Karen Brooks’ post on Tony Abbott’s now infamous interview with the Women’s Weekly is the best piece I’ve read about its implications. Read it here.
Tag Archive for 'values'
Tony Abbott gave an Australia day address in Melbourne last night (a few days early, but what the hey…). The Shorter Tone? Immigrants should adopt Australian values and that Mufti character was dodgy; A big population is good, but John Howard was right about everything, though we should have compassion for asylum seekers.
This, no doubt, is the first of the ‘philosophical’, ‘headland’ speeches which will define Abbott as the very model of a modern Liberal leaderthe ghost of Howardia.
Elsewhere: Andrew Elder.
As a conclusion to his series provoked by The Australian’s “What’s Left” op/ed fest, Guy Rundle has proposed a positive vision of the future from the left. [For my previous LP posts on this theme, see here.]
I’ll post the whole piece over the fold (with permission), but I want to zero in on this point and add a few of my own thoughts:
Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions…
Read that together with another observation:
Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.
It’s precisely, I think, because a certain blockage to thought has now fractured with the Global Financial Crisis’ destruction of the legitimacy of ideological capital (and Slavoj Žižek may be right that this is the second ‘end of history’; the first being the implosion of Soviet Marxism), that we can begin to think a future outside the “no alternatives” terrain of both neo-liberalism and its anodyne Third way echoes. The term “social democracy”, in and of itself, doesn’t imply an economistic orientation, and it should not. What we’re actually seeing, I would argue (and more on this later), is a return of suppressed conceptions of value and values in the popular mind, which create the building blocks on which a vision of the future can be scaffolded, even if the foundation must rest on shards.
In short, and this was a theme of my doctoral thesis, what we need to do – collectively – is to revive our ability to imagine life otherwise. That works better if we allow critique its place – to render what appears natural strange – but also if we ground our thoughts of the future in what we can see around us, and orient our presents to a future hope. A certain utopian sensibility is required – but one which is open to the invention of utopias in a plural and a minor key.
Continue reading ‘Left futures’
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’
When John Howard’s government announced funding for school chaplains in public schools, then Education Minister Julie Bishop (remember her?) claimed it was all about instilling “values” in the kiddies. Apparently, the fruits of the program have exceeded expectations:
GOD has cured at least one state school student of attention deficit disorder and another of asthma, according to interviews with chaplains employed in 2850 schools under a $165 million federal government program.
The Lord has also made it stop raining at a state school assembly in Queensland and performed other miracles to bring state school children to Jesus.
One chaplain was able to “fix the head” of a disruptive student by placing his hands upon the boy’s head, and praying for him.
These and other miraculous claims are included in a book about the national school chaplaincy program, which was introduced by the Howard government in October 2006.
Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.
Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book – Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?
Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.
Cross-posted at Terry Flew’s blog.
Most attention in the U.S. Presidential elections has been given to the Democratic Party, and the wide schism revealed in its support base between supporters of Hillary Clinton (majority of women, Latinos, older voters, lower income, lower average levels of education) and Barack Obama (majority of African-Americans, younger voters, higher income, tertiary educated). It has been cast as “a standoff between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Huxtables”, but its fault lines are pretty clear. This cannot be said for the Republican Party going into the 2008 elections.
John McCain does not bring a strong hand to the election, although the ongoing saga of the Democrat nominee has helped somewhat. There is usually a change in the governing party after eight years of one President holding office. While this was not true in 1988, George Bush gained the presidency with Ronald Reagan having a personal approval rating of about 60%. George W. Bush has a personal approval rating below 30%, and sinking. Even if his approval figures were better, this would be no guarantee against change. Bill Clinton left office with personal approval ratings over 60%, but his Vice-President Al Gore could not defeat the Republicans in 2000.
The position of the Republicans as a party is far worse than that of John McCain as its presumptive Presidential nominee. Continue reading ‘John McCain and the future of the Republicans’
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