Julia Gillard is certainly capable of a sophisticated negotiating strategy, and it’s been interesting to observe that the process of formulating the legislation to implement Forward With Fairness and replace WorkChoices - while managed largely behind closed doors - was accompanied over the year by a fair bit of crowing from business that they’d extracted more concessions than in the two documents released before last year’s election. However, the ALP caucus and the ACTU also belatedly secured more of what they wanted - particularly in last resort arbitration, multi-enterprise bargaining for low paid workers, good faith bargaining and union entry and records inspections rights. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such changes were always contemplated, and certainly explicit attention to the needs of workers with poor bargaining power spread across a number of work sites (for instance cleaners or employees in light manufacturing) was part of the election policy. What is entirely predictable is the tenor of the business reaction, which you can get a sense of quickly by reading this story from yesterday’s Australian. Unions are back and the sky will fall in! In fact, the points business objects to really just serve to underpin bargaining. There’s an element of balancing equity with efficiency, which has always been part of the IR framework in Australia, but we certainly haven’t “gone back to the future”. In many ways, the legislation could legitimately have gone further in redressing some of the imbalance of power in the bargaining process.
If, although as one would imagine there’s some equivocation going on, the opposition allow the laws to pass substantially unaltered, the business whining will be futile. That in itself may push the opposition into a more negative stance. The passage of the laws through the Senate early next year could get interesting.
Glenn Milne used to be frequently accused of being a mouthpiece for Peter Costello. Guess who he’s talking to now?
Pyne, one of Turnbull’s key leadership backers, has now been promoted into the frontline education portfolio and it is Julia Gillard, his opposite, whom he now has in his sights. Pyne has finally assumed his rightful position at the epicentre of the Opposition, a role that was bloodymindedly denied him by Howard for two reasons: he was a Liberal progressive and he was a supporter of Peter Costello. It was enough to generate such negative personal energy from Howard that he continually blocked Pyne’s promotion in what turned out to be part of an act of self-destruction.
Pyne is now where he wants to be in the Liberal pantheon and, more critically, where Turnbull wants him to be.
In case you don’t feel like reading the rest of this guff, Christopher Pyne has “lighted onto” a “proposition” - that while Kevin Rudd and his ministers are portrayed as “Howard lite”, they’re actually hiding their socialist lights under a bushel! Exposes such as Christopher’s clever realisation that transparency in private school funding might lead to Class Warfare will be their secret weapon as they go on the front foot…
Memo to Kevin Rudd: these guys think they can win. And they will now do whatever it takes to do so.
Whatever…
A bit of a shoutout to all the teachers out there on the intertubes - we love youse all!
Today is World Teachers’ Day. I’m sure there are very few of us who don’t remember teachers who made significant differences in our lives. It might be a neat way to celebrate to tell some of those stories on this post - you never know, your favourite chalkies might even be reading.
That might also be a useful corrective to the constant attacks in the political realm teachers have to confront - not to mention working conditions which are far from ideal, and having all sorts of social problems heaped on them to solve when no one else will apparently take responsibility. In Mark’s post the other day, discussing “Wicked Problems” in public policy, he mentioned Judith Brett’s consideration of this theme in her article in the current edition of The Monthly. Brett referred to education as one domain where a whole set of inter-related issues meet which make neat objectives like “better schools” almost impossible to achieve through magical policy transformations pollies of all stripes are in the habit of promising. In practice, whatever you think about the schools policy stuff announced by Julia Gillard recently (and I don’t think much of it), you should be able to agree that teachers are only one part of the educational policy mix. But - perhaps because unions are also a convenient can to kick for both conservative and “Third Way” style pols - they tend to get blamed for everything. I’m sure anyone who’s worked in the education game will agree that it’s a really demanding job, and one that takes a degree of commitment beyond most vocations. Let’s recognise that!
This time last year, we were all feverishly anticipating the calling of the federal election, which was less than a fortnight away. Now, courtesy of the quarterly Newspoll geographical and demographic analysis we can track where and with whom the Rudd government has been travelling well and less well from January to September 2008 and compare the poll numbers with the election result in November 2007.
Possum has all the spiffy graphs.
As The Poll Bludger notes, there are two really interesting trends in the aggregate poll. First, the Rudd honeymoon is still very much alive for the 18-34 demographic (and it will be intriguing to see some good data on how Turnbull’s elevation shifts this - if at all - down the track.) Secondly, Labor is still doing poorly in the West, and has gone a fair way backward in South Australia. (Incidentally, the data supports the point Kim made here the other day about Labor trending upwards in Queensland federally while Anna Bligh’s state regime goes into a slump - albeit a slump which is still of election winning dimensions even if it’s not a Beattie style landslide. And federal Labor hasn’t been hurt in New South Wales by the implosion of the Iemma government.)
A lot of folks are attributing Labor’s performance in South Australia to the Murray-Darling basin issue. Again, it’s worth noting that Labor still has a primary lead of 3 points over the Coalition, but it is no doubt significant to see eight points knocked off its lead so quickly in the last quarter, after having been stable at 49% more or less since the election. I’d be interested to hear from South Australian LP-ers about what they think is going on.
If it is the Murray-Darling, this might say something interesting about the Rudd government’s ability to deal with relatively intractable problems through its preferred mode of governance. Continue reading ‘The state of Rudd Nation’
As Luke Slattery observes, a significant number of universities are moving to emulate either the whole of or aspects of the Melbourne Model - generalist undergraduate degrees followed by vocational postgraduate degrees. UWA and Macquarie are the latest off the starting block, with Macquarie VC Stephen Schwartz stating:
Of course we will continue to teach professional skills - accounting students will still learn to keep books - but we will also ensure that each of our students learns how to analyse scholarly papers, criticise research methods, solve problems and integrate information into coherent arguments.
Some universities which are not going down this route are moving to a broader focus on core subjects and workplace learning for undergraduates - in generalist as well as vocational degrees. Sometimes this is driven by a desire to find a point of differentiation - for instance with Griffith’s emphasis on social enterprise as part of its Arts degree - which is, in part, a recognition that QUT and UQ have the vocational and sandstone/comprehensive humanities angles covered in the eyes of many students. Griffith Arts students also do first year courses like “Great Books”, which must gladden the hearts of the educational traditionalists (I don’t know what’s actually on the curriculum, I should add). And at ACU, all students must do “mission” units - particularly in ethics and to expose them to aspects of the Catholic intellectual tradition (as well as fostering social responsibility).
Slattery notes that some of this is driven by the international market - including the 3+2 Bologna Process for standardising tertiary qualifications across the EU where a bachelors degree is followed by a masters degree as a matter of course. There is probably some benefit - aside from considerations of the international export market - in maintaining the standing of Australian higher education, reducing the over proliferation of degree courses (itself driven by now superceded marketing considerations) and in fostering scholarly and critical skills across all disciplines in the academy. Continue reading ‘Exporting the Melbourne Model’
…45% of Australians think so, according to this fortnight’s Essential Research poll. As a bit of an addendum to my earlier post about Julia Gillard’s speech last week to the National Press Club on the detail of the Forward with Fairness bills which will shortly be introduced into parliament, I should also note that many Labor MPs have been concerned by reports they’re receiving from constituents about continuing abuses of workplace power. This is more the everyday bastardry that WorkChoices encouraged, rather than the headline anti-union moves of big corporations like Telstra. A lot of voters assumed that WorkChoices had already been “torn up”, and there’s significant pressure on Gillard to bring forward some of the implementation dates for aspects of the new legislation.
The whole “keep business satisfied” implementation agenda might have seemed like a good idea last year. It’s not looking so flash now, particularly as the ACTU finally wakes up to the fact that they’ve effectively been locked out of the policy making process.
Elsewhere: More discussion of the poll at The Poll Bludger. Also interesting is the comparison with ratings of attributes between Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd (with the proviso that the data on Rudd dates from June). Turnbull will be worried at the 47% “out of touch” figure. How do you actually turn that around? Brendan Nelson didn’t do so by emoting and going trucking.
Earlier in the year, writing in On Line Opinion, I thought that Labor’s “Forward With Fairness” industrial relations policy was best interpreted as an attempt to entrench a new workplace settlement acceptable to all parties - and I still think that’s the Rudd government’s main game. However, it’s now becoming clearer that an element of union bashing is involved - the tired old Third Way game of establishing supposedly electorally popular distance from teh evil labour movement, and also that the “balance” being struck is tilted quite significantly in the direction of employers. Among other things, this explains the dissent in the ranks of unions toward the lacklustre public performance in holding Labor accountable from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence. It’s also becoming clearer - with the resurrection of demands for “statutory individual contracts” by Julie Bishop as a condition of Senate passage - that the model hasn’t succeeded in producing consensus.
Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.
It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.
Continue reading ‘Julia Gillard and the unions’
MB writes: Lost, it would appear, in the government’s focus on productivity as the ruling motif of the workplace is any consideration of the human costs of work in the new economy. I had hoped that Julia Gillard might bring a focus on industrial democracy and the quality of working life to her role as Industrial Relations Minister, but, to date, that’s a hope that appears a futile one. Nevertheless, I agree with David Coats that we need to politicise “bad work”, as I’ve suggested before, and that may well be a contribution largely to be made by civil society. Anyway, when I read this post at The Global Sociology Blog, I thought it cohered well with this effort, and so I asked SocProf if we could post it at LP, and I’m delighted that she agreed.
Dominic Huez, an MD specialized in questions of labor-related medical conditions, has a book out, Souffrir au Travail: Comprendre Pour Agir, that connects illness and suffering to management practices. He recently had a chat hosted by Le Monde. Here is the digest version of what was discussed.
Rejecting “stress” as the proper concept to define his subject, Huez prefers to use “suffering at work” as the correct one that can be caused by a lack of recognition by one’s peers or bosses. In a very Durkheimian fashion, he explains that the dynamics of recognition are essential to one’s identity-at-work and to one’s health.
For Huez, there are two main mechanisms at the root of psychopathologies at work (in both senses):
Continue reading ‘Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain’
Now that the Howard gubbermint is ancient history - except in the memoirs of the ghost of Peter Costello who wants you to know that Howard LIED six times and failed to hand him the leadership on a platter (ps. don’t waste your 55 bucks on his stoopid book - it’s been scooped, and that’s about it, except Pete WAS TEH BEST TREASURER EVAH! and could have singlehandedly sorted the international credit crisis) - there’s very little force, I’d have thought, in a claim that “the history wars have been revived”. A claim made by the usual suspects - particularly Dr Kevin Donnelly - that teh Communists have their hands on the history curriculum under a Labor Government. Read all about it here - in Crikey - by Jeff Sparrow - who skewers this nonsense without even raising a sweat, I suspect. As you were. No narrative here. Look away. There’s commies under your bed though.
Continue reading ‘What if they held a History War and nobody came?’
Although the AEU has been dismissed as one of the dreaded teachers’ unions by Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, some others have actually been looking at the evidence in the evidence-free policy of the Kevin Rudd “education revolution” narrative. And that’s some clever people who’ve actually been reading an evidence based report.
Ross Gittins:
Because the Rudd Government promised to leave the funding formula unreformed during the next funding quadrennium ending in 2012, McMorrow projects that whereas another four years will see annual grants to the private schools increase by 3 per cent in real terms, real grants to public schools will fall by 2 per cent.
All this will occur while Rudd is pressing schools to publish far more information about their performance and encouraging parents to “walk with their feet” if they don’t like what’s revealed.
The state education bureaucracies and their unions have their own reasons for continuing to resist federal pressure to publish performance indicators. But Rudd is giving them a valid argument that his competition is biased against them.
Continue reading ‘(Private) education revolution?’
The MSM is full of reports and commentaries praising Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard for taking on the teacher unions with their proposals for “a new national system of school transparency” based on publication of information and ranking of the performances of schools and those who work in them.
This proposal, and the prospect of a Federal Labor Government beating up on TEH TEACHER UNIONS, has attracted praise from Peter Hartcher, Michelle Grattan, the Opposition Organ and Terry Sweetman.
However, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has a different view. Its Improving School Leadership study finds that the kind of public reporting and ranking of school performance proposed by the Rudd government does not, on the evidence, improve school performances and may even be counterproductive.
Continue reading ‘OECD in league with communist teacher unions’
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?’
Kevin Rudd’s address to the National Press Club yesterday (you can read it here) was notable as much for what he didn’t say as for what he did. I’d be very surprised indeed if the expectation that he would spell out a “narrative” wasn’t created by Labor types themselves. It’s not the sort of thing that journos just make up. But with his tick a box recital of what the government had done on education, he’s signalling that he’s not going to play that particular game - pragmatism rather than oratory is his weapon of choice. But like a lot of what Rudd has announced as PM, there’s very little detail to back up his various initiatives in the latest “chapter” of the “education revolution”. That’s ok, though, apparently for a usually sceptical media, because he’s representing himself as taking on the teachers’ unions.
As Bismarck commented on this thread, it’s an old trick. As old as Bill Clinton actually - who first trialled it in Arkansas when he wanted to demonstrate that he wasn’t a “traditional” Democrat. And, as we all know, Arkansas now has a school system that’s the envy of the world (ahem)…
Continue reading ‘Forget political narratives, here’s a media narrative’
We’reThey’re all neo-liberals now?The think tank culture is weird. Although there are certainly think tanks around that put some effort into commissioning and fostering quality research, the origin of the beast lay in the business of shaping and shifting public debate through the media and influencing pollies. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it were, provided that we understand that the research produced may not always be peer-reviewed (CPD, with whom I’m associated, does subject its policy papers to peer review) and in particular we understand not just the ideological commitments of individual think tanks but where their funding comes from. That’s why there are legitimate questions to be asked - including but not restricted to the propensity to push climate change denialism - about the reluctance of some organisations such as Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute to even admit that disclosure of funding sources is in the public interest.
Because one of the things think tanks do is provide a ready source of op/ed copy, so-called “public debate” can go down some quite odd paths. Most recently, in Australia, the bizarre theme about the Enlightenment (and apparently the “good” Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the “bad” French Enlightenment) which was articulated to climate change denialism, and which also prompted some public weirdness from Craig Emerson. It’s noteworthy that just as the Rudd v. Hayek wars are really just proxies for a dispute about underlying policy orientations, that none of the gibberish that has come out of the new MSM meme of the month has anything much to do with scholarly study on the role of the actual Enlightenments in history or in philosophy. It’s not really a “battle of ideas” at all, just a convenient hook for some very tired positions to be hung on.
But everyone in this game - “progressive” or “liberal” or “conservative” - has a vested interest in pretending that what is being staged is some sort of “battle of ideas”. Hence we have Per Capita, a particularly neo-liberal bunch of progressives with strong connections to some of the Blairite Third Way orgs in London, holding a “Consilium”, whatever that may be, accepting most of the premises of the CIS’ Enlightenment-fest. And we get PC fellow Dennis Glover writing an op/ed for The Australian spruiking his mob’s definition of Kevin Rudd’s “reforming Centre”. The new ideas in question (and the PC’s website features slogans such as “Hard Decisions”, “Human Capital” and “Practical, Empirical, Fresh” demonstrating their desire to be the house intellectuals of the Rudd revolution) aren’t actually new. It’s all standard “social democracy = markets + human capital theory + communitarian welfare policy” Blairism. It’s just getting a run in Australia for the first time, and there’s no doubt that it is getting a run - with initiatives such as the marketisation of Victorian TAFE and Julia Gillard’s musings about vouchers being directly linked to this agenda. And the “truancy welfare quarantining” seems quite redolent of Blair’s first term - when backbenchers revolted over welfare cuts. And, as argued here recently, there’s evidence that this sort of thing misses the point in addressing the actual causes of poor school attendance.
Continue reading ‘
We’reThey’re all neo-liberals now?’