A truly bizarre editorial decision from Ben Naparstek, who occupies the chair at The Monthly, has resulted in the publication of a review of Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Julia Gillard by Christine Wallace, who is writing a rival biography of the Deputy Prime Minister for Allen & Unwin.
Wallace, in her review, describes the Kent book, The Making of Julia Gillard, as a “political quickie”. I’ve read it, and that’s fair comment, though Kent does cast a fair bit of light on aspects of Gillard’s rise through Labor ranks which are not well known, such as the effects of her long term rivalry with Lindsay Tanner and Kim Carr.
In his defence, Naparstek points to a similar review by Michelle Grattan.
However, Michelle Grattan has not written a book which is in direct commercial competition with one she is reviewing.
Naparstek also claims Wallace is best qualified to review Kent’s book – by virtue of being the author of a rival biography of Gillard. Bizarre.
There’s a fair bit of obfuscation in Naparstek’s defence of his editorial decision. Continue reading ‘Ben Naparstek, The Monthly and the Julia Gillard “biography wars”’
The Centre for Policy Development has released a new issue of its online magazine, Insight:
As the internet continues to make transparency and collaboration cheaper and easier, governments around the world face increasing pressure to become more open and more participatory. This edition of InSight looks at the idea of Upgrading Democracy: combining open access to government information with collaborative policy development to increase citizens’ influence over the decisions that affect their lives. The ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ is currently putting together its advice on how to open up access to public sector information and use online tools to improve the conversation between government and citizens. This InSight, which has also doubled as a submission to the Taskforce, unpacks the ‘Government 2.0′ concept for the non-geeks out there, as well as featuring some hot new ideas for those who are already in the thick of it.
You can read the issue here.
Sometimes, in politics, it might be better to remain silent.
Glenn Milne’s latest intervention, talking up a line from Liberal MP Scott Morrison, has to be one of the lamest ever political attack lines. [For those who don't want to wade through a farrago of fallacies expounded at excessive length, his core point is echoed by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy, though without attribution to Milne. Rendered in short form, the basic logical fallacy is starkly evident.]
So, there’s going to be an “emissions financial crisis” and the Reserve Bank wasn’t consulted by the Government before climate change legislation was prepared? A non sequitur built on speculative and incoherent fantasy does not make for an effective political attack. ‘OMG! Governor didn’t read legislation! Rudd FAIL!’…
The political syntax of this claim, of course, is that Rudd and co successfully berated the Liberals for ‘ignoring 20 (or whatever it was) successive Reserve Bank warnings’ in the lead up to the 2007 election. Now, we have the Liberals, and their echo chamber, arguing that the Reserve Bank should have been given a chance to warn. Somehow a hypothetical and unlikely warning was pre-empted by the Government deliberately choosing not to do what it doesn’t have to do. Try to make any sense of that.
What would be far more interesting to examine would be the politics of invoking the Reserve Bank (and for that matter, Treasury and its ubiquitous Secretary, Dr Ken Henry). Continue reading ‘Lame claims: invoking the Reserve Bank and Treasury politically’
In an interview with the Financial Review a little while back, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner commented that governments might face some difficulty down the track when the need for economic stimulus has passed, but when also public revenues are not flooding into the coffers as they were at the height of the mining boom. It’s not terribly surprising to see Tanner thinking ahead – and no doubt the government is also thinking about what sort of narrative might be utilised to justify an era of diminished expectations to the voters.
It’s interesting to set these remarks aside a leak from the Coalition party room yesterday – apparently Malcolm Turnbull mentioned that there may be a need to raise tax in the future. Predictably, this was howled down as being “contrary to Liberal philosophy”.
Therein lies the rub.
Aided and abetted by a quite unique set of economic circumstances, the Coalition’s “economic management” over the last few terms of the Howard government basically translated to reducing personal income tax while maintaining the rate of corporate tax. Add to the mix a crazed melange of transfer payments and electoral bribes, and for a while they had a winning electoral strategy.
It did, of course, trash “core Liberal philosophy” if that meant what John Howard supposedly stood for in the 1980s – ‘dry’ economics. Reduced to a few slogans, the Liberals have proved themselves completely incapable of arguing any economic direction which even vaguely makes sense ever since their defeat in November 2007. Turnbull’s comments, and Tanner’s remarks, suggest that the political playing field of the economic game will be a much transformed one over the next few political cycles. Labor seems to understand this. It’s highly questionable if most Liberals even grasp what’s going on. That absent centre at the heart of their ideology and their political strategy will prove a bigger problem for them than their leadership and their day to day political tactics and messaging. The dysfunctions of the latter are only a symptom of the underlying disease.
John Quiggin wrote an interesting op/ed in the Fin Review today, which I imagine will eventually surface on his blog.
Quiggin picked up on recent remarks by Lindsay Tanner about discipline in the budget process. “Efficiency dividends” are much in the air at the moment, and Tanner appeared to be arguing that the cause of fiscal probity required a razor to be applied to public sector spending, with the goal of eventually returning the budget to surplus.
While Quiggin agreed that the latter goal was desirable, he suggested that “waste” wasn’t a high proportion of commonwealth spending, and argued that it made more sense to scale back the next round of tax cuts. The scheduled tax cuts are highly regressive, and give little or nothing to low and middle income earners. Nor is bracket creep a huge concern at the moment, and the rivers of revenue to be distributed have receded rapidly.
The government seems to be scaling back, or delaying a number of its commitments. While pension increases are apparently electorally sacrosanct, measures like maternity leave are on hold. Julia Gillard’s response to the Bradley review is a good example of this process at work. The government has accepted most of the review’s recommendations, but pushed out the implementation dates for those requiring large additional expenditure. The higher education sector is being told to hold its horses.
There’s something like a replay of the perennial tax cuts vs. services conundrum going on here. But it’s got an interesting new inflection when the quantum of money available is much reduced – focusing in on the economic benefits of spending against permanent tax increases for the upper middle and high end of the income spectrum. I’m inclined to think that there’s some residual defensiveness about the “economic conservative” label at work here. What, one might ask Kevin Rudd, would a social democrat do?
There’s a bit of chat around the shop today that one of the mooted new stimulus measures the Rudd government might undertake – bringing forward tax cuts and LITO changes for low income earners – could be a way of counterbalancing an anticipated small increase in the minimum wage from the Fair Pay Commission. The suggestion seems to have arisen from the eminently well-connected Heather Ridout of the Australian Industry Group.
The Australian characterised such a move as a “wage/tax tradeoff” – ala the Accord, and Simon Jackman alludes to “corporatism”. However, there are some significant differences from the Accord – the most important contrasts with the 80s in Australia are that the reach of wages policy is much smaller (because movements in the minimum wage are relevant really only for “award-only” workers who are a smallish minority, and there’s little chance of flow on increases) and it’s less well thought out because it’s more ad hoc and there really isn’t a “social partner” actually representing the low paid to negotiate with, or the quasi-institutional structures for concerted policy formulation which existed in the past.
Continue reading ‘Corporatism redux?’
Anyone who’s worked in a large public sector organisation will know how “efficiency dividends” work. Or don’t work. Or work in unintended ways – by destroying the capacity to do what your actual main purpose is. There’s a bit of a parable about managerialism there, I suspect. But certainly one of the most egregious of the effects of the efficiency dividends of Lindsay Tanner’s first round of cross-cutting was reducing the sample size of the ABS’ labour market statistics. Not such a smart move at this stage of the game, I’d suggest. But presumably not having Peter Costello raving about Labor deficits trumps informed policy making.
This sort of thing only compounds the fog of economic war at a time of crisis. It is true that economic predictions are a dime a dozen and at best indicative the further they’re projected forward in time. Media savvy ex-Treasury boffins in Access Economics were warning of runaway inflation this time last year. This year, they’re worried that we’re “buggered”. (And they’ve always got some neato right wing policy prescription to go with the diagnosis.)
But at a time when the tectonic plates of the economy are shifting rapidly, it is essential to have access to good data. Nobody seems willing to credit Treasury modelling anymore, so with Rudd’s pre-Christmas stimulus package, we were treated to prediction by anecdote. And, all of a sudden, Gerry Norman, retailer Harvey Norman’s boss, was some sort of folk wisdom personified.
Continue reading ‘Gerry Harvey as leading indicator?’
Anyone wanting an update on how the federal government’s adventures into the wilds of citizen consultation via blogs [at the Digital Economy Blog hosted under the auspices of DBCDE] are going could do a lot worse than read these two posts from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion and Axel Bruns at Gatewatching. Bruns asks the very good question – “what if you do build it and they do come?”
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’
Dave Bath reports that the government has an official blog on their digital economy plans. This has been in the works for some time; a government Lindsay Tanner’s welcome post (which is worth reading in its entirety) explains the idea:
As some of you may be aware, I’ve been talking about our plans to trial consultation blogs for some time now. This is the first of what will be several consultations taking place over the next six months, supplementing existing policy development processes.
While the primary aim of this blog is to get your feedback on aspects of the digital economy, we also want to use this opportunity to explore the mechanics of government blogging and hear your thoughts on how we should interact with you online.
Continue reading ‘The Government blogs!’
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’
With all the attention on the role of Brendon Grylls and the Nationals as the kingmakers in the WA election result, the improvement in the Greens’ vote has slipped under the radar somewhat. Counting subsequent to election night has seen their vote climb to almost 12% of the Legislative Assembly total according to the WAEC (which is interestingly slightly higher than the Greens’ vote in the Legislative Council).
But, if the Fin Review is to be believed, the significance of a 4% plus swing to the Greens hasn’t escaped the attention of ALP wonks. “Labor hardheads” are quoted by the paper as concerned by the vote in Fremantle, and the implications for the seats of Federal Ministers such as Lindsay Tanner, Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. “Labor strategists” are cited as concerned about a drift away among “left-leaning voters”.
This is hardly rocket science. Any modern managerialist ALP government is bound to disappoint at least some left voters after the initial euphoria of a Tory defeat has worn off. And the Greens nationally are going to have a much bigger profile with a balance of power role in the Senate and new Senators who may develop a high profile. The article, however, leaves us none the wiser as to how “Labor strategists” think their party should respond.
Continue reading ‘Greens back in the spotlight after the WA election?’
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