The prisoners get all the risks (including death during transport to remand for a misdemeanour), the corporations get all the rewards. The taxpayer turns an unseeing eye.

(h/t commenter MK on Hoyden)

So far, the Liberals haven’t been emphasising their “Great Big New Tax” line as much as might have been anticipated (and it was a clever political ploy for Julia Gillard to turn it around on them, talking about the implications of the big business levy for supermarket prices).

This theme appears to be some sort of bogey for Labor strategists, despite the fact that most of us are actually paying less income tax this financial year. The Henry Tax Review was pretty much dead on arrival, and the only suggestion which had high profile support, the Resources Super Profits Tax, of course, became one of the issues Julia Gillard identified as needing a fix when she became Prime Minister.

I’d venture to predict, based on so far sotto voce rhetoric from Tony Abbott at his press conferences, that the Coalition intends making a Carbon Tax an issue, if not the issue, in the last stretches of the campaign.

It’s here that Labor’s attempt to fudge the politics of climate policy with its much derided Citizens Assembly pledge could be highly problematic.

The original CPRS, it’s not often remembered, contained generous compensation provisions for households (as well as free carbon permits for Big Pollution). The effect of the ETS, had it been implemented, would have been a net transfer to many lower middle and low income households.

The failure of Labor to sell the ETS meant this never really sunk in.

At the same time, voters in Queensland and New South Wales, in particular, have seen electricity prices rising at a rate far higher than CPI for some time. In Queensland, resentment at this is closely associated with sentiment against the Bligh government’s privatisation agenda. Power is more expensive, the perception goes, because electricity distribution has been privatised, and promises to restrain the rate of increase in tarriffs haven’t been kept.

Hence the feeling among Labor strategists earlier in the year that a scare campaign on electricity prices for households would be fatally damaging to the ALP in Queensland and NSW marginals. The irony, of course, is that the dumping of the ETS proved fatally damaging to Kevin Rudd’s leadership, and recent polls suggest that the government as a whole has yet to recover from it.

Last night’s Nielsen shows that 60% still support an ETS.

There is other polling around which purports to show support declining as perceived costs to voters increase, which has become standard political wisdom among party strategists and the commentariat.

But that polling is occluded by the lack of public information about the actual costs, and the effect of already increasing prices I’ve mentioned above.

If we take the example of water usage and pricing in Queensland, we can see that public awareness of resource scarcity can drive changes in behaviour and attitudes, and that public support for shifts in price signals can be secured where there is a sense of collective endeavour and purpose.

There’s no reason to believe that the same would not hold true for an ETS, particularly as the net impact of a carbon price would either be small or negative.

Labor’s problem, in the face of a Coalition campaign against a ‘Great Big New Carbon Tax’, is going to be that the ALP has already ceded ground on the issue.

But, although there’s a political imperative not to walk away from the climate initiatives announced so far (however derisory their reception), it’s by no means impossible for Julia Gillard to still make a virtue out of a carbon price in this campaign.

That would take an early start to the leadership she says she intends to give on the issue in the next term.

At the moment, the Coalition is creating a phantom in the minds of voters, because no one knows or can say what a carbon price will be under Labor, and how its impact would be ameliorated.

Scare campaigns work best when their object is hazy around the edges, because it enables all sorts of worries to be projected onto the one theme.

The ALP could still announce an intention to legislate for an interim carbon price, and release the modelling that must have been done within the Department of Climate Change when the Garnaut option received serious consideration earlier in the year.

The Prime Minister should then take the Australian people into her confidence, and communicate the ALP’s actual intentions in this area, and talk up the impact on carbon emissions.

It would be a bold play, but it would be one that would also bear fruit in shoring up Labor’s primary vote among the many electors for whom climate change is a key issue.

And it would shake up a somnolent campaign message, seemingly designed to avoid attacks, rather than to go on the front foot.

Yesterday, we saw Flynn MP Chris Trevor make an impassioned defence of Kevin Rudd against what he identified as the factional forces that brought him down (pointedly including Big Bill Ludwig and the AWU). Trevor, who won his regional seat from the Nationals in 2007, had considered not re-contesting. Reading between the lines, he was obviously reacting to a widely reported sentiment among ALP MPs that Kevin Rudd would just disappear at the election, and resentment that he was promised a cabinet post by Julia Gillard.

Secondly, I wasn’t kidding when I wrote that you could barely walk through a shopping centre in a South East Queensland marginal seat without tripping over Julie Bishop or Christopher Pyne. The Liberals have been blitzing Queensland seats, many of which would not be in a lot of people’s list of possible Labor losses.

Historically, Queensland has been fallow ground for the ALP federally.

Even when in government, Labor has often enjoyed only a small advantage in seats, or a small deficit as against the Coalition. 2007 and 1990 are about as good as it gets.

And, at both state and federal levels, Queensland voters go all out when the swing is on. In 1996 and 1975, Labor’s representation in the House of Representatives almost disappeared, with only 2 and 1 seats held.

I’m of the view that Queensland is a prism for a lot of what is currently hurting the government. Forget about asylum seekers – a state which once had low housing costs (and low wages) has drastic shortages of houses and wages haven’t caught up with Southern levels outside those of the professional classes in Brisbane, where rents have leapfrogged Melbourne to reach Sydney like levels in many areas.

Many of the marginals won by Labor last time had very high proportions of part time and casual work, and average income well below national levels. The cost of living, health, infrastructure, and jobs remain big isssues here, astutely exploited by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan last time around.

But now the boot is on the other foot.

The resources tax may have been supported by the CFMEU, but the concern was how fragile regional economies are for those who don’t work in the mines. In a very decentralised state, a confluence of the mining boom, tourist development and sea and tree changers has seen housing prices rise to near-metropolitan levels, and the cost of food and petrol has always been significantly higher outside the South East corner. Now we have huge electricity and water cost rises, driven by privatisation (or at least that’s the perception).

We also have a state government second only to NSW’s in its unpopularity, with the least popular Premier in Australia. The privatisation of public assets has destroyed Anna Bligh’s credibility, and seen Labor’s vote plummet.

A Galaxy poll taken just after Julia Gillard became PM showed more distaste in this state for Kevin Rudd’s removal than in other states. I live in Kevin Rudd’s electorate of Griffith, where that sentiment is certainly widespread, but there are a lot of indications it goes beyond Rudd territory.

Whether or not that translates to a shift in voting intention is another matter, but Nielsen’s state numbers on Sunday (more significant than usual because the national sample was 1400) showed a 5% swing away from Labor – with a 2PP vote of 55-45 in favour of the Coalition.

If you plug that into Antony Green’s election calculator, you see 10 Labor seats falling to the Coalition: Brisbane, Bonner, Petrie, Leichardt, Forde, Dawson, Flynn, Longman, Dixon and Herbert. Labor is no longer looking competitive in Ryan and Wright. Swings are not uniform, though some seats with stronger margins such as Blair don’t look really safe, and Labor would be better placed in some than others, but if only 8 dominoes were to fall, that would see Labor only needing to lose 3 seats elsewhere in Australia to lose an overall majority.

Dennis Atkins observed in the Courier-Mail that Labor polling showed 10 or 11 seats in play under Rudd. While he believes the ALP’s “outlook is better”, they remain in play.

What’s happening in politics in Queensland goes under-reported in the national media, but could be crucial to the outcome of this election (as it was to the last). With that in mind, I’d be very interested in hearing from other Queenslanders what their perceptions are, and what they’ve noticed happening on the ground.

While some of the discussion has focused on some of the more extreme scenarios about the misuse of people’s information, there’s no question that the routine use of Facebook has now become much more problematic for many. Jason Calacanis, as part of an impassioned post, provides some useful links to enable readers to understand the scope of the problem. Few might leave Facebook, but, conversely, the company’s approach to “radical transparency” has undoubtedly flayed a trust already fraying because of resistance to constant shifts in functionality.

Within the techie community, the response has been to call for “an open alternative”. Yet, here, problems of scale arise. Despite increasing attention to privacy issues from regulators, legislators and the media, Facebook’s trump card is its pervasiveness. As danah boyd comments, it’s become a “social utility”. As I’ve commented previously, Facebook is now just part of the communications landscape. While it’s certainly possible to envisage a mass of users migrating to another site, the precondition for such a ‘network effect’ in reverse would be a competing commercial entity able to raise enough capital to compete.

An open source alternative is unlikely to generate the scale necessary.

The claim from Facebook, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that the site is just reflecting shifts in contemporary understandings of privacy can be dismissed easily. Social norms against oversharing still exist, users modulate (or try to modulate) what content and information they want seen by various groups of others, and it’s simplistic and arrogant to claim that all would be just peachy if only dumb users could understand sophisticated privacy settings. The point, precisely, is that the company now affords users only limited choices about how open they wish to be. And Jeff Jarvis is right that Zuckerberg and co. confuse “public” with making a plurality of micro-publics.

Arguments about “a single identity” being a demonstration of “integrity” have been well skewered by Henry Farrell and Kieran Healy.

So what has gone wrong, and what can be done?

danah boyd is, again, spot on:

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outing people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class.

While she is absolutely on the money in contending that the desire to be “public”, in a certain sense, is one that isn’t open or chosen by all, and a desire that is differentially shaped by class, cultural capital and gender, she doesn’t quite put her finger on the basic issue. What we are seeing now is a result of the commodification of personality which, in late capitalism, creates value for corporates. We are all unpaid labourers in the social media industry, whose lives are fodder for the accumulation of capital. Facebook profits from our sociality.

The politics of this issue is, to large degree, shaped by the dialectical conflict between libertarian urges and their commercial capture, which is one way of reading the story of the web. But, because the root cause is that Facebook wants to monetise its ‘content’ (ie – us), a better lens with which to view the problem is a socialist or social democratic one. Facebook is a social utility, as boyd says; a communications medium, but also a public commons.

As such, we’re not in the realm of “good” and “evil” but in the realm of Capital – Zuckerberg has far less agency than he thinks he does, because his duty is to monetise endlessly. It’s not that Facebook is evil, but that it’s a private company providing a public purpose. So the inescapable conclusion is that it should either be heavily regulated, or a public entity should occupy its position. Just imagine the cries from the press if the ABC were to offer social networking as a public service, and you’ll know I’m right.

Not only did Abbott take the obvious route, for a Liberal, of public service bashing, but he also affected a disdain for the public sector which would put even John Howard to shame. Amidst his paeans of praise for small business and lauding of the mining industry, he struck another related note -

(a) that the NBN would destroy Telstra, and that communications infrastructure was a task for the private sector;

(b) that private health was a public good, and that the rebate should stay as is;

(c) that Medibank Private should be sold, no questions asked;

(d) and the doozy of the night – that the government shouldn’t build GP Super Clinics because they compete with corporate healthcare!

Make no mistake, this dude is as right wing as they come. Leaving aside the ranting about the Resources Super Profits Tax, and the drumbeat of negativity, the one theme that did emerge from Abbott’s speech was a complete disdain for anything the public sector, and public spending can achieve.

Abbott’s protracted campaign against all and any stimulus spending, echoed by his fans in the press gallery, is cut from the same cloth. What we’re seeing is a brazen agenda to discredit public purposes in favor of corporate interests, and his conservative rhetoric about government eschewing worthy causes is only the tip of the iceberg.

The two MPs, both former Nationals, have talked up an alliance with the other three Independents in State Parliament, and McLindon dubbed the state election “Independence Day”.

The defection reflects continuing dissension in the ranks of the amalgamated party, and the divisions between former Liberals (including the many who didn’t join the new party) and Nationals. In Kevin Rudd’s home state, the fractious LNP still poses a real problem for the federal campaign.

At state level, the MPs’ action is poised to capitalise on electoral sentiment disgusted by a long term and increasingly unpopular Labor government and unenthusiastic about the lacklustre opposition.

No doubt the momentum of the asset sales is now unstoppable. But it’s a tragedy that one of the many reasons for a backdown is going to be ignored yet again by the Bligh regime.

NB: Previous LP coverage of the Bligh privatisations here.

In the wake of the privatisation imbroglio perpetrated by the Bligh government, expectations were that solidarity between Labor and labour wouldn’t be at the forefront of the Brisbane May Day March. Anna Bligh, and I believe Treasurer Andrew Fraser, disappeared to North America, first purporting to show an interest in bionics, and then holding a ‘virtual Cabinet’ with the provincial government of British Columbia.

What these ventures have to do with anything is anyone’s guess. Commenters on the Brisbane Times‘ story correctly pointed out that Peter Beattie is already paid 250k a year to represent Queensland’s trade interests in North America, and that a ‘virtual’ meeting could surely be virtual for the Canadians, and in Brisbane for the Premier.

To his credit, Deputy Premier Paul Lucas fronted the march, but was met with the jeers which the State Labor crew richly deserve. Kevin Rudd kept his distance, preferring to march with the LHMU, a union well back in the parade, and concentrating on the Resources Super Tax in his address, an initiative I warmly welcome.

In a nutshell, the impasse of Labor politics, and the scissions the Labour movement has fallen prone to, is encapsulated in the events of this day.

It’s a longer story, but I’ve previously argued that (late) modern Labor’s political Janus face results from at least two factors: the corporatised economism of state politics, where slogans about jobs mask a wholesale surrender to business interests; and the weakening of the links between workers, unions and the professional political class.

John Quiggin has provided us with some reflections on Labour Day:

Among his thoughts, he argues:

The old-style politics of class (with the working class represented by male manual workers, gathered in large, naturally solidaristic workplaces) is no longer relevant to the great majority of Australian workers. That doesn’t mean that class has ceased to matter, but it does mean that workers experience class and power relationships more in terms of individual experience than as collective interactions between classes. So, in particular, unions need to be seen more as mutual aid associations that protect their individual members against exploitation and unfair treatment than as vehicles for the mobilisation of the working class. The kinds of legal changes sought to reverse the generally anti-union trend of past decades needs to reflect this orientation.

I think this underplays the degree to which the union movement, particularly as represented by the ACTU, has long practiced a broader class politics transcending trade and occupational union particularism. While I also think that class politics has to move beyond a masculinised workerism, and to take account of the changed social and cultural conditions of twenty first century Australia, I’m not sure things are so simple as John suggests, though he’s surely right that the casualisation of work and a host of other social and economic changes have individualised work relationships.

But I don’t think unions need to return to being essentially mutual benefit societies. They do have a role in building solidarity where there is none, though this role may have to include creating the conditions for more solidaristic workplace relations, through rethinking how unions can intervene in shaping the labour market itself.

I think there’s a great need to develop an approach which does respond to the fracturing of class, the refashioning of the workplace, and the naturalisation of expectations around insecure work. It’s something I’d like to do more work on, and will be writing further about, but it’s also something I think is well worth a preliminary discussion on a very fractured Brisbane Labour Day.

NB: My previous May Day post is here.

I

The Bligh government’s decision to privatise a range of public assets, most significantly Queensland Rail, certainly requires explanation. It’s politically irrational, and as John Quiggin argues, the economic case for privatisation has no merit. Most observers of the 2009 Queensland election campaign concur that Labor’s victory was secured only in a few short days before polling day itself; in part because electors started to focus on the real prospect of a Lawrence Springborg led LNP government, but importantly also because Labor ran a more activist campaign than could have been anticipated – highlighting the need to preserve public sector jobs, and standing up to credit ratings agency in favour of an economic growth agenda to protect Queensland jobs and workers’ standards of living. Debt and deficit scares were pushed aside in the midst of the GFC.

Yet, a few short months later, with no advance warning or consultation, Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser dropped the privatisation bombshell. The polls essentially haven’t moved since, and the public trust that Anna Bligh herself had created collapsed almost instantaneously. Though the LNP opposition led by John-Paul Langbroek is hardly a convincing alternative government, they’ve looked ever since like they have a very smooth path to victory at the next election.

So, the political rationality of this push stands in question, and particularly so given that obvious compromises to reverse part of the privatisation have not been made. Though you can hardly walk up George Street without hearing rumours of coups against Bligh, it appears clear that it is now very unlikely that there will be any backdown, despite a very prominent and active community and union campaign (led by the ETU, in particular).

Labor faces a large defection of support – notably in the suburbs and regions – to the LNP, and a probably slightly smaller swing in inner city seats direct to The Greens. The optional preferential voting system, and the habit inculcated by years of ‘Just Vote One’ campaigning by Peter Beattie in the face of conservative disunity, make it likely that many electors will vote for The Greens, then walk out of the polling booth in disgust, without giving Labor a preference. The ALP’s rational political strategy would be to reverse at least the privatisation of QR, and make a turn to the left, but this almost certainly won’t happen. Rather all the government can offer – including to its own backbenchers – is a strategy of toughing out public criticism and hoping it will all be forgotten before we next go to the polls.

II

A number of possible explanations can be advanced for the privatisation craze. One would be in terms of the factional and political dynamics within the Labor party and caucus, the elimination of any real independent powerbases in Cabinet, the group around Bligh, and the relations between the ALP, the Labour Movement, and the community. Another would be the influence of local business, economists, bureaucrats in Treasury and the Premier’s Department, and the inter-relationship of a resources economy and global flows of investment, exports and capital.

As others will be focusing on these aspects of the privatisation push, I’ve chosen to look at the decision more in the light of longer term structural factors – particularly the influence of the twin forces of globalisation and the centralisation of state power in Australia, and the exhaustion of both Queensland Labor political culture and the New Labor style of state governance and politics. For me, the most important question, which I think could only be answered by Bligh and her crew in sound bite speak, would be what exactly the purpose of the Queensland Labor party is.

III

It’s not as widely known as it should be that, far from being the red neck state of Joh era mythos, Queensland has a very radical past. The work of writers such as Carole Ferrier and historians such as Ray Evans, and in particular their co-edited book Radical Brisbane and Evans’ History of Queensland, documents a continuing tradition of radicalism. Queensland saw the first Labor government in the world, Brisbane experienced a General Strike in 1912, T. J. Ryan was the only leader in the British Empire to oppose Conscription in 1916 and 1917. This state was the first in Australia to have free public hospitals, women’s activism dates back to the 1870s, and even the dispute which brought down the Gair government in the Split of 1957 was over a substantive issue of the extension of workers’ rights.

Space prevents me from developing this argument in full, but my contention would be that the Queensland Labor tradition was a far more properly democratic socialist one than the experience of NSW Labor, for instance, an obvious comparator.

IV

So, where does the State Labor government stand today?

It’s simplifying things a bit, of course, but it seems to me that Labor does three things in government:

(a) Acts as cheerleader for and enabler of fractions of local and global capital; from the ever present developers to international coal. Little attempt is made to question the virtue of development in general, or specific developments in particular – including those which will do much harm to the government’s purported climate change abatement strategy. Anna Bligh appears captive and supine in the face of business interests, caught up in a spiral of zero sum competition with other Premiers, reliant on a drip feed of donations and jobs from resources industries and others to implement her ostensible economic aims;

(b) Plays to the worst in the communitarian New Labor text book; using “nudge” ideas to govern the soul, to shape our behaviour in the face of risks perceived or beaten up by the Sunday Mail or talkback radio. There’s a puritan element to Labor administration, which runs directly counter to a Left tradition I’d like to see revived; that of enhancing and facilitating the ability of citizens to develop autonomous capacities for self government and for using leisure time for self development and other directed activity in the family, friendship networks and local and wider communities.

Struggles over working time – to free the capacities of citizens through both greater leisure and a high standard of employment rights – have been displaced by a narrow economism which celebrates jobs and growth for their own sake.

(c) Ducks for cover when anything goes wrong in the services the state still has responsibility for delivering to its citizens. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Ministers on the ABC tv news throw up their hands and say “but the Department didn’t tell me!”.

IV

Much of this futile activity, shaped by a now well established set of political tactics (“Labor has a plan!”, “Jobs, jobs, jobs!”, etc), takes place in a context where state governments have little power to stucture really distinctive outcomes outside service delivery. Even ten years ago, let alone fifty or a hundred, their influence was much greater. For example, the pay equity reforms, on which I worked as a consultant in 2000, held out the possibility of a real reconfiguration not just of conditions but also of social relations in a gendered workforce. And the Beattie government, perhaps suffused in something of a nostalgic glow now that we know what came next, pioneered an industry policy agenda based around human capital and endogenous growth theory, emblazoned as ‘The Smart State’. Much of this strategy, though continuing to influence the thinking of Rudd Labor, and Wayne Swan in particular, was dismantled by the Bligh regime.

Peter Beattie also understood, in resisting the push from powerful quarters for the privatisation of QR, that jobs were worth more to individuals, families and communities than a matter of mere calculation. There’s no question that he was right to be sceptical of PPPs, and to reject privatisation and the attack on working conditions and jobs which will follow in its wake. He had some awareness of both the dignity of labour, and the way in which public economic power could be leveraged for social purposes.

The Queensland government now stands empty of promise, displaying an inability to unify its areas of residual responsibility with any theme other than anodyne slogans, often ones imported – via the temporary return of Mike Kaiser – from a strategy which supposedly reinvigorated NSW Labor. We all know how that turned out.

And in its own domain, decades of managerialism have ensconced a drive for constant re-organisation in the public sector, a make work culture of reports on reports and the cult of the Excel spreadsheet, where productive activity is secondary to the reduction of all of us to worker bees in the public part of the capitalist hive, dreaming only of a credit card driven escape. Corporatisation and managerialism pave the road to privatisation, and the attendant adoption of a narrow balance sheet mentality (seen also by the fixation on numbers – numbers of jobs, billions of export dollars) which is what passes for thinking among some Ministers.

Purpose is lost.

V

Much could also be said, and will be said by others today, of the significance of global flows of investment, capital and exports. I’d prefer to emphasise, though, the sociological force of homogenisation as a globalising factor. Queensland becomes more like everywhere else, content, or apparently content to feed on the scraps of the resources buck; an increasingly deracinated and featureless landscape.

This homogenisation, which is also a social force, has huge implications for the evisceration of tradition and any vision of an alternative future; any ability to conceive of something different which blends the best of the old and the new. Another world is possible, but not here.

VI

So, too, we see homogenisation in politics. One State Labor government is much like another. Queensland’s distinctive culture is lost, and no real vision advanced of a future for its citizens which would be both transformational and liberatory. The irony of the late arrival of the privatisation push in the Sunshine State is that it’s a reflex of the dying New Labor beast – as if the government were saying, we’ve done everything else except privatise. Decades on from Thatcher and the first throes of neo-liberalism, it’s a perverse form of modernisation, in a register heavily ironic. To privatise is what New Labor governments do, so let’s do it!

Here, if we had more time, we could focus more on the precise trajectory by which the links with past left tradition, with the labour movement and with public culture have become attenuated; the particular pattern where a governing impetus becomes deformed into the routine action of a political class, with all its connections into finance capital, and resources capital.

But, the central contention for me is that Queensland Labor has forgotten what it’s for. I doubt, I’d reiterate, that anyone in Cabinet really knows, beyond their own dreams of endless power. It’s this evisceration of purpose, driven by the diminution of responsibility and the globalisation of the same, which really explains the privatisation push. Ideology, stripped of ideas and a social purpose, reveals itself as irrationality, venality and stupidity.

VII

So, what is to be done?

For me, one of the greatest irony in a litany thereof, was Anna Bligh’s supposedly knock down argument, delivered as part of her half-hearted defence of the privatisations, that it may have been appropriate for Labor to run State Hotels and Butcher’s Shops in the 1920s, but not in 2010. I’m not defending State Hotels per se, though perhaps they might stay open longer than Bligh’s wowserish desire to ensure that we can’t enjoy a drink because we can’t be trusted to do so implies. But there’s a significance in the trashing of the Queensland Labor tradition by its current leader which goes to a total failure of purpose and imagination, and a failure to see that public purposes have a role to play in socialising the benefits of economic life.

What we need now, I’d contend, is to start to reimagine what our forebears saw as the purpose of state government; to extend to the citizens the fruits of their labours, and to develop capacities for personal, civic and communal action beyond the narrow repetition of the same which is work in late capitalism. We need to start thinking of what public services are for, what democratic management of enterprise means, and what we can do, collectively, to both articulate and realise a dream of a more socially just and sustainable State.

In the wake of the GFC, and the exhaustion of neo-liberalism whose parallel is to be seen in the exhaustion of Labor’s purpose, I feel hopeful that we can actually begin to articulate such an agenda, and begin to dream big dreams again.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin’s talk at the same event.

Previous discussion on LP here.

There’s a great line up of speakers, including Professor John Quiggin, Peter Simpson of the Queensland ETU and Dr Patricia Ranald from the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, as well as myself.

Proceedings start at the Brisbane Workers’ Community Centre at Paddington at 1pm, Saturday 10 April. More details here.

Update: Text of my talk posted here.