While I’m quite a fan of allohistory, I rarely engage in it because (a) I’m not very good at it and (b) it’s rather self-indulgent. But like most indulgences, it’s a bit of harmless fun and it won’t make you go blind.
So here goes: This letter in today’s Oz alerted me to the intriguing possibility that a bit of judicial activism by the High Court over WorkChoices might have been enough to save the Howard government from electoral oblivion.
While the High Court’s 2006 judgement on WorkChoices makes an unassailable case for the legal correctness of upholding the legislation, let’s pretend things were different. If the High Court judges had gone all activist and concocted a convoluted Constitutional argument to strike down WorkChoices, then the result of the 2007 election might have been very different.
Continue reading ‘Would judicial activism have saved the Howard government?’
Our friends at Griffith Review are holding an event in Brisbane tomorrow at the State Library of Queensland from 1 to 4pm:
The 2020 Summit was just the beginning. The more substantial and critical task is to advance the process by building consensus, by continually developing engagement and cooperation between traditionally divided streams, factions and ideologies. Join us for a free seminar featuring twenty Summit delegates who will report on their impressions from the Summit proceedings and consider pragmatic steps forward to identify and achieve Australia’s goals. Come early to enjoy lunch - your own or from Tognini’s Cafe - outside the State Library’s beautiful new building. Panellists include Julianne Schultz, Michael Wesley, Michael Good, George Williams, Matt Foley and many more.
RSVP here.
Incidentally, my copy of the May edition just arrived in the post. It’s on Cities, and I’m looking forward to a stimulating read as always. We’re hopeful we’ll be able to announce a discount bulk subscription offer for LPers in the not too distant future.
What’s with the Iemma government?
DRINKING a glass of wine in your own home could be illegal under extreme new liquor laws that rubber-stamp the use of no-go alcohol zones in NSW.
All kinds of nanny state madness, I guess.
Apparently, unlike the NT intervention, it’s up to “communities” to request a no grog zone where even drinking in the home will be banned. But who are those communities? And who gets to say whether “chronic alcohol abuse” is going on? All I can see resulting from this is a push from some residents in areas such as Newcastle’s CBD with a big concentration of nightspots in one area to ban takeaway sales. Presumably respectable citizens won’t expect the booze police to knock on their door and confiscate their chardy, and all the bourgie restaurants on Darby Street will fall outside the zone. It may also of course result in all sorts of puritan dogooders forming unrepresentative action groups or whatever in their local hood. Just stupid.
Continue reading ‘No rivers of grog - now for whitefellas in NSW (if they want)’
I’ve been intrigued to see the debate about the funding and direction of the ABC go underground since last year’s election. Although Kevin Rudd only promised “adequate funding”, the defeat of a government that expended so much energy on critiquing “bias” and whose acolytes in the commentariat never tired of denouncing the ABC in hyperbolic terms has probably served to siphon off much of the intensity of the public broadcasting budget wars. That may or may not be a good thing, but lots of interesting things are afoot at the ABC, and I think it would be beneficial for there to be more of a debate about them. I’ve taken a look at the issues in my column for New Matilda this week.
Whatever you think about the merits of the issue (and it’s certain that Morris Iemma doesn’t have the public of New South Wales on his side with his electricity privatisation drive), the politics of Iemma’s decision to ignore a contrary vote of the Labor Party conference which was carried overwhelmingly - by 702 to 107 - are intriguing.
Iemma’s trying to position the whole thing as a fight with the unions. You’re supposed to win electoral kudos as a Labor leader by standing up to “union bosses”, or so the Tony Blair script goes. But that ignores the fact that Iemma’s at the end of his government’s tether, not a bold new opposition leader, and both he and the policy are wildly unpopular, whereas the unions’ position is in keeping with the public will. He’s also broken not just election promises but specific undertakings to the party. I don’t think the “tough guy standing up for what he thinks is right” act is going to do him any favours, not at all.
Continue reading ‘Iemma and electricity privatisation’
As a follow up to the discussion of the 2020 Creative Australia stream here, I’m reproducing (with permission) below the fold an article by Nicholas Pickard in today’s Crikey. Pickard writes about a group of delegates who are apparently so “incensed” that the recommendations didn’t reflect the ideas suggested or discussed that they’re now forming an advocacy group to hold Peter Garrett accountable. It’s intriguing that the invitees the government copped so much grief for having there in the first place seem to be the most dissatisfied of all the streams (it’s not as though a lot of the rest are shrinking violets when it comes to soliciting media coverage, unless they’re hiding their lights beneath a bushel while simultaneously gritting their teeth). It’s also interesting to see that Garrett has been unable to capitalise on the goodwill including the arts and culture crew inside the tent should have generated, suggesting that he might be a flop in both his portfolios (that’s if you accept, as I do, the argument that the signs are he’s not flash in Environment). Certainly the article seems to indicate that delegates blamed Garrett for putting in the fix rather than his two co-chairs.
Of course, we don’t know (yet?) who the dissenters are or how many delegates are unhappy. It could be that the anonymity approach might be a way of running a campaign to have the final report more accurately represent the discussions, and those concerned aren’t yet ready to go fully public with their criticisms.
Continue reading ‘How to win friends and influence people’
Channel Seven is being sued for defamation by Mercedes Corby.
The gravamen of Ms. Corby’s case is that Channel Seven’s Today Tonight program, in the persons of its presenter Anna Coren and reporter Bryan Seymour, had promised Ms. Jodie Power $100,000 and a trip to Canada if she made false statements on air implicating Ms. Corby in illicit drug dealing. The truth of the matter is ultimately for the court to decide, but the salient point is that the matter is only before the court because Ms. Power made contestable statements, and the station broadcast those statements, about a specific individual other than herself who has standing to sue.
An obvious question this case raises is whether the practice of paying interviewees to make sensational, misleading and/or false statements is widespread in the genre of tabloid current affairs television. I can think of two such interviews, both broadcast on tabloid current affairs programs, about which I have long held grave suspicions.
Continue reading ‘Coren’s (alleged) Cash for Crud, and moral panics about “welfare bludging”’
What’s with the Iemma government? About the only time they seem to hit the national news apart from scandals and stories about the collapse of public services is when some new height of absurdity is reached in their apparently obsessive desire to fence everything off from anyone bar dignitaries. Yesterday, Morris Iemma unaccountably locked the public out of a ceremony to unveil a statue of a New Zealand soldier on Anzac Bridge. Today, the charges against the Chaser boys for their APEC stunt are dropped, and ABC tv news reports the government warning ominously that it might send the wrong message to people contemplating something similar for the inordinately expensive Popefest in July - where all the usual panoply of exclusion zones, special police powers, fenced off areas of the city, redirected roads and so on will be in place for what looks set to be a spectacular flop, at least as far as frustrated Sydneysiders are concerned it would seem.
Please enlighten a puzzled Queenslander. Is it that they only get the illusion of power in a state they’ve made ungovernable when they can erect fences and restrict civil liberties? Is this the reductio ad absurdum of Bob Carr’s law and order campaigns? A distraction from electricity privatisation? Would they be happier with the North Korean style of staging a public event? Puzzled minds want to know!
This piece was written last week, and didn’t make it into print among the plethora of musings on the Australia 2020 summit. It should be noted that after I put pen to paper, the stories about the final communique having a rather tenuous link with the discussions in the stream emerged. That’s disappointing, but hardly surprising. I learnt a long time ago that whoever writes the minutes of a meeting is in an incredibly powerful position. It might also be interesting to compare the outcomes with pre-summit commentary.
Cate Blanchett was in danger of being upstaged by her new son Iggy, and 2020 Summit delegates were treated to a plenary session featuring Prime Ministerial favourite Hugh Jackman’s comedy stylings. The arts crowd were delighted to be back inside the tent, while culture warriors were licking their lips at an opportunity to resurrect slogans about “Keating era luvvies” - when they could take time out from watching La Bohème, that is.
But what did the Creative Australia stream achieve?
Continue reading ‘Creative Australia 2020 style’
Michael Molitor gave a public lecture last night at UNSW, where he now holds an adjunct professorship with the Climate Change Research Centre between appointments as a ‘Carbon Manager’ for PriceWaterhouseCooper. The talk was entitled Climate Change: ‘Show Me The Money’, which is the famous line from Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire - so when Molitor spoke passionately of the ‘Governor of NSW’, I was thankful that there were no couches onstage. Though, to be fair, the event showcased a fascinating, eclectic and sometimes contradictory mix of bravado-filled insights on the problem of climate change from someone on the inner circle of business elites. The message was familiar enough - that we aren’t moving quickly enough for the scale of the problem - his analysis, however, was somewhat less conventional.
The ‘good news’ began with the observation that our ‘carbon productivity’, that is, our economic outputs from machines relative to their spewing waste into the global carbon dump has actually been increasing over time. Continue reading ‘Molitor@UNSW’
This morning I found the following passage in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks which might be applicable to an aspect of Australia’s republic debate:
Thus it is not a question of the people who “have the brains” feeling that they are being reduced to the level of the lowest illiterate, but rather one of people who think they are the ones with the brains wanting to take away from the “man in the street” even that tiniest fraction of power of decision over the course of national life which he possesses.
The section of The Modern Prince in which this quote appears can be found here.
It’s unrealistic to expect detailed policy prescriptions to come out of two days of discussion - though the choice of two days of discussion with SFA preparation was entirely the government’s. And a variety of sources are saying that the interim reports really struggled to capture the tenor of the actual discussions. But the interim report of the “population, sustainability, climate change, water and the future of our cities” subgroup at the 2020 Summit fits right into Jeremy Sear’s typically snarky critique. While there is some substantive and good ideas, it’s mixed in with a collection of meaningless motherhood statements, populist pandering, prediliction for bureaucracy, and an overly narrow focus.
Below the fold, I’ve outlined the “top ideas” proposed by this stream, with some brief comments, and some reflections on the stuff that didn’t make the cut.
Continue reading ‘Timid, dull, and vague’
Director of the Centre for Policy Development, and 2020 summit delegate, Miriam Lyons, writes in today’s Crikey (republished with permission):
Suddenly ideas are sexy. The Australia 2020 Summit has done for Deep Thought what Australian Idol did for karaoke - what was once a mildly embarrassing hobby best practised under cover of drunkenness is now played live to a national audience.
Like music professors asked to comment on the success of Idol, most of the wonks who went through the last two days can’t quite decide whether to be pleased that so many people are paying attention to ideas or annoyed that serious attempts to grapple with complex, long-term policy problems were sometimes lost amidst the all-singing, all-dancing Summit show.
In the governance group Marcia Hines was played by Maxine McKew, who, after listening to report-backs from groups with ideas ranging from FOI reform to a new Federation Commission, entreated us to put a little soul into it. Kudos to youth summit delegate Owen Wareham who read between the lines, said something like “here’s a sound bite, if that’s what you’re looking for” and delivered a punchy straight-to-camera pitch for automatic enrolment.
I had a lot of sympathy with Ms McKew’s call for more ideas that would capture people’s imagination. Continue reading ‘Guest post by Miriam Lyons: Summit Idol - Mostly covers but some real gems too’
I’ve had a go at drawing together some of my commentary on the politics of and media reaction to the 2020 summit in my New Matilda column for this week.
There’s also a measured assessment of the summit in Eureka Street from John Warhurst, which I think is well worth a read.
Today’s Opposition Organ reports that the eminent indigenous academic, Professor Marcia Langton, believes that the Indigenous 2020 Summit Stream, consisting of people selected by the Federal Government, was uninformed and unrepresentative, and failed to adequately address policies to secure the learning, health and economic future of indigenous children.
However, Professor Langton’s views are reported in a way which implies that she is also opposed to the creation of an elected indigenous representative body to advise on policies.
As Mark mentioned a few days ago, the establishment of such a body is also opposed by Warren Mundine and Wesley Aird. Yet Mr. Aird was also highly critical of the Summit Stream, suggesting that its outcomes would be as “predictable as a Zimbabwean election”.
Continue reading ‘Marcia Langton says whitefella government’s handpicked advisers got it wrong’
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