Tag Archive for 'Tony Blair'

“The poor will always be with us”; Abbott’s Brutopia

It must be ‘write an op/ed for Fairfax about something a political leader said to me’ week. First, Nina Funnell, and now Michael Perusco:

I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government’s goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no.

In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ”The poor will always be with us,” he said, and referred to the fact there is little a government can do for people who choose to be homeless.

Perusco, the Chief Executive of Melbourne’s Sacred Heart Mission, goes on to refute Abbott’s claim that homelessness is a choice, and to underline how vital action in this area is.

It’s instructive to compare Abbott’s remarks, which he presumably didn’t think would end up in The Age, with this piece of puffery from Senator George Brandis in The Australian: Continue reading ‘“The poor will always be with us”; Abbott’s Brutopia’

Tony Blair at the Chilcot Inquiry

There’s been some talk about Tony Blair’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq War on the open thread, so it might be best to have a dedicated post to focus comments.

A good starting point for discussion is the Guardian’s comprehensive coverage.

Keeping the New Labour faith, even unto death

2010 is going to be a year of elections. In Australia, we have three state elections – Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, and almost certainly a federal poll*. In Britain, the Labour party’s future is on the line; the same party which was variously cited as inspired by the Hawke/Keating government and an inspiration for the ALP in opposition.

Writing in The Guardian, Seamus Milne has an interesting piece on the failed coup attempt against Gordon Brown last week. Theatrics aside, he sees it as a contest for the future of the party, with the Blairite forces trying to enforce the New Labour line through a proxy contest over personalities and electoral tactics:

But by exploiting the coup attempt to demand a change of direction, and making the prime minister’s closest ally, Ed Balls, their fall guy, the cabinet’s anti-Brown majority has unmistakably called time on the Keynesian-inspired and progressive tax measures that have won public support but caused such alarm in the City, Treasury and media.

Milne goes on to argue that the (now) Brownite position makes more economic and political sense.

There’s a big irony here, given that New Labour’s success derived from an argument that the Labour party had sacrificed electoral success on the altar of ideological purity.

There’s also an Australian parallel, as the Coalition appear determined to avoid competing for the centre at any costs, all in the name of ‘defending the legacy’ and ‘differentiation’. So, it seems that the tendency for parties to curl up in an ideological ball in the face of defeat afflicts those of the right, as well as those of the left.

*In theory, Rudd doesn’t have to go to the polls til April 2011.

Elsewhere: Ben Eltham on the year ahead in politics.

Rundle on the recent history of the left

As a sequel to my post on The Australian’s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Continue reading ‘Rundle on the recent history of the left’

Turnbull’s turn

I’m not sure if the anniversary has been celebrated, but it’s just over six months since Malcolm Turnbull became Leader of the Opposition. At the time, I suggested that he needed to junk the obsession with the Howard legacy, and lead from the centre. I also said that there was a real chance that he’d end up as Brendan Nelson but without the stunts and the Emo Man persona. It was interesting to see this open letter from Alister Drysdale, a former Fraser advisor, published in Business Spectator on Friday:

You came into politics as a rare beast – successful in business, charismatic, intelligent, representing a vibrant small “l” electorate in Sydney, a man not frightened to take on a case or a cause, a serious contributor to the climate change debate and a tough nut. Not a bad resume for an aspiring Prime Minister.

Yet, within just a few months you are in danger of throwing that reputation to the dogs and joining the queue of failed opposition leaders.

At the G20 this week Obama said he gave only one piece of political advice to Gordon Brown, facing an election – “Gordon, good policy is good politics”. He said results may not be immediate, but would prevail.

Not bad advice, Malcolm. Why don’t you forget that Peter Costello sits behind you – and just do what your instinct and brain tells you?

I think it’s too late now for Turnbull to take that advice. Continue reading ‘Turnbull’s turn’

The state of capitalism today II

SocProf over at The Global Sociology Blog and I must be reading the same things, and thinking along similar lines, because I had planned to link to precisely the same articles she highlights in an update to my recent post on the state of the global financial crisis.

In The Guardian, Will Hutton explains why measures to halt the cascading crisis have been ineffectual to date. He might have made more explicit the implication that one of the basic structural problems is that action taken at the level of the nation state can be counter-productive given the disseminations and movements of capital, and that there are real domestic political barriers to coordinated action, as well as all the obvious problems of concertation through institutions such as the EU and the G20.

But he does make this point – harmonising with the note I’ve been sounding repeatedly – very clearly indeed:

There was no effective opposition. The left and organised labour collapsed as intellectual, social and political forces; there was no conviction that any alternative to this shareholder value-driven, financial, ’securitised’ capitalism existed, or any political muscle to support it even if there were. Mainstream culture moved away from public purpose and fairness; the new priorities were individual self-fulfilment, personal experience and loyalty to self.

Hutton is perhaps more sanguine than I am, though, about the capacity of state action to turn all this around. Continue reading ‘The state of capitalism today II’

Greens back in the spotlight after the WA election?

With all the attention on the role of Brendon Grylls and the Nationals as the kingmakers in the WA election result, the improvement in the Greens’ vote has slipped under the radar somewhat. Counting subsequent to election night has seen their vote climb to almost 12% of the Legislative Assembly total according to the WAEC (which is interestingly slightly higher than the Greens’ vote in the Legislative Council).

But, if the Fin Review is to be believed, the significance of a 4% plus swing to the Greens hasn’t escaped the attention of ALP wonks. “Labor hardheads” are quoted by the paper as concerned by the vote in Fremantle, and the implications for the seats of Federal Ministers such as Lindsay Tanner, Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. “Labor strategists” are cited as concerned about a drift away among “left-leaning voters”.

This is hardly rocket science. Any modern managerialist ALP government is bound to disappoint at least some left voters after the initial euphoria of a Tory defeat has worn off. And the Greens nationally are going to have a much bigger profile with a balance of power role in the Senate and new Senators who may develop a high profile. The article, however, leaves us none the wiser as to how “Labor strategists” think their party should respond.

Continue reading ‘Greens back in the spotlight after the WA election?’

On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?

Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

Continue reading ‘On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?’

We’re They’re all neo-liberals now?

The think tank culture is weird. Although there are certainly think tanks around that put some effort into commissioning and fostering quality research, the origin of the beast lay in the business of shaping and shifting public debate through the media and influencing pollies. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it were, provided that we understand that the research produced may not always be peer-reviewed (CPD, with whom I’m associated, does subject its policy papers to peer review) and in particular we understand not just the ideological commitments of individual think tanks but where their funding comes from. That’s why there are legitimate questions to be asked – including but not restricted to the propensity to push climate change denialism – about the reluctance of some organisations such as Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute to even admit that disclosure of funding sources is in the public interest.

Because one of the things think tanks do is provide a ready source of op/ed copy, so-called “public debate” can go down some quite odd paths. Most recently, in Australia, the bizarre theme about the Enlightenment (and apparently the “good” Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the “bad” French Enlightenment) which was articulated to climate change denialism, and which also prompted some public weirdness from Craig Emerson. It’s noteworthy that just as the Rudd v. Hayek wars are really just proxies for a dispute about underlying policy orientations, that none of the gibberish that has come out of the new MSM meme of the month has anything much to do with scholarly study on the role of the actual Enlightenments in history or in philosophy. It’s not really a “battle of ideas” at all, just a convenient hook for some very tired positions to be hung on.

But everyone in this game – “progressive” or “liberal” or “conservative” – has a vested interest in pretending that what is being staged is some sort of “battle of ideas”. Hence we have Per Capita, a particularly neo-liberal bunch of progressives with strong connections to some of the Blairite Third Way orgs in London, holding a “Consilium”, whatever that may be, accepting most of the premises of the CIS’ Enlightenment-fest. And we get PC fellow Dennis Glover writing an op/ed for The Australian spruiking his mob’s definition of Kevin Rudd’s “reforming Centre”. The new ideas in question (and the PC’s website features slogans such as “Hard Decisions”, “Human Capital” and “Practical, Empirical, Fresh” demonstrating their desire to be the house intellectuals of the Rudd revolution) aren’t actually new. It’s all standard “social democracy = markets + human capital theory + communitarian welfare policy” Blairism. It’s just getting a run in Australia for the first time, and there’s no doubt that it is getting a run – with initiatives such as the marketisation of Victorian TAFE and Julia Gillard’s musings about vouchers being directly linked to this agenda. And the “truancy welfare quarantining” seems quite redolent of Blair’s first term – when backbenchers revolted over welfare cuts. And, as argued here recently, there’s evidence that this sort of thing misses the point in addressing the actual causes of poor school attendance.

Continue reading ‘We’re They’re all neo-liberals now?’