|
May 19, 2003
This text by Kenneth Davidson is one of the more interesting interpretations of Simon Crean's mapping of the ALP's response to the 2003 Costello Budget. It builds on the more immediate responses.
Davidson says:
"It is about time that MPs began to refocus on the main game - nation-building - which involves reinforcing the nation's social cement as well as its skills and its physical infrastructure."
Is this what Crean is foreshadowing? A return to, and reinventing of, nation building through publicly funded infrastructure and ecological renewal?
By social cement (ugh!) I guess Davidson means social cohesion or the communal ties that bind us as a nation. He says:
"Australia is not so lucky that it can manage to retain a cohesive society while deliberately setting out to create a two-tier health and education system under the rubric of seeking excellence, while looting public infrastructure built up over 200 years."
Many liberals, including lefty ones, do not like the word community, or more correctly communitarian but we do live in a nation under the sign of fraternity as well as liberty. Social cohesion is important, especially when the self-organizing market frays the ties that bind. The conservative response is to reshape social cohesion through the national security state through appealing to fear and anxiety.
Is what Davidson saying plausible? That:
"Simon Crean's budget reply last week [is] the first breach in the neoliberal consensus since Paul Keating won the unwinnable 1993 election against John Hewson's Fightback package of "reforms" - which John Howard has been implementing by stealth ever since he promised to create a "relaxed and comfortable" society in the 1996 election."
Is the ALP on the path to finding alternative ways to renew public infrastructure and foster social cohesion to that of the Howard Government? Are we actually moving into to a public policy situation where there will be real and genuine policy differences?
Or is it still going to the old scenario of Tweddleedum and Tweddleedee with marginal differences in packaging----eg like table salt in the supermarket? Same salt different packaging.
|
Wouldn't it be even nicer if we actually had statesmen & women to help provide that 'social cement' rather than the school-brats and short-term great blokes & sheilas that inhabit the halls of our parlimentary system at present?