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January 5, 2008
There has been lots of ALP spin in the Fairfax media since Xmas about how wonderful the new individual ministers in the Rudd Government are, how they have got their portfolios down pat already, and how they are already hard at work. I've seen the selling of Roxon, Smith and Crean and I haven't even been looking. Is this a sign of Blair-style spin doctoring?
Alan Moir
The big sell is that the Rudd ALP is the party of reform. What sort of reform though? Reform implies more than being managers modeled on CEOs of the big end of town. Or being agents of change.
Is it smoothing the rough edges of capitalism a la Sussex Street in NSW? Making things easier--more efficient---for big business? Fostering technocratic capitalism? Deepening social democracy? Reforming society to liberalize and deregulate the market? Revitalising the welfare state? Is the ALP the party of social democracy? If so, in what way? Will they continue to question the ideology that the market is always right, that things are inevitable, that there is a natural balance in the self-regulating market etc etc.
Whatever reform the ALP has in mind we know that is not a deepening or broadening liberal democracy that is on the agenda. Government equals bureaucracy, and democracy is pushed into the background and no longer really matters as a mode of governance concerned with the shrinking of the public good. So how will a Rudd Government address the growing economic inequality in a prosperous nation that is growing richer in a globalised world? Through the market?
update
If the Rudd ALP are economic rationalists and think that globalisation is a good thing, then doesn't that mean they need to reform the public education system to ensure, in the words of John Ralston Saul that Australian:
students who are coming out of schools and universities who spoke two or three or four languages, who had an intimate knowledge of history, philosophy, language etc, who knew the religions of China, [India] and so on, so that they could go into meeting rooms around the world and negotiate things and make money without making fools of themselves and losing the contract.
This means, as Ralston points out, a public education system of the highest possible quality, as this is the only way that Australians would be able to educate themselves in order to be able to engage as workers and citizens in a global world. Or should Australians pay for this kind of education through private school and user pays university fees?
Australia does seem to be drifting to an American type society in which the gap between the very rich and the very poor widens each year. Doesn't this concentration of economic power amongst a small transnational group have big implications for our public health and education systems, given the under-investment in this social infrastructure over the past two decades?
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Dear Anonymous,
Is there any evidence that the questions you pose are real issues or are you push polling an agenda of your own? Please inform us.