… And it should have entered the negotiating fray itself, helping bang heads together.

Leaving that aside, though I think there is an element of piling on Julia Gillard at work, Bandt makes a number of claims, one based on a factual error, and the other encompassing a confusing elision between claiming the “government shouldn’t be taking sides” (which the government itself has claimed not to be) and an apparent belief that a suspension of the bargaining period, as opposed to a termination, would somehow have resulted automatically in industrial victory for the unions. Or perhaps Bandt is making or implying an argument that it’s undesirable, generally, for ‘third parties’ to intervene in industrial disputes.

Let’s get a number of facts on the table, first:

(a) The government, represented at FWA on behalf of the Minister, Chris Evans, argued either for a termination of the bargaining period, or for a 90 day suspension. That’s clear from a reading of the decision by Guidice J, Watson SDP and Roe C, right at the outset. The government was actually being consistent with the thrust of its own Act, that such matters ought to be subject to judicial determination, and, like the other parties involved, was following normal industrial practice by envisaging a range of outcomes which the tribunal might give effect to. It’s important to recognise this, and as far as I can see, it’s been completely overlooked, because it is highly pertinent to the Tony Abbott line that the Minister should have used the powers available to him under section 431 of the Fair Work Act.

(b) Bandt says:

Ever since John Howard’s WorkChoices, the spirit of which still lives in the current legislation, many unions have sought to bargain for an outcome and avoid arbitration. Why? Because the outcomes you’re likely to get in an arbitration are widely thought to be less than what you might get in bargaining. Especially over matters that impinge on managerial prerogative. Like job security clauses, a key claim of the unions in the Qantas dispute, because they are concerned about ‘offshoring’ and contracting out of their work.

Partly, this is wrong, and partly, again, it’s confused. FWA gives greater scope for arbitration than WorkChoices in the case of low paid workers, in particular, and where both parties consent to conciliation and arbitration. It’s true that the provisions regarding the availability of arbitration to settle disputes are not substantially changed from WorkChoices (with a very important exception, which I’ll come to). But this gives the lie to his logic. How could unions have been seeking to avoid arbitration, when arbitration has not been a legal option except in exceptional circumstances such as would trigger the termination of a bargaining period? It doesn’t make any sense, and in fact, the whole thrust of the reforms since, arguably Paul Keating’s Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993, and certainly since the Peter Reith/Cheryl Kernot Workplace Relations Act 1996, has been to de-emphasise and radically restrict arbitration.

Certainly, from WorkChoices onwards, the choice has simply not been there for unions. So it’s hard to know what he’s saying here. That’s why various analysts of Australian industrial relations have characterised the system we had as ‘voluntary collective bargaining’. One of the most important changes ushered in by the Fair Work Act was to remove the right of management to refuse to negotiate with unions. So we have probably returned, not to a regime which offers a choice between conciliation and arbitration and bargaining, but to one of compulsory collective bargaining. The enhanced provisions for union recognition, and for good faith bargaining, are precisely what business has been screaming about. So I think Bandt’s claim that “the spirit of [WorkChoices] still lives in the current legislation” needs heavy qualification.

Under WorkChoices, the most likely outcome would have been freer rein for Qantas to pursue a naked strategy of de-unionisation. Peter Reith’s very vocal calls for ‘free collective bargaining’ are exposed for what they are by his references to Margaret Thatcher in the same breath.

What I suspect Bandt actually has in mind, and this is taking us closer to the crux of the matter, is the degree to which unions in strong bargaining positions have been able to influence (but not determine) managerial strategy through “job security clauses” and restrictions on contract labour, or agreements that contractors be paid the same as employees. Typically such agreements have been reached in labour intensive industries where time constraints (and penalties for non-completion) are a factor, and where competition is minimal. Construction is the obvious one, and mining is another.

But I’m unclear as to why Bandt thinks, or could be read as thinking, that issues regarding job security may go more in Qantas’ favour under arbitration. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t fall within the scope or ambit of the dispute, because they are “employment matters” (and Australian industrial jurisprudence has always sought to wall off management prerogative). Certainly the Act envisages the distribution of labour between full time and other employees and the role of contractors as matters that can be subjects for an enterprise agreement. Another very significant change between WorkChoices and the FWA was the removal of the severe restrictions of matters on which parties could bargain. Given that there are few disputes in recent times which have reached the point of arbitration, I can’t see any reason on the face of it why there would be an assumption that job security clauses would not be matters on which FWA would make a determination.

It may be that he is thinking of the very strong line in the sand business is drawing in resisting these clauses, which is, again, one of the key planks of the anti-FWA campaign.

The assumption by some, such as Dr_Tad, who have seized on Bandt’s rather confused remarks (and he does a nice line in trying to be happy and shiny and appealing to everyone – “reach a negotiated outcome by supporting the whole of the airline, management and employees, with an eye to the country’s long-term interests”) that a suspension of the bargaining period would somehow lead to a victory for the unions seems to me to be highly questionable. Syndicalist sentiment aside, sometimes, sadly, the workers united are defeated. It’s not clear to me that the interests of pilots, baggage handlers and engineers are identical, nor that they would not become separable during a 90 day bargaining period (and let’s not forget, 42 days are potentially available under the FWA decision). But, more broadly, I’m unable to see:

(a) that the industrial muscle exists to produce an outcome favourable to workers’ desire to restrict the company in its pursuit of its strategy of offshoring, cost-shifting and outsourcing;

(b) how, in the absence of arbitration, Alan Joyce would be shifted from his stated intention to again lockout the workers. All he would have to do is endure negotiations for 90 days before the bargaining period recommenced, and there’s no legal lever to exert pressure on Qantas to negotiate on job security, which it’s made clear it does not want to do. With arbitration, there is. Or, at least, there potentially is. It needs to be remembered, and FWA took note of this, that Qantas could also, and probably would, lockout its workforce again on the resumption of a bargaining period. I doubt there’s much, if any willingness, on Qantas’ side to reach agreement on job security issues, which are what remain in the air, not pay.

In short, I don’t think Bandt has much warrant for saying this:

As it is, a Labor government has tipped its hand and sided with Qantas. Whatever Fair Work Australia decides, Qantas now knows the government will help it get to arbitration.

However, he is right about one thing. In a statement today, he writes:

“Now that the government has done what Qantas wanted and removed the workers’ capacity to protect Australian jobs, the government has a responsibility to outline how it will prevent Qantas from off-shoring its workforce.”

The first bit is wrong, for the reasons outlined above. The second is right, because it’s only through political rather than industrial action that a serious challenge can be posed to Qantas’ aim of effectively closing down its international operation in favour of joint ventures and subsidiaries which would offshore jobs and radically drive down labour costs.

“Job security clauses” would be a useful restraint on this form of aggressive management strategy, but the Australian industrial relations regime simply doesn’t empower workers to determine or even co-determine management strategy. Nor are the industrial interests of the various workers and unions identical with a political strategy to maintain airlines as providers of an essential public good (which is why, of course, Qantas should never have been sold in the first place). The specious rhetoric of Qantas management about competition and cost needs exposing for what it is (and one benefit, incidentally of arbitration is that it would allow the claims by unions that it has been cost-shifting to make its international operations appear unviable to be tested).

Similarly, we need a debate on whether or not we, like other countries, need to get back into the realm of owning airlines, precisely so that management thuggery can be curtailed and so that public goods can be provided publicly (and no one disputes the financial viability of Qantas’ competitors which are government owned). In other words, we need to resist the logic of the market and contain and constrain it through politics. We need to start reviving the idea central to the social democratic project of de-commodification, of progressively challenging and removing the inexorable logic of the market through collective action, including through action which seeks to utilise and reshape the institutions of the state.

That option exists, and it exists precisely because public suspicion of corporate behaviour and the excess involved in capitalism is fast reviving. It may well be that these hopes are incapable of fulfilment by the Australian political class. But it’s a disappointment that The Greens, in the persona of Adam Bandt, are chasing a rabbit down a bolthole by trying to score political points against the Labor government. Much more worthy of highlighting would be the mechanisms I mentioned in my post on Saturday which Bob Brown himself has sponsored, through amendments to the Qantas Act, which might usefully and fruitfully challenge corporate power.

By contrast, the argument that the bargaining period should be continued (and the Dr_Tad corollary that this would necessarily lead to victory for the unions) seems to me not making the perfect the enemy of the good, but the unachievable the enemy of the ambivalent. That ambivalence is best ended by continued political action around the central issues at stake here: the need to rein in and constrain aggressive market capitalism in the interests of workers and the public good.

Update: Adam Bandt responds in the thread and I respond in turn. I’d also observe that there’s a fair amount of extremely valuable and useful information in the thread from some commenters on the precise context of the use of various powers available to FWA under the Fair Work Act, which has been helpful to me in further informing my understanding of what is still relatively unsettled territory under a bargaining regime and legal framework that is, in some ways, novel. It adds nuance and substance to the debate, but I’m yet to be persuaded that I should shift from the broader political points made in the original post.

NB: Comments strictly on topic, please. All general comments about the Qantas dispute can go on the recent roundtable thread. All comments I regard as being unresponsive to the post will be removed without warning, and correspondence won’t be entered into. Please note that I won’t be moderating constantly, but I reserve the right to return and remove comments retrospectively.

…the motivating force behind these groups appears to be more about expressing resentment about social and economic change in recent decades, and particularly because such changes have delivered nothing but difficulties for the demographics we’re talking about: social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heteros-xual people and males in particular, and, in the Australian context, economic changes have squeezed them, along with everyone else, into a far more competitive, market-based economy that no longer delivers the sort of certainty they grew up with and that Generation X, in particular, never had.

For such people, Gillard’s gender (and unmarried status) or Obama’s race are not so much a problem as a high-profile, indeed inescapable, symbol of how much the world has changed and changed in ways that deliver nothing but pain for such people.

I think there’s probably an aspect of the phenomenon he identifies in the second para, but I am very far from being as confident as he is that racism and sexism are not a big part of the picture.

He’s also spot on about the ludicrous claims about ‘censorship’. And about the way the Coalition is essentially using this diffuse ressentiment to contribute to its recreation of the febrile atmosphere of 1975.

To update on some of the analysis, the prediction that a number of the usual suspects would turn the events into a partisan football has unsurprisingly been borne out. “It’s all Labour’s fault, it’s the welfare state’s fault, etc.” To be fair, there’s a dollop of stupid on parts of the left side of the fence too.

So let’s ignore that, and have a look at what we know about what’s happened and what it means.

Guy Rundle made the important point in today’s Crikey that there’s no single cause because there are a series of inter-linked events occurring, in sequence. Rioting started in Tottenham, after a protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan spun into violence. But, later, Rundle suggests, anarchist violence popped up in other areas, some quite demographically and socio-economically distinct from Tottenham.

Lastly, we have a combination of opportunistic and gang driven violence and looting, spreading to other English cities as London is locked down by the police response.

Two excellent attempts at providing explanation and context are from Daniel Hind at Al Jazeera and Monkey at Feminist Philosophers.

Hind:

Civil disturbances never have a single, simple meaning. When the Bastille was being stormed the thieves of Paris doubtless took advantage of the mayhem to rob houses and waylay unlucky revolutionaries. Sometimes the thieves were revolutionaries. Sometimes the revolutionaries were thieves. And it is reckless to start making confident claims about events that are spread across the country and that have many different elements. In Britain over the past few days there have been clashes between the police and young people. Crowds have set buildings, cars and buses on fire. Shops have been looted and passersby have been attacked. Only a fool would announce what it all means.

But…

any breakdown of civil order is inescapably political. Quite large numbers of mostly young people have decided that, on balance, they want to take to the streets and attack the forces of law and order, damage property or steal goods. Their motives may differ – they are bound to differ. But their actions can only be understood adequately in political terms. While the recklessness of adrenaline has something to do with what is happening, the willingness to act is something to be explained.

Feminist Philosophers:

First, those who claim the rioters have a political agenda are surely wrong. Whilst I don’t think that having a political agenda is an easy thing to capture (I doubt, e.g., that it must involve having explicit political motives and a detailed understanding of why one is doing what one does – which of us ever has such self-knowledge of, or control over our own actions?), I suspect it must involve at least some sort of political consciousness, which it’s not clear the rioters possess. People are rioting because breaking things is fun, and looting is a quick way to make some cash.

But second, those who think the rioters are merely mindless thugs, and there is no political dimension to the riots are surely also wrong. The rioters are (wannabe) gangsters, from some of the poorer neighbourhoods. It’s fairly easy to predict – if you know a city – where there will be rioting. And let me give you a clue, no-one’s predicting riots in the nicer suburbs. It’s no surprise either when the police announce they’ve arrested people from neighbourhoods x, y, and z because x, y, and z are poorer, rougher places.

So what does this mean? One part of the answer seems to be that to people in poorer, rougher areas, being a gangster looks like an attractive option. Not only is it attractive, it’s also a live option. What makes it an attractive and live option is surely that (i) one’s other prospects are bleak, (ii) one has been conditioned since birth (like everyone else living in a consumer capitalist society) to want the latest whatever, and to believe that one has the right to have it; (iii) one is surrounded by others living the gangster lifestyle. The roots of (iii) are no doubt fiercely complicated, but surely there’s some importance to the fact that being poor is stressful, stress breaks families apart, dysfunction creeps in, and once there, it reaches down the generations.

Things will no doubt become clearer with time. But for now, on behalf of all the families, shopkeepers, and other folk battening down the hatches after dark, let’s hope it’s true that the rain is coming, and rioters don’t like getting wet.

It’s also worth emphasising that the UK has the lowest level of social mobility in the OECD. Even the perception that overcoming deprivation is possible is an important legitimation of the social order. It may now be absent for a lot of people.

Hind is right to argue that large scale civil disorder is itself necessarily political, even if many participants have no explicit political motivation. But it’s also right that those projecting revolutionary fantasies onto these events are wrong.

I’d close by noting once again that events of this sort are intensely frightening for those living through them. That should not be forgotten.

Update: Another extremely interesting post at Potlach:

Sociologists and socialists are wary of blaming individuals, for events that they are not entirely in control of, and structures that they didn’t design. But surely a nuanced understanding of contemporary individualism recognises that it is no less real for having been politically constructed. Political and economic ideas and concepts can become more truthful over time, if there is enough power behind them. The neoliberal vision of the individual ego, choosing, desiring and consuming, independent of social norms or institutions, has grown more plausible over the past thirty years. Once it becomes adopted by people to understand and criticise their own lives and actions, then it attains a type of ‘performative’ and interpretive reality that class may have done in the past, but may never do again.

As David Harvey argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, combine neo-classical economics with the 1960s rhetoric of emancipation, and you have a heady ideological cocktail, that draws people into conceiving of themselves as autonomous sovereign selves. Ask today’s rioter what he is doing, and he will reply using the language of self, pleasure, economic freedom and individual recognition. This borders on the concerns of the Left, when it enters into identity politics, but for the most part it is entirely neoliberal.

Anyone watching cable news would have been treated to the febrile opining of members of the terrorism studies community, the academic and thinktank acolytes of the national security state, madly pattern making and subjecting none of their guesses to any rational scrutiny or, indeed, having any regard to facts that were becoming known on Twitter.

It’s not just in Australian politics or in discussion of climate science that we live in the very opposite of a truth-based world.

Much of the current discussion of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik now seeks to depoliticise. He’s a ‘lone gunman’, a ‘crazed loner’; you know the drill. Peter Hartcher, writing today for Fairfax, is just one example, and far from the most egregious.

At (ir)religiosity, Blake Huggins puts his finger on it:

To but it bluntly, when “a cultural Christian” is to blame, acts of terrorism have nothing to do with religion. When a Muslim is involved, however, it is quite the opposite. This is the framework operative in our collective imaginary (despite the fact that many Muslim terrorists appear to be motivated by anti-imperialist sentiments rather than religion alone). Muslims are terrorists, Christians are not. These categories have become so deeply engrained in our psyche that the knee-jerk reaction to any terrorist attack is to place blame upon Islam.

Immediately following the violence in Oslo the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both jumped to xenophobic conclusions. Even a newspaper as “progressive” as the New York Times wasn’t immune to the sociological inertia. The same thing happened after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In times of crisis and in response to heinous acts of violence our most foundational — and, by and large, dualistic, even Manichean — stereotypes come in to play. And it would seem that in the American imaginary, liberal, conservative or otherwise, the category of the Muslim is conflated with that of the terrorist. There is a deeply essentialist if not racist double-standard at play when it comes terrorist and religion. The common perception, even the default position, is that Christianity is the exception, while Islam is the rule.

Shakira Hussein also speaks truth:

This year, I’m not going to let myself think of Breivik – the man or his shadow – and I’m not going to let myself resent the morons who fed his hate and then scrambled to lay to blame for his crime upon “the Muslims”. They do not deserve my attention.

I will reflect instead on those Muslims and non-Muslims who lost their lives on Utoya and elsewhere. Let their names be remembered – and in the case of those civilians who are dying away from the media spotlight in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq – let their names be recorded.

If the definition of terrorism is political violence, then there is no doubt that Breivik’s actions were political. The careful targeting of the current government and the activist future of Norway’s Labour Party, let alone the activist future of that party gathered on Utøya Island, makes that abundantly clear.

As Waleed Aly writes:

Breivik is a committed political activist. His manifesto (which for the time being is on YouTube), if correctly attributed, makes this abundantly clear. It is deeply implausible that this was anything other than a textbook case of terrorism. It was fear-inducing violence by a non-state actor in the service of a political cause.

And Jeff Sparrow is absolutely right that there’s a whole political and cultural climate which envelopes Breivik’s thinking and his detestable actions.

Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, rightly called for a response to the mass murders in Oslo and Utoya which would consist of “more democracy, more humanity”. A prerequisite for such democratic humanity is that we call things by their proper names, and start to reflect on the terrible consequences of the myths and discourses that have seized much of the world over the last decade.

In so doing, we mourn the victims of these massacres by working to ensure that such abominations never occur again. To do that effectively, it is necessary to understand, without illusions and avoiding polemics, why this tragedy occurred.

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.

If you sit back and take the longer view, reality is actually shaping policy – the reality of climate change, the reality of female workforce participation, the reality of changing attitudes to gender equality, the reality of an impending end to dirty and unrenewable fuel… and same-sex marriage can’t be far off.

And the forces of reaction have nothing to peddle but fear. The peddling of that fear, in terms of public opinion, has of course, been spectacularly successful. To date.

But there may be another tipping point – the decline into collapse of industrial media. Given that the NotW scandal has now seen it suggested, plausibly, that the Murdoch family may lose control of News, I’ve seen it argued, also plausibly, that come the next election, there may be no Australian to run its “campaigning journalism”. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Thinking, though, that everything will always be the same in the Australian mediascape is almost certainly also out of step with reality. We may be seeing the end of newspapers as we know them.

Elsewhere: On some of the issues tossed around concerning mooted and current media reviews, Mr Denmore at The Failed Estate. Anthony Burnett has an interesting UK take at Open Democracy.

NB: Earlier Murdochracy discussion on LP is here.

But when central elements of the Mass – such as the chanting of the Gospel – were overlaid with asinine journalist interviewing journalist moments, we really did have a parable of the idiocy of the postmodern media, and maybe an answer to Saint Luke’s question too. Similarly, the Mass was obliterated by ceasing the coverage at its most meaningful moment – the Eucharistic Prayer – and ironically Pope Benedict’s communion was seen only on a screen behind a babbling journalist at the MacKillop Shrine in North Sydney later on during the news.

The commentary itself – particularly from ABC Religion and Ethics Editor Scott Stephens – was sometimes worthwhile, and later on ABC1, Compass did a much better job. But most of the coverage was indicative only of the sole frames the media appeared to find handy – celebritisation and nationalist hooha. Journos didn’t appear to be able to reach for the right cliches, though most of their comment was cliched. Claims that “naturally irreverent” Australians in Saint Peter’s Square would have cheered as if they were at a sporting event had they not been cautioned otherwise are incomprehensible when one considers that most of those present were presumably Catholic and would have been well aware of the difference, and the different dispositions appropriate, between the Commonwealth Games and a solemn liturgical celebration. Yet such claims were closely articulated to the prevalent mythos that the canonisation was an event for “all Australians”.

The ceremony itself, to the degree it was visible through the coverage, resisted this theme, inscribing Mary in a communion both synchronous and diachronic in time, and universal in global space.

That nationalistic motif may be, in part, a defensive political projection, seeking to ward off claims that the state is breaching its public secularity by giving aid and comfort to the rites of a particular faith. There is some legitimate debate to be had on Julia Gillard’s perceived about face, and the degree to which legislative fiat (protecting the “brand” of “our Mary”) and the attendance of Kevin Rudd and Julie Bishop at the Vatican is warranted. But, largely, the state’s role has been one of recognition, of integrating those of Catholic faith into the national story and Australian imaginary. The flipside of this process of inscription and narrativisation is the triumphalism of some elements in the Church. Some prelates still appear to be compelled to worship the idol of political power.

However, those concerns are no doubt going to be occluded by a false debate – an encounter that never really takes place – over such sideshows as miracles. The diktats of the atheist rationalists, or rather of those who are actively and prominently anti-faith, reinscribe a narrow range of tropes little changed from Reformation polemics. Anyone who doubts that many of the ‘atheist’ talking points have a direct lineage with English Protestantism need only read the more crazed sections of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the anti-Roman bits they don’t teach these days in political theory school. If a reading list were to be compiled for the disciples of Hitchens and Dawkins, the spectral mouthpieces of Calvinist rationalism, it ought also to include John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Perhaps then they’d realise that secularism is something quite distinct from anti-religious abuse, something which Scott Bridges observes is the stock in trade of too many alleged rationalists.

Much of this vitriol is directed, unsurprisingly, at the Catholic Church. Some of it, in the works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, also reflects a hatred of Islam. Neither, as Jeff Sparrow wrote in his piece for Meanjin earlier this year on the “New Atheism”, is a necessary implication of a rationalist rejection of faith, but neither is really contingent either. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Islam, in this discursive register, have their origins in a particular conjunction of English Imperialism and the construction of its knowledges and its enemies, a tradition which profoundly influenced the social dissensus between Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish, in Australian history. It’s no surprise to see it resurface at this moment, and attempts to contain and meliorate it through social re-integration – the real purpose of the political and media insistence that Mary MacKillop, or rather, Saint Mary of the Cross, is a saint, or an exemplar, for all of us.

But, to what degree is this true?

The proclamation of Saint Mary as true blue has accreted to itself a range of contemporary pre-occupations – authority in the Church, pedophile clerics, the role of women in religion and in community. All of this is potentially divisive, so there’s something of an attempt by her auto-authorised hagiographers, both Churchly and Stately, to appropriate her for something that can be represented as a common denominator of Australian “values” – so Mary started her own Education Revolution, and stood for “fairness”. No doubt, had Tony Abbott been in power, she’d have been something of a different saint.

It’s hard to be a saint without attracting hagiography.

Almost impossible, by definition.

What we don’t really have a sense of, in all the “celebration”, is the challenge Mary makes to us on two levels. First, the empty rhetoric of “fairness” dissolves next to the much more confronting notion of a radical preferential option for the poor. Secondly, the idea that one’s life must be subservient to divine will and to an overarching thirst for justice sits uneasily with the idea of her as a precursor to the palliative care our neo-liberal society deems right and just for the deserving poor. In truth, it’s in her strangeness to us in the Australia of 2010, that St Mary of the Cross speaks to us most clearly.

If the premise is that Twitter, Facebook and other social media enable politicians to enter into dialogue directly with voters, then, as he says, that’s unlikely. I’d add to the reasons Farnsworth enumerates that those Tweeps who discuss Australian politics are a micro-public, not “the public”. That is to say, as for instance the #ausvotes crowd became more of a community, barriers to entry also arise, and I’d observe that Twitter’s social ecology particularly lends itself to hierarchisation. In any case, we’re talking about a very very small proportion of the electorate, and probably, a much more partisan population than the citizenry as a whole. I’m not sure whether anyone has attempted to gauge just how many people joined in election related talk on Twitter, but I expect that might be one of the outcomes of an interesting research project my former colleagues at QUT, Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, are conducting under an ARC grant (research results are regularly updated and discussed at Mapping Online Publics).

The second point to make here is that because Twitter is the media’s favourite social medium – as Farnsworth says because of its utility in driving link traffic, but also because it aids in “branding” journos and the media organisations that employ them – we can observe some of the same network effects in operation as those which restrict the discussion of politics to a small circle. Insofar as it’s more porous, than, say, letters to the editor, it still tends to centre around particular nodes – the regular #qanda commentary, #qt when parliament is in session, and comments about and to particular journos who have a high profile on Twitter (@annabelcrabb being a good example). In a textually restricted medium, moving oneself closer to the key nodes (through retweets, gaining more followers, or a mention by a leading Tweep) is often a matter of making a 140 character joke or witticism, or acting as a catalyst for conversations which start to involve a significant number of others. What’s going on is very interesting indeed sociologically, but it’s not either deliberative debate nor, I strongly suspect, particularly influential.

Incidentally, one of the other claims about social media – its ability to aggregate distributed knowledge and to disseminate it quickly, is also I think proved largely false. As Farnsworth rightly observes, the only gain in information during the Gillard/Rudd leadership contest was probably knowing the result about a minute or so before everyone else, and a lot of what was purveyed turned out to be wrong. Twitter probably best lends itself to these sorts of fast developing events, but in terms of citizen journalism, a political event is something very different from, say, a natural disaster, as people aren’t reporting on what they see or know directly, but speculating on snippets of information – and manipulated snippets – from the core inside actors.

Incidentally, I have had the view for some time that Kristina Keneally is a thoughtful and intelligent politician, whose talents are surely wasted in the abyss of NSW state Labor politics. You have to feel some empathy for her in face of the behaviour of the latest Minister to be forced to resign, the undistinguished scion of a mediocre Labor right dynasty.

Update: Just to clarify, in response to comments, the legislation is subject to a conscience vote, which explains why Keneally has discussed the relevance of her personal religious beliefs to her legislative judgement on this bill.

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.