So, Barry O’Farrell and the Coalition rained on Morris Iemma’s privatisation parade. Now, the Dilemmster announces that he can still privatise the retailers and generation sites without parliamentary approval.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Iemma’s original argument some high sounding blather about the sovereignty of the people’s representatives in Parliament assembled and governing in the people’s interest not those of the unions and the party machine? Internal ALP democracy was supposed to give way to parliamentary democracy.
Pathetic. Contempt for his own party, the people of New South Wales and democratic institutions.
Hat tip: Chookie in comments.
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?’
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At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’
Yep, Christian Kerr is talking about us. Among others. Guess what, we’re smug, ill informed, prone to conspiracy theories, full of hatred for the noble profession of journalism, divorced from the real world, an echo chamber, too academic, etc, etc. But he couldn’t possibly tell his readers which “certain blog” he’s talking about. Lord no. Even though there is a direct quote from a post at LP. People might come here and make up their own mind. So the impression is left that bloggers are bad and as far as Kerr is concerned, that’s all anyone needs to know. Yet he provides “balance and fact”. Obviously. Btw, you can’t comment on his article. And if you disagree with him here, you just go into the “ill informed” pile, I guess. The irony that he’s ostensibly writing about free speech seems to have escaped him.
Anyway, he was baiting for a link. He’s got one. I hope he’s happy now.
Update: [by Kim] More from tigtog at Hoyden.
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There was an interesting discussion on this post on the whole “what is different about blogs and MSM “blogs” theme” with George Megalogenis recently. I generally agree with those who argued that whatever takes place on the bulletin boards of the News Limited and Fairfax online empires, it ain’t blogging. Even the reference to commenters as “bloggers” is jarring to anyone who was actually around the blogosphere before the media tried to appropriate it. It’s the lingo, dude! That’s just a small sign of something different going on, but a significant one. Another is evident from Megalogenis’ blog today.
My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.
My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.
Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.
Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.
Continue reading ‘The mote in your own eye: civility, community and the MSM online’
WorleyParsons’ PR coup last week indicated a thirst for big interventions into an otherwise rather bleak energy policy landscape. The ~$100k feasibility study regurgitated by the MSM (and analysed by Robert here) was, as Brian alluded to, chump change from their handsome profiteering from Canada crapping all over its Kyoto commitments under the Harper Government. It remains to be seen whether WP actually capitalises on its good press and goes ahead with the projects, or simply banks the warm and fuzzies and continues its search for business opportunities elsewhere. If the projects do progress beyond the speculative phase, it would raise some interesting questions around the diversification of a business like theirs into solar (rather than, for example, consolidating its interests in various carbon intensive fields). Continue reading ‘How to live with emissions?’
In the wake of discussion of Andrew Forrest’s proposal for the creation of 50 000 full time jobs for Indigenous Australians (discussed here at LP) and Germaine Greer’s remarks on the continuing force of history in shaping Indigenous responses to state initiatives (discussed here and see the video of last night’s Q&A), I thought it was worth linking to a paper prepared for the Australian Education Union by UTS Indigenous academics Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland. The specific topic they examine is welfare quarantining and schooling outcomes. I’d recommend anyone interested read the whole thing, but the abstract has also been posted at Australian Policy Online.
As well as discussing the philosophy of mutual obligation (referred to as John Howard’s most significant legacy to social policy), the authors point to the lack of an evidence base for most policy initiatives in this area - something almost totally lacking in the research which justified Noel Pearson’s proposals for “family commissions” in Cape York, which is now being held up as a model for the rest of Australia. This appears inconsistent with Jenny Macklin’s disclaimers of ideological motivation and claims that evidence and “what works” would be the criterion for Indigenous policy. They also point to several studies which demonstrate that parental responsibility in sending kids to schools is at best only one factor in school attendance and outcomes, with the quality of schooling and child health also being very important variables.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that most policy initiatives in this area are at best blunt instruments. It also suggests that they are being driven by a new orthodoxy - arguments about “personal responsibility” and “social norms” being more assertion than evidence based. Most tellingly, perhaps, and here Greer’s comments are important too, is the suggestion that the obligation is almost entirely one sided and thus lacking in mutuality - and that the state is failing to put in place the preconditions for such experiments to have much chance of providing enduring outcomes. That doesn’t leave me feeling me feeling very hopeful about the prospects of closing the gap.
The other day when I was talking about the findings in the Essential Research poll about public attitudes towards banks and passing on Reserve Bank interest rate cuts, I linked to Janet Albrechtsen’s column in which she loudly denounced populist bank bashing and asserted the Government and citizens should all be grateful to the banks:
The bottom line is this. The more the PM and the Treasurer bash the banks, the more they hurts Australian borrowers. Bank-bashing may feel good at the time but the subsequent pain will outweigh – heavily – the momentary pleasure. Anyone who understands the economy should understand that.
Anyone who understands economics? That apparently doesn’t include the Reserve Bank’s Deputy Governor Ric Battelino, who made these remarks to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics yesterday, reinforcing a “detailed case” from Assistant Governor Phil Lowe:
When we look at bank profitability, we find that Australian banks are around the top of the international range. On the surface, this could indicate a lesser degree of competition than elsewhere. But when we look a bit deeper it seems that an important reason for the high profitability of Australian banks is their unusually low bad debt experience.
That’s directly opposed to Planet’s arguments, any disagreement with which she denounced as “hypocrisy” and “ignorance”. Let’s dwell on the first of those nouns. Stephen Mayne revealed on Tuesday that Albrechtsen’s husband John O’Sullivan works in the banking sector, and that their family wealth was enhanced by remuneration including Commonwealth Bank shares worth $5.1 million. O’Sullivan received them as a senior CommBank exec. Does Janet disclose any of this? And this is the mob who have been crusading all week for the public “right to know”?
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There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently on this thread about the right to free speech, which I think took far too narrowly American and thus falsely universal a view. In the common law tradition of Britain and Australia and comparable countries, there hasn’t historically been a legal right to free speech (except in Parliament!). Though that’s changed to some degree here, and in Britain because of the importation of civil law jurisprudence via the European Union, it has always been the case that protection from intrusion and protection of reputation have been significant barriers to press “freedom”. Defamation law, however, is a blunt instrument when it comes to protecting privacy, and the Australian Law Reform Commission has released a report suggesting higher barriers for media intrusion into people’s private lives. The report can be found here and the salient recommendations are covered in this story.
The Right to Know Coalition - an organisation of Australian media companies - vigorously opposes any new legal protections for privacy.
In an op/ed pushing this barrow in The Australian, UQ’s Garrick Professor of Law James Allan makes the case against, predictably roping in the general conservative suspicion of any measure that might resemble a bill of rights. He concentrates on a recent UK case which turned on a right to privacy, brought by motor racing boss Max Mosley. Mosley’s adventures with sex workers and domination scenarios in a basement were reported by a British tabloid, and the story had all sorts of salacious elements - including the fact that Mosley’s famous father Sir Oswald was a home-grown British Fascist. But the court found that there was no public interest in revealing all this, and indeed it’s hard really to see what that public interest might be. The suggestion from the media crew is that “ordinary people” don’t have to worry about such intrusions into their private lives. But is that so?
Continue reading ‘Right to privacy or right to profit from celebrity trash “news”?’
In the spheres and circles in which Planet Janet moves, it’s “defend the Enlightenment” week. At first, I thought this was just the latest volley in the denialist wars, but now that we know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in town, and her usual fanbois are overcome with their customary posture of uncritical worship, I suppose that explains part of it, even if “We are at war with terrorism!” no longer packs so much political punch as a slogan. Indeed, there might be a bit of an exercise in parsing exactly why - in “an enlightened spirit of inquiry” - Planet’s proclamation that -
There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more.
- is such an incoherent notion. In part that would be because the bricks she’s used to construct her discourse (her word, not mine) now no longer fit together anywhere so neatly as they once did, because the mortar of her political obsessions has grown old and cracked. But I’m not particularly interested in doing that, so I’ll use her as a segue to a consideration of the latest shot in the “higher education wars” - an article today by Gavin Kitching entitled “Paralysed by Postmodernism”. Continue reading ‘The Enlightenment is in danger! (from its false friends)’
At Public Opinion, Gary Sauer-Thompson takes a look at the craziness of a climate change denialist clothing himself in the raiment of the Enlightenment. Astonishing.
Update [by Mark]: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge links to a piece by David Karoly at Unleashed which debunks a lot of the climate change “scepticism” and has a neat statement of what scientific rationality is actually about.
Like Andrew Bartlett, I agree entirely with Andrew Bolt regarding the shameful weaseling by the International Olympic Committee regarding the whole idea of granting the 2008 games to the authoritarian dictatorship of China in the first place.
crossposted
UPDATE: It has been pointed out in comments that LP has not discussed the Rudd government’s continued determination to introduce ISP-level internet filtering this week. To redress that lack I’ll quote a post I made at Hoyden About Town a couple of days ago in its entirety below:
No surprises: internet filtering test results show products block legitimate content
We said it would. Despite a cheery press release from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that all is going well, an analysis of the actual test results shows that the tested filters slow connection speeds significantly (which means ISPs would have to increase capacity, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers) and have a false positives rate that would block at least 10,000 legitimate sites (and that’s for the best product result - most would block more). It gets worse:
None of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely. Let’s count them again. None.
How long will the Rudd government continue to pretend that having this cumbersome, costly and ineffective product shoved at us under an opt-out scheme is in any way a good idea?
Via Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy.
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Boing Boing reports:
The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys’s Diary.
That’s so cool. Though actually I suspect Pepys would have been the better blogger. He was LJ circa 1660.
The whole revival of Orwell thing is weird and so overdetermined. On one hand, there’s the Orwell as anti-po/mo theme. On the other, there’s Orwell as the “hero” of the “Decent Left” theme (cf. you know, everything Christopher Hitchens has recently written). What’s ignored and effaced totally is Orwell the polemicist in favour of imagining a postwar social democracy. If you read what he was saying in the 1930s, what he was wishing for - as a “realistic utopia” - was something very like what was envisaged in the whole Beveridge/Keynes libertarian social democracy vision. 1984 was also really meant to be more about the distortion of this “new Jerusalem” by the statist Labour Party than “Stalin”. But anyways… Orwell as a writer - and here I’d gesture to the almost forgotten Burmese Days - is also much neglected. Perhaps his diaries will stimulate a respectful consideration of him in regard to his own concerns not some dumbarsed political point scoring about teh war on terror or whatevs.
I haven’t seen any discussion in the blogosphere about the stories in the papers of the report of a major research project on Work, Life and Workplace Culture co-authored by Barbara Pocock and Natalie Skinner. Maybe we’re all too busy juggling work, blogging and life. But it’s a pity.
The report can be downloaded from here [pdf].
Since we do a fair bit of dissing the mainstream media round here, I wanted to observe that the story in the Sydney Morning Herald is an exemplary piece of reporting academic research into social issues - summarising the nuts and bolts of the findings and contextualising it with the every day lived experience of citizens.
Continue reading ‘Work/life balance?’
We’reThey’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’reThey’re all neo-liberals now?’