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’
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?’
As a sequel to my post on The Australian’s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.
Update: Quadrant piles on.
Continue reading ‘Rundle on the recent history of the left’
Parliament goes into recess next week, after a sitting whose most prominent contribution to political discussion was the unruliness of question time (aside, of course, from the usual shenanigans of opposition disunity, which are now customary).
Writing in Crikey yesterday, Bernard Keane observed:
I’ve been watching or listening to Parliament since the early Hawke years and I can never recall Question Time not being made a mockery of.
Speaking as a recovering question time tragic, I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s true if the ritual is compared to some sort of Platonic eidos – as if its essence (dignified accountability and/or razor or rapier sharp wit) must incarnate itself in the chamber on a daily basis. In truth, a lot of the mysticism about parliamentary discourse – and accountability – is just that. If some sort of conception of parliament as a pure space, an agora if you like, for the exchange of ideas and reasoning was a large part of the mythos of nineteenth century liberalism, that doesn’t mean that we should expect that it would have a lot to do with the pragmatics of twenty-first century Australian politics, though its traces remain.
Back in a more Aristotelian world, I think we can discard the Bagehot for a bit, and make some observations about precisely when and why parliamentary tempers boil over. Continue reading ‘Question time: The classical philosophy edition’
The latest issue of the Centre for Policy Development’s online mag, Insight, is out, and ‘Taxation for Our Times’ focuses on the Henry Review. I make no claims to any expertise in the technical aspects of taxation policy, but I was chuffed to be asked to write something from the point of view of cultural and political sociology. I think it is important that major aspects of our governance – and our relation as citizens to each other and to the state – are scrutinised in a frame that transcends some of the immediate implications and interests at stake. You can read my piece – ‘Death and Taxes’ – here, and I’d encourage you to have a look at the other articles too!
A couple of items which provide some food for thought:
Firstly -
Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.
Image source here.
Secondly – Arianna Huffington:
Judging by where the media are focusing their attention, you’d think the Blago/Burris/Reid and Kennedy/Paterson/Cuomo soap operas are the biggest issues facing the nation — and that little thing about the potential collapse of the world’s largest economy is just a sideshow.
Why have the media shown such relatively little interest in the utter lack of transparency about the bailout?
This post is a sequel to my previous one on economic faith and doctrines. When reflecting further about the ideological construction of “oppressive state intervention” and some of the comments made on the thread, I kept thinking about the fact that the liberal economy needs an enormous amount of state intervention and support to function, and that a social democratic perspective can be non-statist. One of the easiest elisions to make in thinking about politics and the economy is to equate anti-statism with the right and statism with the left. The two binaries do not map on to each other so simply. In fact, it’s a sure sign of thinking that’s really far too prone to ideology to assume that they do.
So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:
Continue reading ‘Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!’
Gary Sauer-Thompson has trained an observant eye on an editorial in the Fin:
Yes, the road ahead looks difficult. But this is no time to abandon our faith in the capacity for enterprises and markets free of oppressive state intervention to reinvent ourselves and bounce back. Human ingenuity will prevail, confidence will eventually return and the wheels of commerce will spin again. There is too much evidence that the world, despite periodic setbacks, continues to progress.
He parses this intriguing paragraph thus:
Interesting isn’t it. The defence of free market capitalism depends on faith not on reason. Reason cannot do the job any more given the global financial crisis and its aftershocks on the economy. So faith is called in to plug the gaps.
Of course, faith was always a big component of economic liberalism. Enlightenment doctrines (and Marxism is another), having toppled God from his epistemological throne as the prime cause, took on some of the characteristics of the theism they thought they’d banished. So economic science has always been contaminated by ideology. Normative values such as “progress” and “ingenuity” underpin a worldview which partakes in blindness as well as insight. Now that a leap of faith is required to defend one’s choice of belief, we’re beginning to see this aspect of economic liberalism in plain view. We’re being asked to sign up to a metaphysics.
Coincidentally, John Quiggin has posted the inaugural number in a promised series of observations about economic doctrines which have been discredited by the Global Financial Crisis. First cab off the rank – the efficient markets hypothesis. Continue reading ‘Economic faith and doctrines’
Probably one of the most laudable steps taken by the Rudd government has been the attention given by Senator John Faulkner as Special Minister of State to cleaning up the electoral system. Admittedly, this isn’t one of the funky and sexy issues the media likes to highlight, but the importance of the Green Paper on Electoral Reform is profound.
But while most Australians probably had other things on their mind, John Howard’s former Workplace Relations advisor and Alexander Downer’s replacement as Mayo MP, Jamie Briggs, found time on Boxing Day to denounce third party campaigns as a “a growing cancer in our democracy”.
Briggs named GetUp! and the ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign as examples of what he was talking about.
I don’t have any particular problem with disclosure of funding for third party campaigns, though I would object to caps on donations. But the hyperbole from Briggs (and no doubt his views are shared by Nick Minchin and others) is absurd and dangerous. Props to Andrew Norton for sounding the alarm. Norton refers to Briggs’ call for disclosure and observes:
Continue reading ‘The vigilance of (il)Liberalism never sleeps’
Over at Catallaxy, Jason Soon links to Kerry Miller’s article in Spiked about Clive Hamilton’s influence in the propagation of the idea of the “Clean Feed” web censorship plan. There are some strange alliances around this issue, and Miller, who writes for the Maoist site Strange Times (formally, as The Last Superpower, about the only actually existing Australian example of the pro-Bush “Decent Left”) can’t resist a side swipe at us “pseudo-leftists” even when we’re on the same page. There’s also a bit of a contradiction in her piece. She argues that Hamilton is a “communitarian” – which I think is to give him too much credit and in light of his views on other issues, somewhat inaccurate. But nevertheless, the moral authoritarianism of communitarianism is certainly in play in the censorship stakes. Miller claims:
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.
Continue reading ‘Strange affiliations: the Clean Feed’s political trajectory’
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