The story is here.

Pearson’s main issue seems to be the Queensland Wild Rivers legislation, which Brian wrote about recently.

As the article notes, this intervention comes on the back of an attack by Pearson on Friday on Labor.

One thing of interest is that Pearson seems to be acting, in this context, as his own local member. That is – his concerns appear to be mainly about his own region, and his common theme of seeing his own ideas implemented elsewhere.

In that vein, there’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of Overland by Chris Graham, which among other things, makes the point that Pearson’s biggest blind spot is his isolation from other Indigenous leaders, and also critiques the policy initiatives he’s seen implemented (largely with Peter Beattie’s support) in Cape York.

[It] might also be a good idea to take some sort of stock on how the whole “Bridging the Gap” thing is going – almost a year after the Apology. Debate on Indigenous issues appears to have gone into cold storage recently. Although it’s a good thing if Indigenous people are no longer being used as partisan footballs, conversely if we’ve all decided to sit on our bums in a permanent warm glow after the Apology, that’s not a good thing at all.

While it’s probably understandable that the combination of bushfires and the economic crisis and stimulus package kerfuffle have pushed Indigenous matters out of the media spotlight this week, that’s nevertheless deeply disappointing. Props, though, to organisations like SBS which have taken the trouble to highlight the anniversary of the Apology and to interview a range of Indigenous people each night on the news. But, bushfires, Senate shenanigans and the media cycle aside, I think the comments I was making back in January do suggest that “Closing the Gap” has largely fallen off the political agenda, at least in terms of what’s highlighted publicly. So I’m pleased to see Professor Jon Altman reporting in Crikey today on how much progress is or isn’t being made. Go read!

Indigenous activist, academic and co-chair of Reconciliation Australia Professor Mick Dodson has been named “Australian of the Year”. This award makes an interesting contrast with the selection by The Australian of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch and Bart Cummings. I think Dodson’s selection is a well deserved recognition, and I’m encouraged to see someone selected who will undoubtedly be quite critical of the government’s stance on some human rights issues.

Two other observations are worth making. First, there has been some suggestion that the nominations and the selection (as well as the theme of “Reconcilation” for Australia Day) are a reaction to the ALP’s reneging on an election pledge to consider an alternative to 26 January as our national holiday. Frankly, I’m quite stunned that ever made it into the ALP’s platform. Rudd’s apparatchiks must have fallen down in the controversy proofreading stakes. It’s certainly something I would support, and it would be something of a pity if Dodson’s award were indeed in part a device to draw attention away from this pledge.

Secondly, it might also be a good idea to take some sort of stock on how the whole “Bridging the Gap” thing is going – almost a year after the Apology. Debate on Indigenous issues appears to have gone into cold storage recently. Although it’s a good thing if Indigenous people are no longer being used as partisan footballs, conversely if we’ve all decided to sit on our bums in a permanent warm glow after the Apology, that’s not a good thing at all.

Elsewhere: Lauredhel at Hoyden on the nominees.

Elsewhere: Guy Beres.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett at his blog and at Crikey, Hoyden About Town, Dave Bath.

The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.

I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.

Probably the best way of understanding what’s going on is in terms of the clash between post-materialist and materialist politics. Labor governments need their own discourse to recapture those who “should” vote for the centre-left on economic grounds, and moralism and campaigning about the dire effects of pr0n and binge drinking or whatever provides the missing piece of the puzzle. But it is very much the case that such attitudes – or at any rate similar attitudes – cross the political spectrum, and that’s why it’s far too simple to judge one government as more authoritarian than another. There is a reason why Miller is partially right in suggesting that the left’s response has been “anemic” but again I think she’s too predisposed by her political dispositions to be an objective analyst in this instance. That reason has to do with – yep, you guessed it – the same legacy of 60s libertarianism Hamilton rails against, but it’s a big issue, and one I’ll return to shortly in another post.

Similarly, Hendo appeared to be reacting to a press release. Now these characters are held up as “public intellectuals” and their assemblage of titles (thinktank director, educator/consultant, etc) supposedly represent authority and expertise. Obviously, they’re just going to push the political line they run with constantly, but what’s happened to the idea that you should actually inform yourself about what you comment on?

(Hendo, I suppose, doesn’t have time, what with having to write 50 emails a day to Robert Manne about what they each thought about Indonesia in the 1960s, or monitoring the ABC all day for “bias”…)

Something very similar is operating with the reaction of Warren Mundine to the NT Intervention Review. Andrew Bartlett asks some pointed questions:

Yet almost all the attacks seem to be ignoring the evidence about what has been happening on the ground, and the views of the people that live there, instead treating policies such as universal compulsory quarantining of welfare payments and scrapping the permit system as sacred totems which cannot be touched, regardless of the evidence.

NSW based Warren Mundine, described by The Australian newspaper, as an “ALP powerbroker and indigenous leader”, provides a range of insults of the Indigenous leaders involved in the review, saying the report is “touchy-feely nonsense” and “a joke” written by “people who want to accept second-best.”

The inference that any changes to the Intervention constitutes a ‘softening’ is particularly ludicrous given the strong comments at the time of the original legislation setting up the Intervention was passed by Noel Pearson – The Australian’s main standard bearer in justifying their strident support for every original facet of the Intervention and attacking anyone who raised concerns – that the Intervention process “needs to be decisively improved” and it would be a “grave mistake” to be intransigent to any amendments.

If memory serves, I think Mundine has previously been critical of Indigenous leaders who he claims are disconnected from folks on the ground and sip lattes in Paddington or wherever all day. But I can’t for the life of me see that Mundine has made any attempt to respond to the report with anything other than his usual schtick, and a range of ad homs which probably reflect struggles within the Indigenous community more than the Welfare Wars script they get written into.

Elsewhere: Marni Cordell on the substance and politics of the report at New Matilda.

Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form – On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.