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April 30, 2010
UK: politics as usual?
The political situation or equation is this. Nick Clegg has broken through to demonstrate just how unrepresentative and damaging the current electoral system is in the UK. Is this election the game changer? The last election under the two party system, as The Guardian reckons?
How does Clegg and his Liberal Democratic party actually achieve ‘something different’ when that same system keeps the two major parties alternatively in power and robs his party of the seats in Parliament that are their due? .
Steve Bell
At this stage it is unlikely that the Liberal Democrats will break through and win enough seats so as to gain leverage for reform, and so their political momentum looks as if it will be extinguished by politics as usual.
It is economics that may transform the situation since the austerity measures and tax rises required to shore up the UK's finances will be harsh. Times are tough. The UK has a huge fiscal deficit, a bloated state and soaring public debt. Adjustments must be made to the tune of £37bn, and it will continue to decline as a "great " power.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 29, 2010
squeezing Big Tobacco
If the Rudd hospital reforms increasingly look as if they will make minimal difference to the way that public hospitals are run, then the shift to preventing smoking by ensuring that cigarettes would be sold in plain packs is to be welcomed.
This represents a reduction in cigarette advertising (brand names and product names will have to be displayed in standard colour, font style and position) and it will, according to leaks, be accompanied by a hike (25%) in the tobacco tax in the budget.
This public health policy is welcomed because it is a good public health measure: smoking kills people and the harm that it causes for smokers and non-smokers costs the nation around $31 billion.
The standard utilitarian argument is that if social costs are greater than social benefits then that activity should be taxed. Increased taxes act as a price signal to consumers to change their smoking habits. So Big Tobacco should pay some of the cost of smoking on the public health system.
Big Tobacco is outraged---the plain packaging legislation constitutes an expropriation of intellectual property rights (their trademarks). They are demanding billions of dollars to compensate for the loss of their trademarks. The argument is provided by Tim Wilson from the IPA in this paper on Intellectual property in a knowledge economy.
Commenting on this public health policy initiative Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy says that Tobacco persecution continues. He says that both the increase in the tobacco excise and the plain packaging legislation are irresponsible and short-sighted.
However, in the latter Taxing fags: Repost at Catallaxy Davidson says that:
It is true that smoking has adverse health effects on smokers and non-smokers. This is well-known and has broad acceptance and understanding in the community and the incidence of smoking in the community has fallen dramatically in recent years.
So how does preventing people from dying from cancer square with the persecution of Big Tobacco? The latter implies a defence of Big Tobacco, the former implies the need to reduce smoking to prevent carcinogens.
So how do the right-of-centre libertarians square their circle?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:48 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
April 28, 2010
Rudd's retreat
So it has come to this. Rudd Labor has postponed dealing with climate change until the end 2012. Once an emissions trading scheme was vital and urgent for dealing with ''the great moral challenge of our age''. Now Rudd Labor has distanced itself as far as it can from the dodgy scheme that was progressively watered down in concessions to the polluters--including the coal-fired power sector.
An ETS is buried, even though Rudd + Co know that Australia has to have a carbon price to make a significant difference to Australian greenhouse emissions. Yet Rudd Labor offers nothing in its place. Climate change is not an issue for this political class. When do we expect more subsidies for King Coal? A coal-drive future is our destiny according to some Labor ministers. To hell with all this talk about shifting a low carbon economy.Sustainability is for the idealists. Coal rules, okay. Get real.
Isn't this burial of the ETS an example of what Rudd once accused the Coalition of---"political cowardice . . . an absolute failure of leadership an absolute failure of logic." Isn't this yet another example of political expediency ("clearing the decks") by Rudd Labor?
It cannot even bring itself to defend its own policies on climate change in an election, nor is it willing to see things through. They will go ahead with the internet filter though. The progressive side of Rudd Labor continues to weaken whilst the authoritarian side strengthens.
My only hope is for a surge in the Green vote. What will ensure that Australia's largest carbon dioxide emitters do pay for their pollution is for the balance of power in the Senate to shift to the Greens, and, even more hopefully, for a handful of House of Representative seats to fall to the Greens (eg., Lindsay Tanner in Melbourne, Tanya Plibersek in Sydney and Anthony Albanese in Grayndler). The possibility is the Greens overtaking the Liberals on the primary vote and chasing down Labor with their preferences.
The political system is crook and it needs reform.
Update
Surprise surprise. Janet Albrechtson is trying to argue in The Australian that the anti-democratic Left are launching a new attack on democracy with proportional representation. She's spotted them though and exposed them for the totalitarians they really are.
She says that it is a:
myth that proportional representation is good for democracy. Truth is it's rotten for democracy. Proportional representation will bestow disproportionate influence on minor party leaders to become kingmakers. Forget democratic principles of voters knowing what they voted for and politicians being accountable for their promises. Post-election horse-trading between minor parties and minority governments will mean election promises count for nought.
Just look at Tasmania and the disproportionate influence to the Greens (special interests) who attracted votes from only one in five Tasmanians.
So what is good for democracy? Why, it is strong, decisive leadership taking the tough economic decisions to further a market economy:
when minority governments become the rule, forget about strong, stable governments making tough economic decisions. The sort of gutsy reforms that transformed the British economy under Margaret Thatcher won't happen again if Clegg gets his way with proportional representation. Of course, this is precisely what the Left has in mind, hence their catch-cry about voters embracing a progressive moment
Yep, executive dominance is good because it is democratic (majority rule). So you have to be wary of the canny Left pushing anti-democratic agendas using slogans about improving democracy. But never fear, you can trust Janet to let you know about the latest tricks of the anti-democratic Left are.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:46 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
April 27, 2010
UK: a surveillance society?
David Marquand in The Independent argues that:
The age of the collective is over. A new kind of individualism is in the ascendant. The mass society has disappeared; its preoccupations have disappeared with it. The great liberal issues that seemed quaintly archaic in the 1920s – citizenship rights, the devolution of power, individual freedom – have returned to the centre of the stage. The state-centred collectivism which the rising Labour Party offered in place of liberalism, and to which it still obstinately cleaves, is patently a busted flush, just as liberalism was in the 1920s.
Under Blair/Brown Labour there has been 13 years of authoritarian legislation and the growth of the surveillance and database society in which the state acquires ever-greater powers to track people's movements and retain personal data. This would have the effect of corroding public life and space, leads to a crisis of legitimacy and radically transforms what it means to be a free citizen.
New Labour had its opportunity and it blew it.Its embrace of globalization as a driver of econonic growthwent with an embrace of inequality, authoritarianism and deception.
Marquand adds that, if they are to succeed, the Liberal Democrats need to show that they:
are the heirs of all that was best in the old Labour Party: that there was a libertarian strand in the Labour tradition, as well as a statist one, and that the libertarian strand is encompassed by the Liberal Democrat party of today.
So they need to challenge the sleepwalking into a surveillance society emerging from the Labor Government's disproportionate efforts to guard against terrorism; and to do so by highlighting the limits of state interference into the private sphere of both citizens and non citizens. A large dose of the “surveillance-as-a-threat-to-freedom” and the standard liberal language of freedom and individual self-determination is needed if the Lib Dems are to help produce meaningful political change in the UK.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 26, 2010
UK: the "plague-on-all-their-houses mood"
In After the Second Debate: The Clegg Catharsis? in the New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban refers to the recent mood of distrust and contempt for politicians in general in the UK.
Martin Rowson
This public mood of cynicism and disgust tends to drive the political discourse, and it is coupled with increasing frustration that no effective mechanism exists to enable citizens to convert these sentiments into action. Raban says that there had been a:
breaking wave of fury that had been building in strength from around the midpoint of Tony Blair’s second term in office (2001-2005). The huge unpopularity of the 2003 Iraq invasion (supported by the Conservatives, but opposed by the Lib Dems), followed by the bursting of the property bubble and the steep rise of unemployment and home foreclosures that came with deepening recession, had turned British voters against their political class.
The Labour Party was a cheerleader for the turbocapitalism of the City, but Raban overlooks the Labour Party's descent into authoritarianism – with its appalling record on civil liberties, whether ID cards, 42-day detention without trial, or the creation of 3,000 new offences.
Raban adds that when the great parliamentary expenses scandal broke in the UK last year it seemed:
to ratify everyone’s worst opinion of parliamentarians—that they were all in it for themselves, all had their snouts in the same trough, and none were to be trusted with running the country. Timing was everything. The story happened to come out when Britain was enduring the worst of the recession, when people were baying for a scapegoat to blame for their shuttered businesses and underwater mortgages, and MPs as a class became that useful animal, and more easily targeted than the hated bankers.
He adds that Clegg and the Lib Dems offer the electorate the chance to teach the British parliament a lesson that it won’t forget.
This is what Anthony Barnett calls a historic "Gotcha!" moment ---the public has finally recognised that it cannot trust a system that has long needed to be changed.
Can the Liberal Democrats gain enough electoral support to leverage the electoral reform that many desire? Would Labour under Gordon Brown support electoral reform in order to retain power?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:27 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 25, 2010
Gray on modern conservatism
John Gray has an excellent article on modern conservatism in the London Review of Books that has some relevance to Australia. He says that Thatcher defined the aim of her policies thus ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul’ and he adds that Thatcher:
fully shared Hayek’s view that free markets reinforce ‘traditional values’, which is an inversion of their actual effect. The conservative country of which she dreamed had more in common with Britain in the 1950s, an artefact of Labour collectivism, than it did with the one that emerged from her free-market policies. A highly mobile labour market enforces a regime of continuous change. The type of personality that thrives in these conditions is the opposite of the stolid, dutiful bourgeois Thatcher envisioned. Skill in re-inventing yourself is the key virtue, along with a readiness to cut your losses as soon as any commitment becomes unprofitable or unexciting. Thatcher’s economic revolution was meant to go along with something like a social restoration. Instead, it led to Britain as it is today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more insecure and more unequal.
So too Australia, and that creates problems for Tony Abbott and his conservative backers in the Coalition who fully share Thatcher's idea of social restoration. They hold that the only model available to Australia is the prevailing version of American capitalism. This meant advancing this brand of capitalism and re-engineering social institutions when they failed to obey its imperatives. In the real world the market has imploded, but the Coalition (and Rudd Labor) continues to insist that society must adjust to market imperatives.
Gray adds that the society that emerged in part as an unintended consequence of Thatcher’s policies in the UK (and Howard's in Australia) can’t be dismantled. Hence the loss of social cohesion which followed the unleashing of free markets---with its rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical. Abbott's response has been to demand policies that strengthen traditional values, especially in the family: As these Conservative see it, what was wrong with modern conservatism represented by Malcom Turnbull, is that it was too liberal – a mistake that Abbott's is set about remedying. They stand for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’.
These conservatives are programmed for ideological warfare on sex and the family and climate change.Behind this is the old Conservative desire to take an ax and sunder the connection between the words ‘welfare’ and ‘state’, thereby freeing government from the expensive business of dispensing social services and to dump them on the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organisations, non-profits and the like.
An ideologically driven Conservatism is here to stay – even if it means the Coalition once again drifting into limbo.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 24, 2010
Anzac Day: Why not Kokoda
If Anzac Day is for many Australians a true and authentic national day---a cathartic moment of Australian nationhood---then Anzac Day has been captured by a new form of nationalism - all the flag waving, the kids chanting ''Aussie, Aussie, Aussie'' and wearing stick-on flag tattoos that often turns into a jingoism that supports military intervetions overseas.
What puzzles me is the celebration of Gallipoli, which represents military disaster for the British Empire, rather than Kokoda, which represents blocking the Japanese advance and the defence of the homeland.
In the National Times Martin Flanagan rightly says that:
the Anzacs didn't die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world - to wit, Turkey - with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.
Surely the celebration at Gallipoli represents a love of country that is misplaced; it is distorted because it represents fighting another country's wars in a foreign land that does not threaten Australia at all. As such it represents the militarisation of Australian history by the conservatives.
An earlier example of Australia participating in, rather than avoiding, foreign wars fought to further the interests of the British Empire is the Boer War (1899-1902). Instead of remaining neutral, the six Australian colonies and then the new commonwealth government sent thousands of troops to fight alongside the British forces against the two Boer republics. Crazy. Yet Gallipoli and the memorialisation of the first world war, is now a bloated media event. Solemnity has become sentimentality; banality has triumphed over profundity in the contemplation of sacrifice.
In The AustralianTim Soutphommasane writes:
Yet it would be superficial to renounce the Anzac tradition, or even to believe that all things Anzac must involve jingoistic fervour. Equally, it is wrong to believe that any trace of myth must invalidate the Anzac story.To be a nation is to have a common memory of great deeds that inspires citizens to perform still more....At its best, the Anzac legend isn't a narrow myth about military prowess or the virile manhood of an Australian race. One needn't have had a forebear who fought on the Western Front or at Gallipoli in order to engage with the tradition.Rather, the Anzac legend can be an inclusive and unifying story. It symbolises an ethos of egalitarianism and mateship that animates our national life. It serves to remind us that when we are at our best, we are prepared to think about something greater than ourselves, to place duty above interest.
Fair enough. But why Gallipoli not Kokoda?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:46 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
April 23, 2010
return of the 'dole bludger'
The Coalition looks to be preparing an election strategy that includes the possibility of refusing the dole to the unemployed after six months and banning those under 30 from benefits if they refuse to move to areas where there are skills shortages.
The implication is the youth unemployed are dole bludgers, and as their dependency on the welfare system places a drain on the public purse, so they need to be stripped of welfare since they are capable of working but don't .
Apparently, there are nearly 40,000 young Australians aged between 15 and 17 are neither at school nor at work, according to Senate estimates hearings. The Coalition's proposition for lessening youth unemployment is that, in the context of labour shortages in parts of the country, unemployed people should be expected to relocate in order to take up a job; and secondly, that removing the support structure may force many to pick up tools and join industries where demand for workers was growing.
One argument is that if young people are to be gainfully employed, then they need skills. The emphasis of both the Howard and Rudd Governments was on apprenticeships and the trades: the former had a Australian Technical College program, the latter a Kickstart Apprentice program. The assumption is the unemployed need to acquire the skills required in the booming sectors of the economy in order to share directly in the benefits. This kind of policy addresses the main business concern which is a shortage of skilled labour.
However, there are labour shortages with respect to unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and this appears to be Abbott's target. Since six months is not long to acquire skills, Abbott is talking about unskilled work and the working class. He makes no mention of investing in a school system that would prepare people to be ready for the workforce and to enable them to get the qualifications (literacy and numeracy; a Year 12 qualification) they need to get basic training.
Unemployment rises very sharply during a recession (as in the early 1980s and 1990s) and takes a long time to fall after the spike.Young Australians bear a disproportionate burden during economic crises because during a downturn. Youth unemployment in Australia sky-rocketed as a result of the economic downturn.
It’s the casual, part-time and lower skilled jobs in the labour market – the type of work young people rely on– that are first to go. Those lacking experience, or in traineeships or apprenticeships, are amongst the first to go when businesses feel the pinch. They also have the least resources to fall back on and are the last to benefit when things pick up.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:56 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
April 22, 2010
a thinking conservative?
Arthur Sinodinos, when he was Howard's chief of staff, had a reputation for being tops in the political smarts. He was super sharp, was three steps ahead of everyone, and could put his finger on the essence of things without being taken in by the mystifying appearances.
Given this background I read his commentary on political events in The Australian as he one of the few thinking Conservatives in Australia. I keep waiting for the eagle-eyed insights into the nature of things. I find it hard to them. Maybe they elude me, trapped as I am in the confusing appearances of politics?
So I decided to read his Captain Rudd still hasn't set course for reform in today's Australian closely. A close read and all that. Sinodinos starts by saying that:
This year was meant to be a triumphant rollout of good news before a mighty election win. Instead, it is scraping off more barnacles from the good ship Rudd.The government has not even been able to nail Spartacus. He was cornered in the great health debate but jumped on his bike and escaped to regional Australia. His good reception there is consistent with the published national polls.The boatpeople issue has set off alarm bells in middle Australia and is diluting the government's health message.The recent decision on indefinite detention has only heightened voters' concerns.The same applies to the government's announcement of a $14 million independent review of Building the Education Revolution to pre-empt the Auditor-General's forthcoming report.
Okay. I'll give him that. But that's more or less in line with conventional wisdom. But it doesn't justify the headline that Captain Rudd still hasn't set course for reform.
The inference Sinodinos draws from these observations is that the Rudd Government is not in control of events:
Evidence-based policy-making has been replaced by poll-driven policy on the run. Are these the ingredients of a long-term successful government?Too many reviews, too many hostages to fortune too close to the election. The opposition can pick the eyes out of half-pregnant reform of health, the Henry tax review and the absence of a population policy.
If health reform is half pregnant, then the reform course has been set and the Rudd ship is chugging along.
Okay, it is possible that Sinodinos didn't write the title of his article, and that it was done by a subeditor at The Australian, who wraps Sinodino's words into a package so as to send a bullet into Rudd's political body. So let's look at what he actually says on tax in the context of the Henry tax review and the need to reduce the budget deficit:
Tax policies are as much statements of social vision as of economic policy.....A new onshore resource rent tax is still being canvassed, presumably because the money has to come from somewhere. This proposal is meant to capitalise on the commodities boom. It is based on the theory that resources generate super profits that are easier to tax than mobile capital or labour.Through the years the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has argued that the most effective and efficient taxes are property taxes, then consumption taxes and, finally, income taxes. The government is relying on commodities because the politics of more property taxes, including on the family home, are fraught. But when account is taken of the likelihood that higher taxes here relative to overseas will encourage more resource developments offshore, the economics of taxing resources are no longer so attractive.
The Rudd Government are wimps. What is So the mining companies are to be given an easy ride despite their super profits made from booming Chinese demand, whilst ordinary folk are subjected to an increase in the GST.
Is that good policy advice from a neo-liberal perspective or just advice for Spartacus? The judgement is that the Rudd Government are wimps when it comes to tax and prudent budgets. Sinodinos is offering advice to the Coaltion.
Recall Sinodinos' opening line--- "Tax policies are as much statements of social vision as of economic policy". The social vision is a neo-liberal one---investment is to be paid for by spending cuts (ie., austerity measures) coupled with structural reform. What sort of structural reform is envisioned? Sinodinos says that the opposition led by the wily Spartacus:
should set out its own structural reform agenda to strengthen competition and choice, raise productivity and reduce the costs of doing business. It should promise more cuts in taxes on saving and investment paid for by spending cuts. The entrenchment of a savings culture in the household sector is imperative. Structural reform and prudent budgets have served Australia well. So full steam ahead with reform and damn the nay-sayers.
What is important is capital accumulation and class power with resistance to be overridden in order to create a good business climate. The Coalition is to become the representative of its dominant class constituency.
Surely the Coalition needs a solid electoral base if it was to colonize power effectively, and a naked neo-liberal policy agenda would not go down well with Howard's battlers, who need to be wooed back into the conservative fold. How to do this? By appealing, in the words of David Harvey, in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, to the:
cultural nationalism of the white working classes and their besieged sense of moral righteousness (besieged because this class lived under conditions of chronic economic insecurity and felt excluded from many of the benefits that were being distributed through affirmative action and other state programmes). This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti- feminism. The problem was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of culture, but the ‘liberals’ who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environ- mentalists, etc.).
Is the strategy one of diverting attention from capitalism and corporate power as in any way having anything to do with either the economic or the cultural problems that unbridled commercialism and individualism are creating.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 21, 2010
the political tango of the executive and media
Peter Osborne in The Observer highlights the nexus between politics and the media in a liberal democracy:
One of the defining features of contemporary politics is the presence in the leadership entourage of a behind-the-scenes fixer and thug. George W Bush had Karl Rove, Bill Clinton the dreadful Dick Morris. Tony Blair benefited, at various stages of his shining career, from the near permanent availability of Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell.These doppelgängers play an essential part in the construction of the public identity of a prime minister or president. Most top politicians need, as far as possible, to remain fragrant and project a picture of unsullied virtue. They almost invariably conclude that this can best be achieved if someone else carries out the function of striking background deals, terrorising subordinates and menacing opponents.
Osborne's central concern is with Andy Coulson, the former editor of Murdoch's News of the World, acting as the doppelgänger for David Cameron, the Conservative leader in the UK. He advises Cameron to have nothing more to do with his close aide and accomplice and to sever all relations with him should he win the election.
This is one example of the political tango of the executive and media in which government and media together are happy to collude in the continued collapse of parliament. The hollowing out of democracy is a big issue.
Tasmania points the way forward: make the shift to proportional representation as this gives the public genuine representation and that should also break our current system of “executive sovereignty” by creating a House of Representatives that is more free of single party dominance controlled by the executive.
Of course the two major parties in Australia would act to kill this movement to a hung parliament: --as Tasmania shows they would belittle the Greens, intimidate the public and insist that the only choice is Rudd or Abbott. And the media would be their willing partner in the fear tactics and distortions that will be used to try and destroy the Green challenge.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:52 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 20, 2010
The non-existent hand
My position is that the failure of financial markets is at the centre of this global financial crisis and that financial markets are not necessarily rational. Hence the need to regulate them (to prevent deliberate fraud ) so that those who make mistakes bear more of the consequences of their decisions – and that others bear less.
This reform will be difficult given the power of financial capital (Wall Street) in the US, whose policy agenda favours deregulation, growing inequality, weakening social protection and bank bailouts
In his The Non-Existent Hand in the London Review of Books Joseph Stiglitz says that he shares the view that most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did such a poor job both in allocating capital and in managing risk (their key responsibilities) and that a considerable portion of the blame lies with the economics profession. He adds:
The notion economists pushed – that markets are efficient and self-adjusting – gave comfort to regulators like Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe in regulation in the first place. They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades after the Great Depression; and they gave justification to those, like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, Treasury secretaries under Clinton, who opposed doing anything about derivatives, even after the dangers had been exposed in the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 1998.We should be clear about this: economic theory never provided much support for these free-market views. Theories of imperfect and asymmetric information in markets had undermined every one of the ‘efficient market’ doctrines, even before they became fashionable in the Reagan-Thatcher era.
He adds that the present crisis should lay to rest any belief in ‘rational’ markets. The irrationalities evident in mortgage markets, in securitisation, in derivatives and in banking are mind-boggling; our supposed financial wizards have exhibited behaviour which, to use the vernacular, seemed ‘stupid’ even at the time.
He adds that:
markets are not necessarily rational, and even when they are, they are not always well intentioned. The objective of a speculative attack is to generate profits for the speculators, regardless of the cost to the rest of society. They can make money by inducing panic and then feel pleased with their ‘insight’: their concerns were justified, but only because of the responses to which their actions gave rise. Since the time of Keynes, the ability of markets to mount such speculative attacks has increased enormously.
The result is the multitude of other bubbles, booms and crashes that have marked the past quarter-century. Western banks have repeatedly had to be bailed out because of their bad lending decisions.
Hence Wall Street's agenda foir more bailouts. more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:19 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 19, 2010
CoAG: health reform
Today is crunch time to address the rapidly rising costs and inefficiencies in the fractured healthcare system at CoAG in Canberra. The common ground is that the system does need more money now rather than in 2014, and the commonwealth's contribution has gone down and down and down over the last decade. But extra funding does not necessarily mean higher quality health care.
Will the states accept the Commonwealth's bribes or sweetners and sign up to a limited public hospital program? Or will they---WA, Victoria and possibly NSW --- continue to resist signing over a portion of their GST, even though they tacitly agree that a single funder of health is best? That would begin to end the cost-shifting and finger-pointing that bedevils the current split system.
Or will they refuse to cut a deal and go out on a limb, even though the states have little hope of funding or supplying on their own the 21st-century system that we will need to deal with chronic illnesses and an ageing population over the next decade. And the states know it.
What we have, as Ian Hickie observes in the National Times is that:
The big dollars have been allocated to public hospitals and purchasing of elective surgery from the private sector. The real service commitments, particularly the guarantee that you will be treated within four hours of presenting to an emergency department, are clearly focused on improving the acute care sector only.
Nor are the states pushing for the rapid introduction of e-health despite the cost savings, or addressing the perverse incentives such as fee-for-service associated with bulk-billing in which clinicians are rewarded by the number of transactions rather than health outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, the states have been more interested in extra cash rather than addressing the underinvestment in prevention, early intervention and alternative care settings, particularly for older people. Lowering obesity rates, particularly among young people and those on lower income, or dental care do not seem to be very high on any real health priorities list. Nor is mental health.
Tony Abbott has little to say apart from it being another example of Rudd's smoke and mirrors. Peter Dutton, the Coalition's shadow health spokesperson, has nothing to say, as usual. No doubt they will oppose.
Update
The talks move very slowly---"inch by inch"--- by all accounts. Everybody has stayed on message about CoAG being constructive and everybody being willing to negotiate. NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has agreed to hand back 30 per cent of its GST to Canberra to help fund Kevin Rudd's hospital reforms.The commonwealth's claw back of GST to fund health care is the key sticking point, or bone of contention for Victoria and Western Australia. That issue has yet to be discussed at CoAG. Will it be debated tomorrow?
The Commonwealth continues to throw money around --this time it is $1.2 billion to help meet the emergency department and elective surgery targets set up under the Rudd's reforms. They are not talking about reducing the number of patients coming into hospitals through good primary care as David Burchell observes:
Unravel the righteous words about the importance of primary and community care, and it becomes clear that nothing much is about to change there, either. There are no specific proposals about nurturing "wellness", or better treating the epidemic of breast cancers, or dealing with mental health more effectively. Nor is there any evident revision of the received view that treats old age as if it were a form of illness, so that the elderly are condemned to spending their autumn years under the cold fluorescent lighting of hospital waiting rooms.The federal proposals won't make the business of hospitals easier, by keeping people out of them. They won't make the system fairer in any discernible way; nor, so far we can be told, will they work to restrain overall costs.
CoAG has yet to begin to seriously discuss health reform. What we have on display this time is more political posturing and positioning for upcoming elections.
Update 2
So it cost the Commonwealth $5 billion in incentives (including $1.2 billion to help meet the emergency department and elective surgery; $800 million for improved mental health services and 1300 extra hospital beds) to get the states on board plus a partnership with the states, with each contributing to a joint pool to fund hospital reform.
So the Commonwealth had to back down on directly funding the local hospital networks as the states are still involved in controlling the money. That state involvement through a joint funding arrangement to deliver hospital funding reform does mean the continuation of centralised and bureaucratic approach rather than giving the hospital networks the ability through direct funding to deliver locally crafted services according to the needs of the population.
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April 18, 2010
UK election: a three way election
The election in the UK is underway and it looks after the first debate on national television as if the UK will finally experience a genuine three party election. Maybe even a hung parliament, or a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, or between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (more likely) Maybe. Just maybe.
Martin Rowson
An indication that change is afoot? It is highly unlikely that either the Labor of Conservative parties would support electoral reform to introduce proportional representation? It is not in their interest.
The Conservatives are talking big about civil society in which people are given greater power and control over their communities. This puts them at odds with their Thatcherite tradition, which repudiated the very idea of society, and whose attack on the state left people to sink or swim in the market economy.
The Guardian editorial unpacks what the Conservatives turn to civil society in the form of progressive conservatism means in the UK context:
The Big Society... is meant as the alternative to the Big State, which, in the Conservative analysis, is the hallmark of Labour rule.At heart, this expresses traditional Tory suspicion of public services run centrally from Whitehall, deemed inefficient at best, counter-productive at worst. The welfare state, in this view, is a bureaucracy governed by targets and rules that cannot adapt to the real-life complexity of social breakdown. As a result, some problems get worse: fathers are discouraged from living with the mothers of their children by a benefits system that rewards single parents; the unemployed do not seek jobs because they are better off claiming to be incapacitated by sickness.
At a macroeconomic level, public sector spending is said to crowd out the private sector. At corporate level, the expanding state is presumed to stifle entrepreneurs with taxes and regulation. At individual level, welfare payments are said to foster dependency and discourage ambition.
The same old neo-liberalism re wrapped as the 'Great Society', whilst Brown's Labour Party has little time for personal freedom in a national security state in which anyone taking a picture anywhere can be stopped by the police as a potential terrorist.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 16, 2010
Canberra gaze: the electoral middle
We are now in election mode with both major parties busy clearing the underbush and the simmering fires to establish the ground they want to fight on. Rudd Labor wants this year’s election to be about health; Abbott's Coalition wants it to be about about boats. The election campaign is well and truly under way and the contest will be fought around marginal seats and the electoral middle.
In A vote-changer? at Inside Story Peter Brent from Mumble explores the concept of the electoral middle ground in the context of the current debate about asylum seekers. He says:
Australian electoral politics is dominated, to a greater extent than probably any other country, by the views and interests of the “middle.” Not the “middle ground,” but “middle Australia” or the “outer middle,” a group who tend not to identify strongly with either major party and whose votes are often up for grabs.Young couples with children are overrepresented among these voters,who the major parties see as unengaged, conservative, reasonably affluent, self-interested, materialistic and prone to see themselves as victims. They are also very white, wary of change and, when pushed, unenthusiastic about immigration.
He adds that they congregate in reasonably marginal electorates in Australia, mostly in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and the further-out “regions,” our electoral geography gives them extra influence. And this being possibly the most suburbanised country in the world, there are lots of them.
Hence Labor's asylum freeze---a suspension of the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan in order to defuse an issue that has not, and is not, playing well for Labor.
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April 15, 2010
China: the new superpower
The emergence of China as the new economic superpower means the decline of the US as an economic superpower, though not as military superpower. The incumbent superpower is still hegemonic. This historic reordering happened rather quickly---it appears that the global financial crisis was the catalyst---even though China's rise to great power status has been driven by its economic development.
After centuries of dominance by powers outside Asia or on its periphery – Russia, Britain, the US and Japan – China is reasserting the sway it held for most of its history and is exerting pressure in new areas. It is now a global power with responsibilities and influence that extend beyond its immediate national interests.
Though, China is not liberalizing into a liberal democratic/ capitalist regime, nor is it aligning itself with the West to resolve the world's most pressing problems, there is a tilt away from America and towards China by Japan. Australians accept that our future is with China.
Some Americans interpret this in terms of China as a growing threat to the United States. China and the United States are on their way to a global rivalry akin to what took place during the Cold War. Only this time, the United States is declining, and the PRC is far more sophisticated than the Soviets.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:23 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 14, 2010
Brumby = anti-reform
John Brumby, the Victorian Premier, increasingly stands for the self-interest of Victoria at the expense of Australia's national interest. He sabotaged water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin to keep water for Victoria with his anti-competitive, distortionary 4% trading cap--Rudd caved in and rewarded Brumby's intransigence, giving him substantial extra funding for water irrigation infrastructure in exchange for a vague commitment to remove the 4% water trading cap sometime in the distant future. Now Brumby looks as if he will play the same game around health reform with his intransigence and horse trading.
Brumby, it would seem, wants to lock in commonwealth money for the extra demand for health care to supplement his health budget, but without any strings attached. It is state rights not patient rights for Brumby. He stands alone in resisting health reform with his own plan Victoria, it seems, demands bribes (CoAG sweeteners) well beyond what the other states are receiving in order to sign up.
The health reform debate is focused upon issues of short run funding and the promise ofefficiency gains.If Brumby is now the arch opponent of the Rudd hospital reform plan, he does have a point this fight is about funding. The public hospitals' major problems are not about efficiency or management; they are about facilities and money, as a result of the Howard Government pulling money out of the system in the name of privatised medicine in the last decade.
As John Debble points out the Rudd Government is:
simply rebadging the part of the GST money the states and territories now spend on health as Commonwealth payments. About two-thirds would relate to hospitals. The other third would be the Commonwealth fully funding primary health services provided by the states, and there is a case for some adjustment
Moreover, the extra money over the next decade is simply the extra amount the Commonwealth would have to pay to maintain the average 8 per cent a year increase in state and territory health spending over the past 10 years.
State Premiers, such as SA's Mike Rann talk in terms of using these reforms to break the current log jam in healthcare to lock in partnerships between the commonwealth and the states; but the political reality is that the trajectory is one of increasing Commonwealth domination of the health sector. Is that a concern?
Now Brumby does not argue that we should work out the best way of providing health services, reforming the patchwork delivery system, and adjusting taxes to support the more effective delivery of better health services. Nor does he identify that drivers that would make the patchwork health systems improve and deliver what we want. These reform concerns are largely ignored. Brumby wants more commonwealth money for Victoria with no strings attached.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:41 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
April 13, 2010
Building the Education Revolution: rorts etc
I am surprised that it has taken so long for the Rudd Government to set up an inquiry into the rorts by the building industry in the $16 billion school building/stimulus program. The gouging stories have been surfacing for several months, and the months of government denials that there was a problem with respect to the inflated quotes and costs, overcharging, money going to schools due to close, and unwanted projects imposed on schools by state education bureaucracies have not been persuasive.
Clearly, the line that complaints represented a minute proportion of projects, can no longer stand with the dissatisfaction at the school level; in spite of the stimulus package addressing the run-down of public school assets at local level, over the past few decades. What we have is the neutralising of political problems to create clear air for the election campaign.
Most of the Rudd Government's emphasis and rhetoric has been on “branding and recognition" with the signs on school fences announcing the Commonwealth government’s $16 billion Building the Education Revolution (BER) program. It's hardly an education revolution since the rationale is economic rather than educational--it is contributing to economic recovery through rapid construction of shovel-ready building plans, and this takes priority over provision of “learning environments” in the program objectives.
However, the economic and the global financial crisis have now passed. So why no mention of linking the building program to the computers in schools strand of building the education revolution by developing local digital media hubs that would provide training and the development of local digital resources. This would connect education to the digital economy and the national broadband network that will bring high speed broadband to low-income communities.
This kind of linking could begin the process of re-engaging young people who have drifted out of, and away from, formal schooling.The national broadband network opens up possibilities to bring the best educational materials and teachers to students in low-income communities and to training young people in the skills needed to work in a digital/information economy.
The third strand of Gillard's rhetoric of an education revolution is the emphasis on standardised testing and “accountability” for schools and teachers with its focus on progress in literacy and numeracy at the expense of arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages and physical education. What hope for digital literacy in the context of the impact of digital media when the conception of good education is a back to basics education. This dumbing down and narrowing of the curriculum appears to be the future of public education in Australia.
The long term implications of this educational traditionalist strand of reform (the business model of education) are: the “failing” schools are the urban public schools that serve predominantly poor or minority students; acceleration of the enrolment drift away from schools in poor areas; and increasing the element of social hierarchy among and between our public and private schools.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 12, 2010
newspapers + iPad
It may well be that printed newspapers will probably survive for a decade before being largely replaced by digital news and the printing presses are switched off. Mark Day in The Australian, who faithfully runs the Murdoch line that Google steals his precious content, says that the newspaper industry is holding its collective breath: Will Apple's new distribution system on the iPad platform be the game-changer save the industry?
Murdoch's answer is yes. His glimpse of the future is that the iPad (and other tablets) will help him in his attempt to reinvent the newspaper economy in the face of declining print readership and plummeting ad revenues. The Australian says that it will be at the forefront of these new media applications. They can see the advertising dollars emerging from an app store that channels money to those who make the content.
Day treads a little more more cautiously about Murdoch's attempt to roll back the existing "free media models" on the web through paying for access to his content. He says:
The big question yet to be answered is: how many people will buy a newspaper subscription application....and switch to daily electronic delivery in place of a dead tree and diesel truck delivery system? Little else will change: the content, story selection, analysis of what, why and how, context, the interpretation and opinion arising from this analysis, will all remain.
I dare say not many, especially when news and comment is free on the BBC and the ABC. Or Business Spectator. Murdoch may have the devices that must support to make sure his content is in the right access venues, but his content is not unique enough to persuade me to pay for access to it.
It is the book publishers will do rather well out of the iPad, with their multimedia books with sound files, pictures and maps.
Day's argument, in defence of Murdoch's proposed shift to paywalls, is that deliberately downsizing your audience is good. He says:
smaller is better. Publishers who choose to deny access to Google and rely on their own ability to engage readers through iPad-style apps will be able to build their own communities of people in the same way as they do now through print circulation.These communities will be identifiable by their names, addresses, ages, socio-economic status and interests and, as such, will be more valuable to advertisers than the billions of (mostly wasted) eyeballs Google accesses.
Murdoch is willing to take a significant hit on the digital readership of his newspapers in the belief that a smaller, more valuable audience lies over the paywall.
Will the content remain the same as Day assumes? The iPad is a portable, backlit, colour high-definition screen with decent battery life which is equally at home with music, video, text, graphics, photos and hyperlinks. This indicates that the form of the content is going to change, even though TV content is the biggest hole in the fabric Apple is weaving with its integrated content and user experience.
What if text-based newspaper sites become also-rans in the shift to pictures and videos and when internet news becomes even more of fundamentally visual medium? Internet TV via an ADSL 2+ broadband connection is just around the corner.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:29 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
April 11, 2010
Petraeus + counterinsurgency
In his profile on General David Petraeus, the most influential military officer in America, Vanity Fair Mark Bowden links the current war in Afghanistan to the conventional US view of the Vietnam War.
Bowden says:
Here’s how the thinking went: No matter how important a conflict, public and political support for it erodes as casualties and expenses rise. In Vietnam, the U.S. government gave up on a difficult but doable military mission, sacrificing what could have been a hard-won victory to the god of public opinion
The army’s conventional view of that war tended to place the blame for failure on civilian leaders and the press not its own strategies.
Bowden points out that:
As they had in Vietnam, American forces in Iraq were losing the trust and support of the people, who were suffering terrible levels of violence. Yet the generals in command persisted on their course, targeting insurgents and working to secure the safety of their own troops first.
You can see why the Iraqi's want the American out of their country from this viral video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attacking a group of people in a Baghdad suburb inJuly 2007 on WikiLeaks. It's not difficult to see why the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies of the national security state, anxious to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing, want to destroy WikiLeaks.
The new view advocated by Petraeus in Iraq was to put counter-insurgency into practice based on the old principle of securing the population and doing it by living with the people; a fully resourced, comprehensive counter-insurgency including the surge. It assumes that the war in Afghanistan is not chasing the Taliban out of the city or underground but winning the population, a process which can begin only after the city has been retaken.
Petraeus's new version of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual made the central theme political rather than military: counterinsurgency theory holds that military action can only be a precondition for political success. A counterinsurgency can succeed only if it makes the government legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. This requires economic aid, governance reform, improvement in basic services and the like. And it requires an act of understanding, even empathy.
In Afghanistan the US had focused too much on the enemy and not enough on providing security for the Afghan people. In Counterinsurgency Field Manual: Afghanistan Edition in Foreign Policy Nathaniel C Fick and John A Nagl state:
If it is true that a new plan is needed in Afghanistan, it is doubly true that Afghanistan is not Iraq. Conflating the two conflicts would be a dangerous oversimplification. The Iraq war has been mostly urban, largely sectarian, and contained within Iraq's borders. The Afghan war has been intrinsically rural, mostly confined to the Pashtun belt across the country's south and east, and inextricably linked to Pakistan. Because the natures of the conflicts are different, the strategies to fight them must be equally so. The very fact that Pakistan serves as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al Qaeda makes regional diplomacy far more necessary than it was in Iraq. Additional troops are certainly needed in Afghanistan, but a surge itself will not equal success.
Winning over the population for the Americans in Afghanistan amounts to buying the loyalty of the local population.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:10 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
April 9, 2010
Tasmania: power seduces
I see that Tasmanian Governor, Peter Underwood, has invoked the constitutional default position to a hung Parliament. David Bartlett’s caretaker government must continue and the government be tested on the floor of the House of Assembly. The Greens have said they would guarantee they would not move or support any no-confidence motion in a new Labor government in parliament. They went for stability as the best way to establish their legitimacy.
The Liberals refused to even talk to the Greens. Ruling out any deals with the Greens meant that Labor could continue in Government, after, Will Hodgman, the Liberals Leader refused to give guarantees to Labor. So no explicit Lib Lab coalition. The Liberals are angry--we was robbed--- as it is more years in opposition for them. Is that what the party wanted? Or were they doing the bidding of the old guard run by Senator Eric Betz that is allied with Gunns, and who cannot accept that Tasmania is changing from extractive industries based on unprocessed commodities such as mining and forestry, that can no longer compete on the world stage, to clever new technologies.
Bartlett refused to talk to the Greens as well. They were the enemy etc etc. Old Labor still sees the pulp mill as the states saviour, is willing to subsidize the bulk extractive forestry industry, and desires to destroy the Greens. They are in bed with big corporate money and had little time for democracy. The political wheel turns, and Premier Bartlett has grasped minority government in Tasmania suggesting some sort of deal with the Greens, even though he said there would never be no deals. If he is to retain power beyond the first Liberal no confidence motion, then he has to talk to the Greens.
That could mean a more accountable Labor as some bills would have to be negotiated. So there are some brakes on the unfettered power of corporatism. Then again, it could mean that there could be appalling Labor legislation supported by the Liberals and opposed by the Greens. So LibLabs remain in lockstep. Still that even that is a better scenario than a Lib-Lab coalition, as that would mean corporate interests completely smothering the public interest.
Update
The Governor's reasons for his decision have been made public. Hodgman and the Liberals had assumed that Labor had made promises at a Press conference prior to the election not to block supply and that it would not move a vote of no confidence in a Liberal government except in extreme circumstances. Bartlett denied it. The Liberals had been had about the LibLab promise.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:29 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
April 8, 2010
hospital reform: local governance
Health reform proceeds slowly. There is little movement towards health reform being less hospital-centric and more focused on the provision of community-based and preventative care or substantial mental health reform. Hospitals are places where people only need to be because of acute clinical danger (e.g. in trauma and psychiatry), or where rapid assessment requires investigations of the highest technology.
Australia still does not have a comprehensive platform on which to build community-based health services, as the brief flirtation with a nationally mandated community health program initiated in the early 70s was undone by subsequent governments.
The health debate is still about hospitals and it is mostly about the politics of health. Victoria and Western Australia are resisting the Rudd Government's proposal for the Commonwealth to take 60 per cent control of hospital funding by taking it form GST revenue. The debate, or theatre, has been about funding, not the creation of local hospital networks or a shift to activity-based funding.
Little has been said about governance, even though both major parties have advocated a return to the idea of local decision-making for pubic hospitals. Philip Davies points out in The Brisbane Line the local governance works for how hospital services should be delivered:
Figuring out the mix of staff needed to run a hospital, establishing a positive workplace culture, hiring the right doctors and nurses, choosing the equipment they need to work efficiently, and deciding how much to pay them are all issues that a local board would be well-placed to make. Those are arguably the areas where innovation on the part of local boards could have the greatest positive impact on hospitals’ performance.
The aim here should be to free local managers and clinicians from oppressive centralised control and foster innovation in local service delivery. The downside of clinicians playing a key role in future hospital boards is that their professional interests may be at odds with those of the local community. We may have a conflict between the protecting the high incomes of specialists at the expense of the equitable provision of healthcare in a world of limited resources.
Consequently, planning should be done at a state level. Davies says:
Individual hospitals’ roles need to be clearly defined and to fit together to form a coherent whole. Decisions about the location of costly, specialised services cannot be left to local hospital boards, however well informed or well-intentioned they might be. Difficult questions of resource allocation and prioritisation (‘rationing’ if you prefer) are a necessary part of planning health care which we would delegate to non-elected bodies at our peril.
There is a role for government to set standards, allocate resources, define priorities and ensure coherence in services.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:53 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 7, 2010
Turnbull moves on
What can be said about Malcolm Turnbull's decision to leave politics after the Canberra Press Gallery and political commentators have had their say?
The hard grind of opposition would have few rewards for a social liberal in a party that has increasingly become a conservative party hollowing out its liberal values (including individualism); a party that is turning away from its professional highly educated base in the inner urban seats to the suburbs and regions. A party that consciously repudiated its liberalism (using the market to put a price on greenhouse emissions) with its rejection of an emissions trading scheme to actually reach targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Turnbull crossed the floor on February 11 to vote with the Labor government on its proposed emissions trading scheme. He states:
I remain convinced it is in Australia's interest to start cutting our emissions now and to do so by means of a market-based mechanism where the government sets the rules and businesses make their own decisions as to how they will cut their emissions.
In crossing the floor Turnbull closed off his chances of leading the party again. Why bother to stick around as a Federal backbencher until Abbott becomes political roadkill?
The Liberal Party under the highly statist Tony Abbott appears to be increasingly turning back to the Howard decade to define its horizons, politics and social conservative understanding of what pursuing prudent and judicious stewardship actually means in a global world. It seems that the old ways are the good ways; that there is no need for radical change; and no need for a modernising Australia project that Turnbull stood for, and represented, on water in the Murray-Darling Basin and climate change.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:33 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 6, 2010
Islamophobia
An excerpt below is from John R. Bowen's Nothing To Fear Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe in The Boston Review. It is pertinent to Australia given those who talk in terms of The Islamist Threat to Australian Security in Quadrant, which advocates the view that the West is at war with Islam ("terrorists") in the the post-9/11 era.
Bowen says:
For those not on the far right, complaining of too many “immigrants” has been a common and relatively safe way of complaining of too much Islam. But Islamic shock is not simply a description of differences in flows of people. The claim is that the new wave of immigration has been uniquely disruptive of a European “way of life.”
This group holds that people should not have to radically change their ways of life. But the arrival of Muslims has forced such changes, wrested quiet Europeans from their peaceful ways, and forced them to look at minarets next to their steeples.
Their prescription is to call for a reverse the misguided “multiculturalist” policies that engendered large Muslim populations in our cities because Muslims do not share our Anglo-Saxon commitments to universal values.
In Islam, academia, and freedom Merv Bendle talks in terms of widespread capitulation to Muslim demands across the globe, especially in the very societies that Islamist jihadis have explicitly targeted for destruction.
This cowardly posture is most noticeable amongst the intelligentsia and within the education system and means that we have had to rely on independent scholars and courageous journalists to develop a critical debate, when we should have been able to rely on our universities and research centres. This capitulation is most obvious in the UK, but is also very apparent in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, where the battle is being lost in the areas of academic research, public policy, education, ideology, law, human rights, and particularly in the realm of free speech.
He finishes by saying that until the stranglehold of the carefully calibrated political correctness in the universities is broken, Australia and the West will continue to lurch along, reacting blindly and ineptly to the challenges thrown up to us by our enemies as they seek to bring about our destruction.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 4, 2010
a Big Australia
If more people now leave Australia for resort holiday in Asia, rather than holidaying in Australia, then more people want to come to Australia. Nor problems, given that the current political discourse is about a Big Australia to live. The concept of a Big Australia refers to total population levels, rather than annual immigration numbers and refugees, and it is tied to economic growth and development.
The ability to sustain a larger population depends on the planning abilities of state and federal governments and a larger population means that large investments in urban infrastructure must go hand in hand with longer-term reforms to boost the productivity and participation of the existing workforce.
Yet population is tied to migration, asylum seekers and boat people by those who play on the atavistic fear of boat people in the Australian population.
Thus the Liberal Opposition, ever anxious for "product differentiation" in difficult times, quickly ties a Big Australia, to border protection, and quickly ups the anti on asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat people. The federal government is far too soft on asylum seekers is the talking point. They lack the muscle that is required to control Australia's borders effectively and stop the boats. They are moving towards making "the boat people" a major election issue.
So we don't really have a debate about what a Big Australia means for our cities. Nor will we have one in 2010.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:37 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
April 2, 2010
the aspirational class
Stefan Collini in Blahspeak at the London Review of Books highlights, and criticizes, the concept of the "aspirational society" that has become so influential in the last decade. He says that the word ‘aspirational’ in the UK (and Australia) refers to:
an ‘aspirational class’, rather uncertainly located within a traditional hierarchical social structure, but composed of people who probably had working-class parents, who hope to have professional or managerial-class children, and who want more of ‘the good things of life’. But they want, it is said, to attain these goals without taking on the trappings and snobberies that historically went along with moving into a higher social class. An edge of ressentiment lurks under ‘aspiration’, not the old ‘Jack’s as good as his master’ kind, which acknowledged social position while claiming it was not the whole of life, but a more relativist kind, confident that ‘no one has the right to say what someone else ought to do or think.’ Any other view of the matter is damned as ‘elitist’.
As these attitudes assert and impose themselves, we are encouraged to talk not merely of an aspirational class but of an ‘aspirational society’ at once insistently egalitarian and aggressively competitive. This is the language of market populism.
This holds that markets express the will of the people and that those who say that society can be organized in any way other than the market way, are ideologues, elitists with their contemptuous disregard for the wisdom and values of average Australians.
Collini says that the emphasis on ‘aspiration’ is one symptom of the abandonment of what have been, for the best part of a century, the goals of progressive politics, since, as an ideal, the ‘aspirational society’ expresses a corrosively individualist conception of life that is at adds with social democracy. He says that:
the language of ‘aspiration’ occludes the stark facts of economic inequality in so much public debate. It is characteristic of the antinomies of individualism that the rhetorical stress on ‘choice’, ‘respect’ and so on has to be ramped up to compensate for the loss of any real prospect of altering the economic structure that shapes and sets limits to all agency.
In a society as unequal as contemporary Australia all talk of ‘equality of opportunity’ can function only as an ideological smokescreen to cover up the existence of the socio-economic inequalities associated with class.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 1, 2010
Tasmanian election: what now?
So it is over ---and, as expected, the Hare-Clark system has produced 10 Labor, 10 Liberal and 5 Greens. Andrew Wilkie almost won in the 5-seat electorate of Dennison. What was unexpected was The Greens winning a seat in Braddon on the West Coast.
Where now for the Greens? Will Premier Bartlett reject negotiating a power-sharing deal with the Greens and advise Governor Underwood to hand the reins of Government to Will Hodgman's Liberals in line with his pre-election pledge to resign his commission if the Liberals won more seats or a higher proportion of the state-wide primary vote. Will this be endorsed by the Labor caucus? Labor's strategy appears to be that it is better to retreat to opposition to rebuild than further antagonise the electorate by clinging to a minority government likely to end in acrimony with the Greens.
The political reality is that both the Liberal and Labor parties are both pro-development/pro business and part of the corporate state. However, there will not be a LIB/LAB government. My judgement is that the Liberal Party will form minority government --but with whom? Labor or the Greens?
Update
Labor lets go of government. Liberals are to form a minority government. Or so it seems. However, both major parties continue to refuse to negotiate with the Greens. Does it make far more sense for the Liberals and Labor to negotiate, than for either to negotiate with the Greens?
Will Tasmania's Governor, Peter Underwood accept Bartlett's decision to give up power? Will the Governor alternatively commission a minority Hodgeman Liberal government? Or will the Governor commission the Labor Party and let Parliament decide the rest by forcing the issue to the floor of the parliament with a vote of confidence in Bartlett Labor? Will the Governor meet the Greens or only deal with Liberal or Labor? What kind of deal will the Liberals try to negotiate with the Greens to form a minority government?
One possibility being canvassed is for the Liberals to be forced to seize power from Labor on the floor of the parliament with support in some form from the Greens. Will the Greens go along with this to ensure stable government in Tasmania? Whatever the mechanism used by Governor Underwood to resolve the stalemate Bartlett or Hodgeman need to accept political reality and accommodate the Greens in some way.
That is what the Tasmanian electorate voted for, given that the two party Lib/Lab style of government has failed to deliver good governance to Tasmania for many years.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:03 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack