Phil Lynch writes:

Of the myriad issues inadequately covered in the election campaign thus far, Australian values and identity — and the question of how these values shape the way we understand our role and responsibility in the world — rank high. In the leaders’ debate, for example, the only discussion of Australian foreign policy and our place in the world arose in the context of the “Timor Solution” and the war in Afghanistan.

This is not the way things should be. With real leadership, elections present an opportunity to tap into admirable but often latent aspects of national identity, a concept explored by Canadian political scientist Alison Brysk in her new book, Global Good Samaritans: Human Rights as Foreign Policy. Why, Brysk asks, do a small number of countries sacrifice their national interest to promote human rights and help strangers? Her answer is simple: they don’t. Instead, she explains, countries such as Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands have nurtured national identities that have a deep commitment to human rights at their core. Global good samaritans, Brysk posits, see the “blood, treasure, and political capital they contribute to human rights as an investment, not a loss”. Both at the local and international levels, they have learned to see themselves, she says, “as interconnected members of a community that works best for everyone when human rights are respected”.

What I’d really like to see in this election is our national leaders appealing to and mobilising the most constructive and admirable aspects of Australia’s national identity and committing to the nation’s development as a principled, persistent, fearless and forceful human rights champion in the region and on the international stage.

Certainly, we are well placed to be an effective human rights promoter. We are democratic and politically stable. We are globalised and multicultural. We have an active and well networked civil society. We enjoy low levels of social stratification and high levels of economic development. We are a secure regional middle power.

We also have much to gain from pursuing the human rights agenda and much to lose in failing to do so. The positive side of the ledger includes the development of more stable and predictable international and regional policy environments, enhanced international credibility and diplomatic capital, strengthened policy coherence, and the mobilisation of universal, unifying national values. Conversely, a failure to multilaterally address urgent human rights challenges, such as climate change and food and water insecurity, will have grave implications for global, regional and national peace, security and development.

What then, could Australia do to most actively and effectively contribute to the agenda of making human rights a human reality in the 21st century?

As a first step, Australia should develop a comprehensive strategy on human rights and foreign policy. That strategy should mainstream human rights across all areas of Australian foreign affairs, including aid, development, trade, investment, migration, environment, business and security. It should contain concrete measures and commitments to promote and protect human rights in the region and internationally. Such a policy could enhance our international reputation as a human rights leader and build significant diplomatic capital.

Australia’s 2013-2014 UN Security Council candidacy could be a flagship for this policy. As a Security Council candidate, we should commit to taking a principled, persistent and consistent approach to human rights internationally and to ensuring that our domestic policies and practices are human rights compliant. We should use our Security Council candidacy to promote our national interest in international human rights, the rule of law and good governance.

Australia should similarly take a proactive and principled approach to the UN Human Rights Council, whether as an active observer state or member. We have an important role in ensuring the Council fulfils its mandate, and achieves its potential, as the leading multilateral forum for the discussion, promotion and enforcement of human rights.

Both through the Security Council and other international and regional bodies, including trade and financial institutions, we should push a fearless and forceful human rights agenda. This agenda should address existing human rights challenges – including poverty, financial instability and inequality – and pursue progressive initiatives, including operationalisation of the responsibility to protect, the abolition of the death penalty, the advancement of Indigenous peoples globally, and the regulation of business and human rights.

It is often observed that human rights begin at home. The fulfilment of human rights at home is inextricably linked with our national identity and our capacity and ability to promote human rights abroad. Domestic human rights protection must be recognised as a core aspect of any comprehensive and coherent foreign human rights policy.

In order for Australia to adopt not only a principled and consistent, but also effective, approach to human rights in international affairs — from the death penalty, to child labour, to people trafficking, to a regional solution on asylum-seekers — human rights must become core business in internal affairs. As US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton recently recognised, “By holding ourselves accountable, we reinforce our moral authority to demand that all governments adhere to obligations under international law.”

Australia’s status as the only Western democracy without a national human rights law undermines our authority and legitimacy on international human rights issues and in regional human rights dialogues. A national Human Rights Act — rejected by the Rudd/Gillard Government – could promote more responsive and accountable government, improve public services, and enshrine fundamental values such as freedom, dignity, respect and a fair go. Perhaps most importantly, however, a comprehensive national Human Rights Act could provide a framework for international, regional and domestic policy coordination and create a “virtuous circle” in which a constructive national identity is mobilised which places human rights at the centre of our internal and external affairs. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has played precisely this role, placing human rights at the centre of both Canada’s self-perception and external engagement.

Australia has what it takes to be a human rights promoter at home and abroad. For Australia to realise our potential, however, will require real political leadership and legislative and institutional reform, Most critically, it will require the mobilisation of a national identity that values human rights every bit as highly as beaches, barbecues, boomerangs, the Anzac spirit and the Ashes. That is the opportunity that this Federal Election presents and the responsibility that the next Australian Government confronts.

Despite all the blah about ‘Western values’, women in the West also have issues with compulsory sexualised visibility. The claim that this regulation of dress is somehow a feminist move is both ambiguous and problematic. I’ve rarely seen a better discussion of this than Liz Conor’s. Go read.

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.

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.

Guy Rundle writes:

Okay for those who may have got bogged down in the thousand words or so about the Maoist-Eurocommunist struggle in the BLF in the 1970s in yesterday’s article on the left, a very brief recap of the last part:

1. Though a unified left has disintegrated, the challenges it spoke of – the structural contradictions of capitalism, ecological collapse from overconsumption, and the nihilistic effects of a civilisation subsumed under the rule of the commodity – have largely come to pass and are visible to billions of people.
2. In the East, capitalist development will not and cannot simply repeat that of Western capitalism, and enormous class struggles are in the offing.
3. In the West, an increasingly educated population, and a society where large sections have become implicitly self-managing has made a socialist framework immanent in everyday life. To look around and see an absence of political alternatives because of the absence of old style rank-and-file politics is to make an error of assessment. Post-capitalism is evolving within the increasingly ramshackle apparatus of capitalism.

That’s the “is”. But what about the “ought”? Why a society based on some other principle? And why haven’t we spoken of it before?

Those of us on the left are wary of expounding abstract alternative schema in the absence of movements wherein they would be actively discussed. That varies in time and place. In Latin America today, there is an enormous amount going on. Though the public face of it is the frequently irritating antics of Hugo Chavez, in every country save the corrupt redoubt of Colombia, new modes of distribution, co-operative production, intersection between intellectual life and everyday existence are being developed.

Drawing as much from Catholic traditions of “subsidiarity” as Marxist notions of anti-imperialism, the continent is leaping ahead of everywhere else in finding ways of doing things that promote equality without penalising initiative. There, different types of alternatives can be actively and concretely debated.

And in the West, from the 1880s to the 1970s, such debates could transfix an audience. In the 40s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the forerunner of the NCC (expounding Santamaria’s loopy Pol-Pot idea to evacuate the cities and create rural communes run by bishops) could sell 50-100,000 copies. In the 20s, people queued round the block for hours to get tickets to hear GK Chesterton and Bernard Shaw debate public control of central banking — presenting alternative schema that would seem identical to us today.

These debates will emerge again, when there is no choice but to have them. At that point, consciousness will change remarkably fast. The acuteness, intelligence and reflectiveness that people apply to running a sports club, a parenting group, the quasi-theological manner in which they discuss the pros and cons of a video umpire for a grand final, will be transferred to the management of the parts of their lives that are now held out of bounds, as “the economy”, once the bankers have budded and burst the next few bubbles, and f-cked everything up beyond the recuperable abilities of the current system.

That transformation can probably be called socialism when it starts happening — because by that time, the dour images of the last time around — Brezhnev and British Leyland — will have faded from memory. For the moment one can talk more about the ethical principles that underlie it.

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.

A post-capitalist system reverses the current relationship between culture/society and market/economy so that the former determines the latter and not, as currently happens, economy dictating to society and culture.

As a rough schema that implies:

1) Social ownership of essential organisations. Anything that’s “too big to fail” — major banks, telecoms, utilities etc — should be majority-owned by the community. The share is held in trust, and represented by a “social board” parallel to, or mixed-in with the commercial board. The social board is elected, not appointed by the state.

Thus for example, the recent splitting of Telstra — a mild move to the left–– would see the wholesale arm of it acquire a social board, and pass into social ownership. The commercial arm could continue in the marketplace.

2) Relocalisation and decommodification — the current culture economy web of capitalism is based on an implicit social contract, that no-one ever signed up to. Under this contract you work longer and harder, while the price of essentials — especially home ownership — are ramped up into lifelong servitude to payment to institutions. The pay-off? Cheap consumer durables and entertainment services.

Forget the civilisational critique of this for a moment — on its own terms, it pitches the whole society into trembling economic fragility in which a whole way of life is based on Xmas sales, and shopping becomes an essential patriotic activity.

Of course this can’t continue — but the expectations it has raised in people cannot be assuaged by any shift to a harsher economy. A half-century ago, you could get people to work 48 hours a week for a weatherboard, a radiogram, a pub counter meal once a week and three course meal when their daughter got married. Any breach of the current contract — 50 hours in the office partition for $12 cocktails and DVD box sets — ain’t gonna fly.

Protestant capitalism cannot be re-established after consumer capitalism. And consumer capitalism cannot continue to sustain the Western economy. An economic-cultural crisis is in the works.

Such a crunch will necessitate a process of uncoupling notions of social progress from GDP growth, and a separation of the notion of freedom from consumer choice. As a social movement, the re-establishment of decommodified spheres of life, in everything from food production and house building to intellectual and cultural production. To facilitate this, the state will need to innovate and change tax scales and exemptions, land ownership systems, intellectual property laws — all to make more flexible and multiply-expressed forms of life possible.

The push for these things will occur en masse once the jerry-built, sellotaped-together and manifestly inefficient structures of global capitalism do not so much collapse as rust to a halt. Once that occurs, the culture itself will start to shift and change, to a more expansive idea of the human.

Just as the rise of liberalism and capitalism liberated a dimension of the human – our protean and promethean capacity — that feudalism had had to suppress in order to maintain itself, so a post-capitalist order will liberate what capitalism has to suppress, our capacity to shape our own lives through collective and communal dialogue about priorities and values (kidney machines versus jet skis, free time versus flat-screens).

Will that future be anything like the communism envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State and Revolution? Emphatically not. Money, pricing, markets, wages will continue to exist — they simply won’t dominate existence. Social control of public institutions won’t end corruption, inefficiency, etc, but they will create a place where social debate and conflict over the running of society can be had in a genuinely democratic fashion. And it may not happen at all — or there may be rough times before it becomes possible.

Lethal global wars over resources, possibly encompassing a new generalised racism, coupled with violently repressive capitalist dictatorships, and a generalised victory of nihilism — such that we lose the capacity, for example, to see the moral horror of a free market in live organ transplants – may be the other result (anyone scoffing at this apocalyptic scenario should imagine they are reading it in 1909, in, say, Warsaw, by way of comparison). In that case, by the end of the century, the planet may be a giant charnel house. There is either going to be a victory of a genuinely democratic and human system, or a barbarism.

In that respect, a left vision grounds itself ethically on the notion — promulgated in the great religions, secularised by Kant – that humans should treated each other as ends, not means.

At a social level that decisively rejects any sort of classical liberal or neoliberal approach which is indifferent to economic relationships and equality in their conception of freedom. It subordinates property, etc to a wider conception of freedom. That someone can open a flower shop if they want to is an expression of freedom. That a bank owns our airports is an expression of its opposite.

At a cultural level, that implies that one has to stand up for a permanently decommodified areas of society — institutions such as childcare, crime and punishment, education (that does not rule out non-government education however) and so on. It implies not a defensive reaction to commodification, but a positive insistence that some things need to be outside of the market for there to be a culture, for the market to sit within the polis, and not vice-versa.

Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions – if the anodyne and idealess series of articles in the Oz over the past week is anything to go by.

As I noted, the choice appears to be deliberate — or maybe it is simply that the editors are as unimaginative and timid as the contributors they chose. Whatever the case, it’s clear that some of us are going to have to be more vocal and explicit about possible futures.

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.

Similarly, the argument about Kevin Rudd and social democracy makes two elisions. The first is the unjustified claim that Rudd himself is “the left”, and that – in the manner of New Labour – he needs some sort of array of philosopher kings (thinktankers and op/edders and other ideologists) to articulate and/or interpret an ideological narrative – of the left – for him. Well, maybe. Perhaps Rudd does feel that every PM should have some sort of ideological narrative. I’m not so sure he’d be all that happy to see himself as ‘the left’. In any case, whatever Paul Kelly might think, whether or not he has an ideological narrative (or indeed a coherent one) is probably electorally irrelevant.

Soutphommasane is probably right that a sort of generalised statism is the substance of what Rudd actually believes in. But I’m not at all sure that he needs to foster a debate on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach or whatever. Such a debate may well be useful, and interesting, but most of this stuff is just court theorising, as it were, and won’t make all that much difference to the Rudd government’s actual practice – composed of an amalgam of managerialism, “tough love” social policy combined with vague dicta about “social inclusion”, regulatory urges existing in an uneasy partnership with deregulatory ones, dreams of nation building, and so on. It’s too much to expect that all this will form a coherent ideational whole, though it can be woven together to form a political narrative that is electorally useful; and useful as an ideological justification.

As I’ve argued tons of times before, ideology is often just what politicians do – that is a social practice of governing – not the fantasy of a neat little Enlightenment style encyclopedia, or a mythical universal. It can be more or less coherent, dependent on the degree to which it represents a genuinely transformational project. And there’s little of that about Australian Labor.

That’s the second elision – between the political-theoretic fantasy of a master narrative and the pragmatics of politics.

Another elision, which is what produces the blind spots in Soutphommasane’s thought, is his own speaking position. I think, and this is not intended to be a personal criticism, it’s effectively that of the court philosopher. Demos style. That’s fine as far as it goes, though it would be helfpul, I think, if he were to clarify in what sense, and to what degree, he actually sees himself as speaking on behalf of ‘social democracy’ or ‘the left’. Where I find his thinking problematic is that it’s relatively disconnected from any actually existing social movement, or indeed social base. That’s a huge part of what’s wrong with most Anglo-American style political philosophy. To the degree that it has an effect – a political effect, that is, rather than the hermeneutic exegesis of books written by dead white men – it’s addressed to power, and it speaks the murmurings of dusty books and canonical texts.

If there’s a left left, we might do better to criticise the Rudd government’s actual practice in the realm of social justice, rather than engage in an abstract debate about how Kevin Rudd should understand social justice. Ruthless criticism of all that exists, and all that.

Incidentally, if anyone is serious about eliciting exactly what the Rudd ideology is, I’d suggest looking at the now seemingly unfashionable concept of labourism, and reflecting on the phrase “socialism without doctrines”.

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.