Tag Archive for ‘social justice’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Tag Archive for 'social justice'

Tony Abbott and the God question

Published

3 months, 2 weeks ago

in Culture, Media, Politics, Religion and Sociology

. 88 Comments

The first few days of Tony Abbott’s leadership have seen a concerted effort by the conservative commentariat to decry any criticism of his reactionary policies on women’s rights and social issues as ‘anti-Catholic’.

A number of points need making about this trope:

(a) Abbott is, of course, not the first federal leader of the Liberal party to be a Catholic. Sectarianism was definitely a factor in the largely Protestant and bourgeois parties of the centre right in the past, and there may be residual effects within the Liberal party itself. It’s worth remembering that Malcolm Turnbull is a Catholic, and this issue (as far as I can recall) was never highlighted during his leadership.

However, Tony Abbott is the first leader to be associated with a particular style of political Catholicism – one which, some decades ago, would have been much more closely associated with the DLP (and indeed still has influence within various ALP right factions and unions). Outside the circles around Cardinal George Pell this sort of neo-grouper politics has little influence in Australian Catholicism itself. Australian Catholics are less unified politically than in the days of sharper religious and political cleavages, and while social justice Catholicism is also a living tradition, my own view is that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is much less politicised with respect to the broader community. That holds less for those who are identified with Pope Benedict’s ‘reform of the reform’, but here, there is often a significant disjunction between Papal social teaching in some areas and an ensemble of conservative social and political positions held by the Pontiff’s Antipodean warriors.

In short, the interface of religion and politics has itself been affected by a secularisation within Australian culture, which is powerfully related to a dissolution of modernist political battle lines.

(b) This fracturing of a largely unitary theological and political constellation is reflected in, and in turn, influenced by a different way of seeing the imperatives of religion for acting within culture. Guy Rundle has summed it up thus: Continue reading ‘Tony Abbott and the God question’

Quadrant piles on

Published

Mark

5 months, 3 weeks ago

in Blogging, Culture, Media, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology

. 326 Comments

Not to be outdone by The Australian, Quadrant has launched its own series on the left. This time with non-leftists writing it… And writing about the Australian’s articles. Jason Soon, for instance, along the way to arguing that social justice is a “category mistake” and the basis of “the left’s form of creationism”, takes a swipe at LP as “postmodernist”. News to me. The mis-en-abyme of Quadrant’s deconstruction of putative lefties writing for a right wing op/ed page strikes me as much more properly po/mo. Or maybe it’s a piece of pure Dada-ist modernist absurdism.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…

There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…

Related LP posts: Here, here and here.

Elsewhere: Catallaxy.

Update: Skepticlawyer.

Tim Soutphommasane, ideology and narratives

Published

Mark

6 months ago

in Culture, Media, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology

. 35 Comments

The Australian is running a series on defining the left (!), kicking off with a contribution today by Tim Soutphommasane. Soutphommasane is apparently the go to person at the moment for all things social democratic, having written a book arguing that we should reclaim patriotism for the left.

Posing the question of “what’s left” begs the question of who the left are. Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre. There’s a broader question in his writing which goes quite unanswered – that of agency and constituency.

In an op/ed for The Age, he wrote:

Preferring the comfortable terrain of moral righteousness, the Australian left surrendered national values to reactionaries and racists in the culture wars.

I don’t know quite what “moral righteousness” means in this context, though I could hazard a guess. But let’s leave that aside. I’m more concerned, for the moment, about who this “Australian left” actually comprises.

We take our attachment to egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go seriously. Most of us have a warm affection for our country and its qualities.

No doubt we do, but what are those “qualities”? And who’s that “we”? And why should such an identification be central to political identity, or indeed constitutive of such an identity?

Egalitarianism has a sociological and cultural history, but it’s also one marked by exclusions – as is “mateship”. If Soutphommasane’s argument is that the Australian Labor Party needed to counter John Howard’s embrace of so-called national values for electoral reasons, no doubt he has a point. Governing parties are by necessity oriented to the state, and since we have nation states, must necessarily articulate some sort of discourse of the nation. But the ALP and electoral politics are not co-extensive with the left. I haven’t read his book, but in the newspaper commentary he’s authored, it doesn’t seem to me that the very good reasons why left wing movements have been suspicious of nationalist particularisms and in favour of cosmopolitanism and internationalism have been addressed.

Continue reading ‘Tim Soutphommasane, ideology and narratives’

The stimulus package and fairness

Published

Mark

1 year, 5 months ago

in Economics, Howardia, Markets and Poverty

. 61 Comments

Just before last year’s federal election, I read Neal Blewett’s Cabinet Diaries. The book is a good read, but I was also interested in reminding myself – in the dying days of the Howard Era – what a Labor government felt like. One of the things that really jumped out at me was regular discussions around the Cabinet table about assistance for the unemployed, and several of Keating’s measures to stimulate the economy were targeted to people on the dole, among others. Those with longer memories might recall Labor’s opposition to Malcolm Fraser’s “fight inflation first” austerity regime in the late 70s. Mike Steketee has a very good column today which shows just how much things have changed in the era of the deserving poor (and not so poor) and the undeserving poor. He rightly points out that some of the pensioners receiving payments will have substantial assets and incomes of up to $66000, and self-funded retirees with incomes up to $50000 for singles and $80000 for couples will also receive the one off payments. It would be very hard to argue that they are the folks in the community doing it toughest, and as Steketee suggests, there’s no guarantee the money will be spent rather than saved.

What we’re seeing here, I think, is a combination of Kevin Rudd’s very conservative personal values and political calculation.

Continue reading ‘The stimulus package and fairness’

Of welfare policy, work, entitlements and parental leave

Published

Mark

1 year, 5 months ago

in Economics, Education, Government, Health, Howardia, Immigration, Industrial Relations, Parenting, Policy, Poverty and Women

. 65 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion sparked by the Productivity Commission report into Parental Leave about “middle class welfare”. Because the PC also made recommendations about the baby bonus, and therefore there have been predictable calls to share the dosh equally with non-working mothers, paid parental leave is being conceptualised as “welfare” rather than as a workplace entitlement. The Commission is quite explicit that the goal of the recommendations is to ensure that leave (which in itself as a concept only works if it’s related to work) is available for parents – primarily for working women. That’s why it will be paid by employers (who will later claim the amount back from the government) – to symbolise that it is an entitlement pertaining to employment rights and not a “hand out” or “welfare”. I think that needs to be recognised.

But perhaps some of the conceptual slippage (which is really important politically) is understandable. The policy has more than one aim – and one of its aims is to foster early childhood development, and the assumption here is that direct involvement of a parent or parents is crucial at the early stages of infancy. But, nevertheless, it is worth reinforcing the fact that insofar as non working mothers have made a choice not to work, that under the current policy design, 10 hours a week for a year would be enough to trigger the paid parental leave entitlement.

So, that’s that. But there are some ambivalences around all this, some of which I share. Writing today in The Australian, George Megalogenis launches an assault on “middle class welfare”, giving readers a history lesson about when family payments took off, and pointing out that in the age of Menzies they were small change. The implication seems to be explicitly that politicians are in the habit of tossing bribes around, and that virtuous self-reliance was the norm for 50s and 60s Australia. What this ignores, though, is that Menzies Land was surrounded by high tarriff walls and as a result of the Australian settlement, had a highly regulated wage system that was openly premised (from Higgins onwards) on the male wage as a breadwinner’s wage sufficient to support two adults and the then average number of children.

As Kim pointed out in a post here a month or so ago, reflecting on Betty Friedan’s legacy, the second wave of feminism and the movement for women’s workforce participation coincided with the increasing inability of a sole wage to sustain the level of consumer demand that sustained a consumption oriented “modern industrial economy”. Feminism, if you like, lent a hand to save capitalism. Megalogenis is right to point to remaining hurdles in the tax/welfare mix to participation in the labour market, but I want to trouble the logic that this should be the sole aim of policy.

Continue reading ‘Of welfare policy, work, entitlements and parental leave’

The Life of Palin or health care and justice and climate change and stuff

Published

Kim

1 year, 6 months ago

in Activism, Blogging, Climate change, Culture, Economics, Ethics, Feminism, Foreign Elections, Health, Media, Parenting, Poverty, Sociology, USA and Women

. 248 Comments

As a bit of a follow up to the discussion on this post of the familial scandals confected or exploited about GOP Vice-Presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, here’s two excellent and thought provoking pieces. First, Feminist Philosophers asks why folks might be more interested in all this stuff than, well, actual issues:

Why is the front page of the NY Times full of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy and New Orleans near miss, when the second major political convention is about to start and there are extremely important issues facing the United States about health care, clean energy, poverty and others?

She points to the importance of citizens – and by implication bloggers – trying to refocus debate on the issues, and on the necessity of a critical education in cultivating habits of mind which place the emphasis where it should be.

Secondly, the uniformly fantabulous Rebecca Traister at Salon writes:

How we got from the dispiriting political and ideological record of Sarah Palin — that she is adamantly pro-life and anti-gay marriage, that she is a lifetime member of the NRA, that she has no foreign policy experience and supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools — to the uterine activity of her family, makes perfect, human sense: Who wants to talk about boring policy when we can talk about teens and sex and pregnancy?

Continue reading ‘The Life of Palin or health care and justice and climate change and stuff’

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