort of savage and de-civilised beings, part of a Tory backlash which is also heavily racialised.

[Jones reflects on the riots here.]

In Australia, things have been slightly different, as we’ve seen white working class people employed as political weapons since the days of Pauline Hanson. One of the ways neo-conservatism has worked as a screen for neo-liberalism has been the celebration of the supposed nativist authenticity of outer suburban culture, a celebration orchestrated by latte sipping Liberal voting middle aged white people, the chattering fraction of the bourgeoisie.

This then produces its mirror, a self-identification by progressives which looks a lot like the ‘inner city’ stereotype. It proceeds in train with the decline of class politics, the de-unionisation and fragmentation of working class jobs, and the dis-organisation of politics in favour of cultural identities.

The paradox here is that the space of the political narrows to a debate between different groupings of inner urban highly educated progressives; and actual poverty, inequality and, well, class are screened out in the ultimate social exclusion.

But the repressed returns: in malicious humour. At Left Flank, Liz_beths takes a look at how this works, in what I think is compulsory reading, through twitter memes such as #boganmovies and #tightsarenotpants, and websites like Things Bogans Like.

In doing so, she has put her finger on something very important indeed about how politics now works in Australia, and how politics and class collapse into cultural distinction. Politics, and economic interest, are distorted and dissolved by a cultural imaginary.

Neoconservatism is, in that respect, a tidy racket for those on the inside, in which they play their readers for chumps, again and again and again – urging them on into culture war skirmishes, while the free market parties for whom they gormlessly vote denude everything they hold dear. Does, for instance, anyone think that, once in power, an Abbott government will do anything whatsoever to prevent market forces from continuing their slow destruction of the country towns from which the Convoy of No Confidence emanates?

But those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, as Powell famously said.

And there’s nothing objectively madder than the activists engaged in a constant and frenzied struggle against a culture – indeed, a world – created by the neoliberal politicians they support.

The tension in the party was highlighted in a clash between Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in the 2008 White House race and a veteran who has done deals all his political life with colleagues from the Democratic party. He described as “bizarro” the newer members and dismissed them as naive, seeing the world as a Lord of the Rings battle between good and evil. One Tea Party senator elected for the first time in November, Rand Paul, in one of the stranger exchanges of the week, responded that he was happy to regard himself as a hobbit.

The dynamic of the crisis has pivoted on the intransigence of a small number of Tea Party aligned Republican House members. Hence, as Paul Krugman points out, the usual process of compromise has seen Barack Obama offer up cuts to social spending which “are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers”.

If the Tea Party legislators are in fact obsessed with ideological purity to the exclusion of most everything else, then we are observing something very interesting indeed. Slogans about “small government” have morphed from vague statements of orientation and political differentiation into a threat to the continuance of governance as usual. Fantasies about 18th century Republics threaten to have their effect on reality in 2011.

While neo-liberal rhetoric has enveloped American politics in the last few decades, the reality has been “big government conservatism”. Now that reality awaits its showdown with an ideology sundered from any real concern with consequences.

Ideology is always part fantasy. But, usually, the fantastic element is contained within political structures and routines. If it prevails to the exclusion of a relation to reality, then the result will indeed reshape reality, but not in the way that the ideologists might want.

You can follow the trainwreck here. Some impetus to a resolution comes from the spectre of a meltdown when Wall Street opens on Monday morning. But the forces working against a compromise may yet prevail.

NB: Previous discussion of the debt crisis on LP is here.

It’s worth putting the negotiations in a different perspective.

The crisis can tell us a lot about two inter-related processes, both of which are now coming to a head. A declining empire is faced with unpalatable choices, and its political class shows its true colours.

It’s all quite neatly encapsulated by Michael Perelman, who opens with a striking quote from Joseph Schumpeter:

“… public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare — all this and more is written in its fiscal history.” He cites Goldscheid. 1917. Staatsozialismus order Staatskapitalismus. “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

Following Schumpeter, the budget debates illustrate the kind of life that the rich and powerful wish on the rest of society. Get rid of the social safety net, destroy unions, turn the clock back to the nineteenth century. And yes, a bloated military to fight in every corner of the world.

In a similar vein, there’s Jodi Dean, who I think is wrong to surmise that Barack Obama is rapt with delight about the situation, but otherwise makes some telling points. Where she errs is to imagine a ruling class frenzy, as if the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” were plotting around the White House cabinet table. What I suspect is much closer to the truth is that the fight over priorities and political advantage is laying bare the underlying logic of US government and politics.

What we’re seeing is a governmental edifice that can no longer ensure a reasonable standard of living for a fast growing number of its citizens, and whose fiscal reliance on the rest of the world is now becoming more evident. At such a moment, denial and ideological smoke and mirrors shape politics, even if, as Perelman suggests, the real nature of the US polity is revealed in the fiscal numbers themselves.

But I don’t think the politicos are wholly aware of that – it’s something akin to the sort of partisan maneouvring and ideological obfuscation that might have characterised the elites of the Roman Empire as it began to implode in the 3rd or 5th centuries.

Spurred on, this time, by the release of 1980 Cabinet papers (resources boom #1) and remarks by Howard government Reserve Bank appointee, Donald McGauchie, we’ve had a fresh round of dire warnings of a “wages breakout”.

This, on top of the usual shrill demands for “reform” in workplace relations – it’s a given, apparently, that the Fair Work Australia Act empowers unions.

Oh really? In a very useful post at We’re All Dead, Matt Cowgill does some myth busting on the current state of play in labour market hysteria.

Among other stats, Cowgill shows that the wages share of national income continues to head downwards, and is at its lowest point since 1964.

A reasonable observer might surely think:

(a) There’s a fairly pure case of ideology in the strict sense of the word in all this hoo-hah – “common sense” which is completely contradicted by facts;

(b) Fair Work Australia actually does incorporate a lot of the thrust of WorkChoices.

But that’s perhaps by the by.

I think one of the most interesting things that came out of Q&A tonight was the way it made me think that the debate over the internet filter is thoroughly misframed, or rather it fails to engage altogether with the issues that underlie it.

Australian Sex Party President Fiona Patten was asked a very interesting question about the way that exposure to sexual content habituates people to a very instrumental view of sex, stripped of its intimate contexts and wrenched out of any sort of human relationship. Whether or not its representation is becoming more violent, I can’t say. But I do think that most of what we see under the guise of “adult content”, and its extenstion into the sexification of everything, has very little to do with:

(a) Mungo McCallum’s view that pr0n is something that people resort to in order to spice up their sex lives – he’s almost certainly completely wrong that it’s not something that people casually consume over their morning tea;

(b) Freedom of expression or civil libertarian arguments.

Stephen Conroy’s gesture, echoed by Sophie Mirabella, that adults can make their own informed choices harks back to some sort of older framing of the censorship debate. We might think of radical Italian cinema, or the Marquis De Sade, or the bowdlerisation of Greek texts, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The censorship battles of the 50s and early 60s were largely about a certain notion of high art, a culture of classical humanism opposed to one of wowserism. Similarly, the ‘free love’ aspects of the 60s sexual revolution had at least the aspiration of expanding human pleasure and obvious links to liberatory movements and impulses.

But we don’t live in that world today.

The nonsense that we’re bombarded with – day in, day out – and here Conroy was right about the ubiquity of it and the fact that it can’t be neatly confined to a “family space” to be filtered out – is something quite different, that doesn’t sit neatly into a liberal versus wowser frame. I’m not just talking about pr0n here but about the insanity of every single mag at the supermarket checkout queue screaming about bodies, bikinis and plastic surgery, and all sorts of other stuff. It’s the marketisation of the body, its commodification – what we’re talking about is the colonisation of the libidinal by capitalism.

There’s a neat circle, then, between social liberalism and economic liberalism, which show both up for what they are. I think we need to confront that before we start jumping up and down about “freedom” when what we actually mean in practice is the right of capital to impose particular body forms and modes of apprehending sex and relationships through relentless repetition.

At the same time, the individualisation of social relationships makes them much more disposable, makes sex much more of an object of assessment and judgement rather than an expression of love. Not that I want to argue that there’s some sort of pristine act of love being deformed, but I think it is incontestable that sex is more and more thought of in a very decontextualised way, even within relationships.

What is to be done?

I don’t know, but I think we need to start talking about commodified sexual culture as it is, not in terms which were set in a very different social formation.

[Just to be clear, I'm not making a pro-filter argument. I am saying a lot of the affect that underpins it comes from elsewhere than the reasons articulated for and against, and that we're missing something very serious if we think only in terms of liberties or the rights of adults.]

As he battled terminal illness in late 2009, acclaimed historian Tony Judt delivered a lecture at NYU that would become the basis for his final book. But rather than be obsessed with endings, he used the occasion to put out an impassioned call for new beginnings, based on the spirit of a past era that now seems all but lost to us despite its relative proximity to today.

Ill Fares The Land deserves to be a key referent for the Left as it thinks through a way forward after three decades of neoliberal hegemony. Judt’s book lays out a well-argued claim that we need not a destruction of capitalism but a re-tipping of the scales to match those of an earlier period – the post-WWII social democratic consensus – defined by a more sensible balance of state and market, public and private, regulation and freedom. In the widely quoted opening passage, he writes eloquently of our current malaise:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

He points not just to the spiritual emptiness of our consumerist, hyper-capitalist times, but underpins his critique with extensive data on the pernicious role of economic inequality in driving these problems, drawing on the synthesis made famous by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their remarkable book, The Spirit Level. Like those authors, he sees the relentless marketisation of every nook and cranny of public and private life as deriving its strength from an atomistic loss of trust created by social disparity.

Judt’s is an angry book, railing against the reduction of politics and social morality to economic logic that governments supposedly cannot or should not subvert. Unlike many so-called progressives today, he trenchantly defends welfare of the universal sort (which operated before means testing apparently became some kind of left-wing ideal). He is willing to support social achievements of the postwar era on a moral basis even if they may be ‘economically inefficient’, although he points out that many neoliberal reforms (such as privatisation) lack efficiency anyway. Judt’s project, openly stated, is to reclaim language that will articulate our political needs – language of justice, redistribution and public good.

Yet when he tries to explain both the ‘Keynesian consensus’ of the postwar era and the neoliberal politics of the current epoch, Judt’s suspicion of economic categories leaves him positing an essentially idealist account. So to him the boom period was the result of elites morally committed to forestalling another Great Depression, while the neoliberal turn is a victory for Austrian neoclassical economists who cleverly pointed to the limitations of state intervention. This dovetails with his conclusion that social democrats today need to revitalise the public debate with impassioned dissent.

Such positions rest on the assumption that a government-directed, booming capitalism can be the usual state of affairs and laissez-faire an unfortunate deviation, to be corrected by getting the right ideas back in the driver’s seat. Yet the postwar period, of almost unbroken economic growth and full employment in the West, remains capitalism’s great outlier, unmatched by any other boom. And there is good evidence that it was neither ideologically Keynesian nor social democratic in character. Rather, governments of all stripes stumbled upon a winning formula of state intervention as they emerged from war in a geopolitically bipolar world. Worse, Keynesian policies utterly failed to fix the first global postwar crisis in the early 1970s, strongly suggesting it was more than neoclassical fashion that provided a springboard for Reagan and Thatcher (not to mention Hawke and Keating).

Unable to understand that his preferred form of society was contingent upon a unique constellation of forces, Judt bizarrely lashes out at the 1960s New Left for undermining collective feeling with ‘self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial’ concerns, thereby opening the door for market individualism. He recognises that social democratic ideology was also undermined by the collapse of Stalinism, but despite many pages stewing over an alternative narrative seems unable to come up with more than a series of abstract appeals to modesty, prudence and incrementalism. It’s hardly stirring stuff.

Despite these shortcomings, Judt’s willingness to put the politics of social justice ahead of economics will rightly inspire many readers. Social attitude surveys in the Anglophone neoliberal countries repeatedly reveal broad and rising support for traditional social democratic policies, even as ‘progressive’ politicians implement the opposite. This has led some to see the re-emergence of an old-style social democracy as a necessary first step in building a radical Left. Judt’s inability to pull together a semi-coherent program speaks to the dangers of relying on such a self-limiting focus, at risk of simply repeating the failures of the past.

Yet throughout Ill Fares The Land, Karl Marx keeps inserting himself into the narrative, suggesting the potential for a greater opening out of Judt’s themes than Judt himself was capable of. Social democracy’s dreams of a just world are also to be found in Marx’s far more radical emancipatory framework, even if the means to that end could not be more different. How to bridge the gap between immediate social needs and more fundamental transformative visions is the essence of politics today – one that cannot ignore the attraction of social democracy’s idealised past but which must transcend it with something genuinely new and better.

Tad Tietze is co-creator of blog Left Flank, where he contributes as Dr_Tad.

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.