November 26, 2010
I've been watching Question Time off and on in the last fortnight in the context of both the anti-Labor bashing by the Murdoch Press' echo chamber (“Labor has no vision” or “Labor stands for nothing”, or "Labor lacks direction") and Australia’s two-party system being over.
I wanted to see how a minority Gillard government is dealing with a situation in which the power of the executive is counterbalanced by the power of Parliament in which members have more power to put different issues on the agenda. The Green did this with gay marriage and euthanasia, and this will become more pronounced when the Greens command the balance of power in the Senate from July next year.
In his 'The leader who needs to get a grip' column in last weekends AFR Geoff Kitney says that the assertion of Green power poses a big problem for the Gillard Government:
The Greens are likely to cause headaches for Gillard by imposing on her issues that appeal to sections of the Labor Party but which risk alienating more conservative traditional labor voters and voters in the uncommitted centre. This presents Gillard with arguably her greatest challenge--to find a way to stop the bleeding of Labor support to the Greens without capitulating to them and losing the vital political middle ground ... But how to deal with the threat posed by by the erosion of Labor support to the Greens is a question that deeply divides federal Labor.
For Wayne Swan, launching All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For by Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane, the ALP stands for prosperity and opportunity (meaning economic growth and social mobility) rather than the in fringe issues of the far left. Swan assumes that social mobility is always upwards--everyone gets a better job.
Climate change and the shift to a low carbon economy left wing fringe issue? Is water reform in the Murray-Darling basin a left wing fringe issue?
Swan's gospel of getting on offers a rather thin account of social democracy: --social mobility is what characterises a fair society, rather than a particular level of income equality. If social mobility is the way to civilize capitalism, then defining 'fairness' as social mobility (rather than as reduced income inequality) leaves the Greens defending the mainstream social liberal tradition.
Kitney, in his 'The leader who needs to get a grip' column in the AFR goes on to say that the Gillard Government is fighting on another front from a confident and emboldened Abbott and the Coalition:
Abbott and his team are increasingly convinced that Gillard will fail to meet he challenge [of how to assert the authority of prime ministership without the authority of Parliament]--- and are seizing every opportunity presented to them to reinforce the perception that she is a weak leader without a clear vision and a coherent reform agenda. tactically, the opposition is consistently out-thinking and out-manoeuvring the government.
Abbott and the Coalition still stand for three-word slogans: ‘end the waste’, ‘pay back debt’, ‘stop new taxes’ and ‘stop the boats’, but this matters less than the unremitting negativity that attempts to make like so difficult for the minority Gillard Government so that its support provided by the Independents splinters and cracks. They have able to consolidate their base and to convince most right-of-centre voters that Labor is not competent to hold office.
The Coalition still reckons that there is a good chance of this happening next year. I doubt it myself. The self-interest of the Independents is to ensure the stability of the Gillard Government as it provides them with the platform they need to further their agenda for regional Australia---- and that is more than the Coalition's ‘end the waste’, ‘pay back debt’, ‘stop new taxes’ and ‘stop the boats’.
Despite all the pressure applied by the conservatives (ie., the Murdoch Press and Coalition) on the national broadband network no splinters and cracks have appeared and a digital economy is now emerging.
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'social mobility' is tied to 'aspirational.' Stefan Collini in Blahspeak in the London Review of Books says:
Collini adds 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.