…what we see in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring are the results of hundreds of years of evolution in human communication, ideology, and organization. They are also the latest chapter in the story of the complex relationship between humans and technology, and what happens in the realm of intersection of the two.

Despite fears that the internet is alienating us from the world, it is actually giving us the means to re-create the ancient polis, but on a much larger scale. Aristotle argued that “it is necessary for the citizens to be of such a number that they knew each other’s personal qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge their fellows in a court of law sensibly”. Where radio and TV allowed our leaders to address a large number of people instantly, the internet also makes it easier for us to talk to our leaders, but more importantly it allows us to talk to each other across ever-greater distances and timezones.

For the cyborg, technology is no longer a thing you use—rather, it is a thing you are. Technology becomes part of you. Cyborgs are not users of tools; they are, instead, equipped with technology.

In the post quoted above, PJ Rey explains how, as technology becomes more integrated into our lives, it becomes less visible. As McLuhan argued, technology changes us in ways that are irrelevant to content, and personal computers and smart-phones are no different. Their effect on us goes beyond what particular status update or embarrassing photo we put on Facebook.

One of the interesting changes is in the way we observe and participate in politics.

Tony Abbott Looking At Things

Ed Millband repeating things

Cop casually pepper spraying things

Politicians are still trying to work with an old system in which they need to control a message and condense it into a 10 second grab for radio and TV newsbreaks. But the ease with which we can reproduce media, and basically unlimited time and space on the internet, mean we get to see the whole press conference, or rearrange campaign images into a new context in which we can see the patterns, see their technique. Now it’s not just the mass media who have the power to choose how a campaign is presented, it’s all of us.

Most politicians continue to use the old techniques of repeating soundbites and slogans, using Twitter and YouTube as a way of getting journalists to notice them. But some of them are realising the true nature of the technology: it’s not the mass media, it’s not direct mail to every household. It’s a way of reaching “image tribes” and communicating a more complex message to a smaller but more receptive audience. There’s so much potential for political parties, who are more and more thought to be hollow, soulless things, to allow their MPs to show what they actually believe in and engage with people. Soundbites were useful when someone else controlled how much time you had to make your point, but now there’s no limit to how long MPs can spend arguing their case. Parties need to encourage their members to do that, even if that’s at the expense of their focus-grouped campaign slogans. Because it’s happening whether MPs are part of it or not.

Firstly though, I wanted to defend Mitchell against Mia Freedman, who is angry because she was quoted, accurately, in the book. Let’s be clear: all of Freedman’s explanations about the subsequent meetings she had with Abbott where she “learned” that she was “mistaken” – all of that is outlined in Mitchell’s book, on pages 123-4. The publishers should not have put the quote on the cover in a way that implies a review of the book. But that is not Mitchell’s fault. If Freedman really believes Abbott’s “charming” explanation that he is not really against all the things he has spent his life opposing, then perhaps she should remind herself of Abbott’s “only if it’s in writing” understanding of truth.

However, that clarification aside, there was a lot to be disappointed in. For instance, seeing Gerard Henderson (ctrl F for “HISTORY CORNER”) correct a feminist writer about the difference between RU486 and the morning after pill, is not fun. Mitchell confuses the two twice, the first time on page 3. This is frankly an unforgivable error in a book that is all about a major threat to women’s reproductive rights. There are a number of other errors outlined in Henderson’s list, such as the dates of Gillard’s swearing in as PM, and the claim that Don Randall is a Queenslander (sadly, we Western Australians get to claim him). These small errors are frustrating because none of them have any impact on the main argument of the book, but they allow Abbott’s supporters to call into question the most important information, which is accurate.

Factual errors aside, the most disappointing aspect of the book is the tone it’s written in, which is snarky, but not very funny. I love snark, but I like it when it adds to the point, rather than just repeating it. For instance, on page 45, Mitchell tells how Abbott missed most of* the birth of his daughter because he chose to play football instead – he sent his mother to be with his wife. This is an appalling story, and nothing is added to that with asides such as: “Eventually, at 3:00am, Louise Abbott was born – without much help from her father.” It’s a small complaint, but the book is full of such asides – they add little to the story, and if they annoyed me, a committed Abbott-hater, then I can’t see how they would be helpful in convincing the undecided.

The tone only gets worse in Mitchell’s conclusion. On page 172 she writes: “Even though he is married with three daughters, he freely admits he has been mostly absent from the housework and childrearing. Is it any wonder that he has no understanding of what Australian women, who are more than 50 per cent of the current population, expect or need from a wannabe prime minister of their country?” Julia Gillard has probably also been mostly absent from housework and childrearing. So have I! Does that mean we are not prime minister material? Abbott has been an MP since 1994, and a government minister for much of that time. Despite a popular conception of MPs as lazy, it is a job that requires long, long hours. Of course he hasn’t pulled his weight around the home. What’s relevant is his view that women are less suited to leadership, not how much housework he happens to do. I’m sure, too, that most women wouldn’t put “knows how to vaccuum” at the top of their list of desirable prime ministerial skills.

I really wanted to write a good review of this book. I’m really glad that it came out now, as a hook to remind people of the kind of nation Abbott would like to mould us into. But this was not the book to do it, sadly. As someone who already sympathises with her thesis, I should have found a polemic against him an enjoyable read. More importantly, for it to achieve its stated aims of warning Australian women who don’t follow politics as closely as I do, it shouldn’t induce sympathy for the subject it seeks to attack. Abbott is a conviction politician, no matter how angry certain commenters may be when I say that. He wants power, yes, and he is ruthless in his pursuit of it. But he wants power for a reason, not just for its own sake. I just hope that the debate this book sparked gets people talking about what those reasons are.

*My bad.

More at Still Life With Cat.

A dire warning was provided to the Coalition by the Secretary of the Immigration Department and senior officials:

MORE than 600 people could arrive by boat every month, leading to the collapse of Australia’s detention system and European-style unrest in its cities, if there is a return to onshore processing of all asylum seekers, according to a bleak assessment from senior Canberra officials.

Isn’t this just indicative of the extreme degree to which this issue has been framed in terms that are sheer fantasy?

There is actually no good reason why 600 arrivals a month could not be processed onshore in an orderly way. If capacity is lacking to perform the required checks, surely some of the immense sums spent on offshoring could be rediverted.

I am puzzled as to how such capacity could magically appear on Manus Island or Nauru, or if one were to take the Gillard position rather than Tony Abbott’s, how we would be justified in effectively dispensing ourselves of any responsibility for the processing of asylum seekers in Malaysia or elsewhere, and still remain committed to the Refugee Convention.

But rationality seems to have fled.

The dark fantasies of “European-style social unrest” among policy makers are even more disturbing.

I am not aware that such “social unrest” (what unrest? London? Paris?) has any particular or compelling connection with refugees.

What are they imagining here?

On another note, Abbott’s goal appears to be to humiliate the Labor Party and force acceptance that they were wrong to oppose Nauru in the Howard era, and that the increasingly ubiquitous former Prime Minister was right.

If, and I don’t know that it’s very likely, because it continues to seem to me that the Coalition’s incentives are for the issue to continue to hurt the Gillard government, there is some sort of “bipartisan” legislation, how would this sit with many Labor MPs? If anything might precipitate a serious threat to Julia Gillard’s leadership, presenting that sort of bill to Parliament would do it, I suspect.

I think the return of Rudd would put the spotlight on Abbott’s total fraudulence, maybe even paving the way for the Rudd vs Turnbull election we should have had last time.

That’s an interesting reflection, because amidst all the sound and fury that surrounds the Gillard government, the related facts that Tony Abbott is not popular and that no one knows what an Abbott government would do except try to return to Howardia are not highlighted enough.

Tony Abbott stands for endless upheaval. He’s the permanent revolutionary of the Coalition side.

On his stated platform, there would need to be another election should he become Prime Minister. In quick order.

That’s simply because what he says he wants to do (repeal the carbon price, undo the resources tax, shift towards individual bargaining in workplace relations, dissolve the NBN and so on) would not, in all likelihood, be capable of being carried through a Senate where the probability that The Greens will retain the balance of power is high.

So an Abbott government would be more of the same. Lots of yelling and posturing, with the view to forcing a double dissolution.

Abbott’s implied assurance that calm and stability and Howardian goodness would return in an instant, and all the many, many grievances he has fostered would be instantly wiped away is impossible of attainment.

Having won power, it’s hard to see the Coalition (which is always of the view that power is the oxygen it ought to breathe) chancing it on another throw of the dice. It would be under a PM whose sole virtue is his not-Gillard-ness.

It is not at all impossible, indeed I’d say likely, that there might be a Liberal leadership change either before the 2013 election (which may occur earlier) or shortly afterwards. Put your money on before. I suspect that John Quiggin is right that a Labor shift to Kevin Rudd (and probably only to Rudd) would act as a catalyst.

On the Labor side of things, reality has to be confronted.

Labor’s primary vote has collapsed, and Julia Gillard’s approval has collapsed.

In reading over the thread about Peter Beattie’s little play, two themes are interesting:

(a) It’s all the fault of the media;

(b) Julia Gillard’s government has done good things.

(a) can be disposed of easily. Kevin Rudd did not have News Limited in his pocket, and he and the ALP enjoyed very high popularity from the end of 2006 to the end of 2009. A hostile and febrile press gallery, and “campaigning” newspapers are simply just the environment in which a Labor government now has to operate.

(b) mistakes legislative command, more often than not, for political and governmental authority. No one is really going to vote Labor because 188 (or whatever) bills have been passed by Parliament this year. A government which looks to be in a state of panic, like a bunny in the headlights, when confronted by the inevitable implosion of an ill-judged and rushed policy fix has little claim to authority.

The good things that have been done (a proper paid parental leave scheme, health funding reform, the NBN, and so on) do not redound, for whatever reason, to the government’s credit.

Over and above that, as Malcolm Farnsworth makes clear in an excellent piece at The Drum, there’s a longer term hollowing out of the Labor project which is really starting to show.

Kevin Rudd’s removal, whatever his faults, were symptomatic of that decline.

Kevin Rudd’s removal also explains most of why Julia Gillard has not been able to make a success of things. The accusation of a ‘lie’ gains so much traction because she can easily be perceived as having seized the leadership by stealth.

Now, that is not true, but the fact that the political logic behind that perception is at work is a fact, and a fact that must be reckoned with.

I don’t think the “hold the nerve with Gillard” strategy is a goer any more.

The three policy issues Julia Gillard herself nominated at the time she became Prime Minister are causes of the government’s pain. Principally, climate change and asylum seekers, but the resources tax is also not settled, and the departure from the original design has, it’s become clear, exacerbated all the political issues associated with the “two speed economy”.

On climate change, Labor gave the issue away to The Greens. On asylum seekers, Labor gave the issue away to the Right.

What we need is a return to sanity in Australian political life. So, Quiggin is probably right that a Rudd-Turnbull contest would promote that. We may not get there. Anything can happen. But Julia Gillard’s effective Prime Minister-ship is almost certainly over.

Again that is not fair, but there it is.

I think that if the leadership were to change, the most likely outcome would still be a sizeable Coalition win. This Labor government is beyond saving. But some of the furniture needs saving, one of Australia’s two principal parties of government needs to recover some dignity and self belief, and the country needs anything other than an Abbott-slide.

Julia Gillard should think about that.

“The government should be investigating what can be done to ensure a genuinely level playing field with a fair go for Australian companies,” he told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia in Melbourne. “If there’s a respectable case that can be made for maintaining a heavy manufacturing base on the grounds of national security, the inherent value of a diversified economy or the transitional costs of shutting down capital-intensive industries only to start them up again when market conditions change, there needs to be a forum where it can be addressed.”

Tony Abbott, February 2011:

Today I can outline more than $2 billion in further savings measures that the Gillard Government should adopt instead of its flood tax

…

* Reducing spending on the Automotive Transformation Scheme (ATS)

…

As this Canberra Times article noted at the time, the proposed cuts to car industry assistance – the car industry being the archetypal capital-intensive heavy manufacturing industry with alleged national security implications – would have amounted to 500 million dollars, or so. And it would have been just the kind of policy uncertainty that businesses regularly indicate discourages them from investing.

But, hey, it’s Tuesday, it must be manufacturing, and suddenly Tony Abbott is heavy industry’s friend.

At the bottom of this article is more scaremongering rubbish:

Touring the Ford factory at Geelong, Mr Abbott said a $30 carbon tax would add $412 to the price of a car and could lead to the end of the motor manufacturing industry in Australia.

As a corrective, some figures from Ford from a life-cycle analysis of their vehicles. It’s from the USA, however, the numbers aren’t going to be radically different here.

In a nutshell, in a typical midsize vehicle, there’s 3.5 tonnes of emissions from raw materials, 2.6 tonnes in the actual manufacturing/assembly process, and an additional 0.3 tonnes from “manufacturing logistics”. 6.4 tonnes in total, in fact. That comes to roughly $192. To get a cost of $412 with a carbon price of $30, the average car would have to emit 13.7 tonnes in the raw materials manufacturing and the assembly process.

But let’s pick it apart even further. Those emissions from “raw materials” are mostly steel and aluminium (with a bit from plastic). You know, those “trade-exposed, emissions intensive” industries that Greg Combet spends so much time talking about. And, guess what – if they’re trade exposed, the price of those materials is going to be largely determined by global markets, not the costs of local manufacturers. So it’s the raw material suppliers who’ll take the hit to their profitability, not the car manufacturers. In practice, every iteration of a carbon price yet proposed has ensured that the TEEI industries are compensated for a large fraction of their permit costs for the next few years. Either way, it’s not the car industry, or, ultimately, the purchaser, that pays until the global cost of those materials reflects a carbon price, at which point it’s not a competitive issue.

So we’re left with roughly three tonnes of emissions from the assembly process, and an impost of $90 – assuming 100% Australian content. Even for the relatively small and cheap Holden Cruze (which has an imported drivetrain and thus the carbon tax impact is even lower) that’s around 0.4% of RRP.

Compared to the Aussie dollar, that’s just noise.

Tony Abbott’s response has been to incite a revolt against the government because petrol prices may rise by 6.5c/L under at $26/t scenario. Seriously.

Meanwhile, the threat of an actual people’s revolt against the brutal Libyan dictatorship may see petrol prices rise by 30c – about five times that much.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Which begs the question of why. Why chose the term ‘people’s revolt’ in the midst of a once in a generation flowering of democracy in the middle east?

Partisanship for its own sake is politics de jour in our national capital, and has been for at least the past couple decades. Rather than speculating on why that is, I would rather draw attention to the content of Abbott’s message – or rather its lack. By rallying Liberals behind ‘Gillard has broken a promise! Great big tax!’ Abbott gives himself room to manoeuvre without having to actually justify why the details of the proposal are bad.

In some respects, the MPCCC proposal for emissions trading is actually more Ordoliberal than Neoliberal. Whereas Neoliberals were united by their opposition to Keynesianism, and the application of economic principles to sociological domains like crime, the Ordoliberals internalized the Weberian desire for “a re-enchanted world, filled with shared meaning for all, embodied in great public figures or works.” Think of Christine Milne’s promotion of great ‘renewable energy’ projects like solar thermal stations. However, scarred by the vital politics of the Nazi state, the Ordoliberals developed an idea of the market as a device to explicitly temper the growth of the state – hence the reliance on a carbon price, and anxiety about ‘picking winners’.

In contrast, Abbott’s demanded rage from voters without recourse to reflection or justification. The squalid invocation of the term ‘people’s revolt’ was nihilistic to the extent that it relied on an empty, blind rage. No morality. This was simply the ‘hacker ethos’ transplanted into the field of climate policy.

Hayek noticed a ‘double truth’ to liberalism. As one commentator has summarized it: an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy while, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of ‘rolling back the nanny state’ and being ‘free to choose’

Breathlessly eliding Libyan oil with the pathetic quasi-libertarian grammar of ‘great big tax’ put both sides of that truth on graphic display today.

Update: (Mea Culpa – this is from 2009, so think of it as a timely reminder)Turnbull savages Abbott over climate ‘bullshit’

Former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has unleashed an attack on his successor Tony Abbott, describing his climate change position as “bullshit”.

In a strongly-worded blog entry posted this morning, Mr Turnbull personally attacks Mr Abbott for putting the party’s integrity on the line, saying Coalition climate change policy has descended into “farce”, because it does not have a policy.

He vows to cross the floor and vote for the Government’s emissions trading scheme and urges his colleagues to follow him.

Elsewhere: Very strong posts from Ben Eltham at New Matilda, Grog and Bernard Keane

Eltham notes that “carbon wars are back and despite the wishes of scientists and environmentalists, this round will be all about politics — not policy, not evidence, and certainly not science.”

Keane focuses on one message within this politics- the seemingly arbitrary fluctuations within the Liberals’ electricity price rise scare campaign. He wonders whether “… voters are more likely to see the Government’s move as a breach of faith or a reversal of an extraordinarily dumb decision? And have we all got the emotional energy to reach the same heights of hysteria as in 2009?”

Grog has carefully dissected the announcement, noting Gillard’s emphasis on efficacy and fairness.

Update: Sophie Mirabella “If Gillard thinks we want this carbon tax she is delusional as Colonel “my people love me” Gaddafi.”

As things stand, each bereaved family knows that the Australian
people respect their loss and value their sacrifice. We have honoured their deaths by continuing their campaign. How worth while would these deaths now seem if the Australian government were to abandon the cause for which they died? How would those families feel if the Australian government were to conclude that the task is now too hard or should never have been undertaken in the first place?

This is a textbook example of the sunk cost fallacy. A particularly pernicious one, given that the costs being borne are premature and violent deaths, rather than money (though of course there’s no shortage of that being spent, too).

Would Tony Abbott still have us on Anzac Cove, trying to take the Dardanelles, to honour the sacrifice of the Anzacs?

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.