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November 10, 2003
It is difficult to restrain my anger as a citizen when I read about this. It appears that Australia's proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US will require Australia making lots of concessions in exchange for no real benefits. It looks like a replay of the Canada-US FTA in which Canada lost jobs, factories, a balance of payments surplus and gained unemployment and increased numbers on welfare. The blankcheque that will probably leave regional Australia bleeding is covered over by the promise of production for a world market and the old fantasy of endless growth through free trade.
However, the macho free traders have more on their agenda than just opening up new opportunities for big business to expand and become global. The proposed Free Trade Agreement is seen as an instrument of social engineering by the liberal state to reshape society to ensure that it harmonizes with the dynamics of free market. Those reforms are the real point of Australia making lots of concessions to US capital, so that Australia's farmers a given a promise of future access to the US market down the track.
The rhetoric from the AFR is that the way our liberal society is organized continues to bind the economy and frustrate the free workings of the self-orgnazing market. So society (ie., welfare, education, health, wages,) has to be reformed quick smart. This is the pathway of modernization and progress. Anything else is becoming a basket case. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of the Australian Financial Review. (subscription required, 7, 11 03, pp.1 & 80-81) It speaks in the patronizing elite voice of the economic universalism of the global market, and scorns the foolish opposition who cannot take the white heat of reform.
From the perspective of an angry citizen more of the short term pain for the long term gain means more for citizens and more gains for Australian business; it means selling your birthright for a mess of potage; it means cutting one's throat to become more competitive. I'm angry because, as a citizen, I'm going to have no say in the decision-making, even though my everyday life is going to be deeply effected.
The finger of my anger can be pointed at the homogenizing and rationalizing bureaucratic centralism of the liberal state. This centralized bureaucracy is now beholden to the executive, and both act to undermine liberal democracy as a viable political system. Executive dominance gives rise to a conflict between liberalism and democracy, with the conflict continually being resolved at the expense of democracy.
As we know from a previous round of reforms, the liberal state's progressive reforms to give free reign to the self-organizing market results in the negative social-economc consequences. The instrument used by the Hawke-Keating Labor government was 'opening up the Australian market to the global one, and then using national competition policy to make the market more competitive. The cultural particularism of Hansonite populism was the political sign of that fallout from the previous round of big economic reforms. Often dismissed as racist and repellent by social democratic liberals, this Hansonite populism tried to put a brake on progress, by calling for a return to the idealized protectionist past.
It sought to go beyond a knee-jerk protectionism by pointing the finger at the democratic deficit in liberal democracy, and highlighting the deep lack of trust between government and citizens. In defending a threatened regional lifestyle it ended up reproducing within its own ranks all the pathologies of the national culture (racism) and those they sought to cure (authoritarianism). This regional populism never shook off its garden-variety expression of provincialism, ethnocentrism and cultural feelings of inferiority.
This insurgent populism was successfully redescribed and incorporated into John Howard's conservatism. He adopted policies of work-for-the-dole, tough border protection and extensive help for regional Australia. He then integrated this regional populism into the political unconcious of the national security state, adopted the populist language of the ordinary people versus the elites and the insurgency collapsed.
So progress in the 1980s meant the bureaucracies' social engineering of an often recalcitrant and angry population, who knew in their bones that the politics of economic reforms was directed against them. The progress of modernizing economic reforms to create an open economy meant unemployment, withdrawal of public services, community disintegration, psychological dysfunction, and a deteriorating quality of life for the squeezed middle and working classes. The sign of this is Snowtown.
To put it in philosophical terms (of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School) we are currently living the destructive dialectic of enlightenment. It hurts. The spin from Canberra during the 1980s was all about persuading citizens to accept policies that were not in their interest.
Australian citizens did succeed in retarding the destruction of social life in Australia, because their political voices had not been stifled. For all the political talk of unity and cohesion during the 1980s and 1990s by a clever political liberal democratic elite, the Australian social democratic regime was, and is, a crisis-ridden regime.
That is the historical background to the proposed Free Trade Agreement.
Today the FTA is a means for legitimating more economic reforms using the same lethal logic of modernity as the only viable option. As the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 7 Nov. 03, pp.1 & 80-81) writes, 'the race is one to catch the future.' A new wave of reforms is needed to fuel Australia's flowering in the 21st century. The market reformers are now painting a liberal Panglossan utopia of heaven on earth, as soon as a few minor social dysfunctions (universities) are engineered out of existence and the government is kicked out of everything.
The reality is a deepening of a crisis-riden social democracy with right wing think tanks (Institute of Public Affairs) calling for a strengthening of society with some social glue. Behind that position we sense the homogenizing tendencies of the central state that is statist and managerialist.
So it is important to stand firm against the way the FTA is being used as an instrument of reforms to Australian society and to counter the old old argument of a decline in national wealth, if we do not give the US what they want. Fighting to maintain the sustainability of the natural resource base in the Murray-Darling Basin is an important plank in resistance; as is the opposition to public health and educational institutions being turned into an lean and mean corporations operating in the marketplace.
There is considerable rural unrest in the regions as regional Australia feels they are still being screwed. A poorly negotiated US free trade deal will fuel the discontent, disenchantment and resentment in the regions.
Resistance needs to become a critique of market absolutism and the anti-statist free market is of economic universalism. On insight here is that the brash entrepreneurial individualism coupled to the integration of Australian market with the US leads to a loss of economic and cultural sovereignty. The big idea here is that Australia is obsolete. Its future lies in becoming part of the North American mega state. Americanization is what current talk about a substantial homogeneity between the US and Australia means.
So we citizens should hang onto a federalism grounded in our regional places for dear life in postmodernity. It is the only political institution we have that allows us to counter the centralizing tendences of the bureaucracy and executive and have a bit of a say in what happens about our future. Federalism also offers a different model of participation (employment) to the market: it is one of democratic participation. Maybe that can be used to destructure the centralized liberal state into a loose confederation in which the states are responsible to local needs.
Why not try and transform Australia into a looser confederation?
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I don't think this post gives a fair expression of my views. A reader looking at it would be led to the implication that I support the FTA when in reality I've been among its leading critics. And if you've read the discussion on the post you link to, you'll know that my analysis of Hanson's economic policies is almost identical to the one you've put up here.
That doesn't change the fact that her views on immigration and Aboriginal issues were repellent and (insofar as the term has any meaning) racist.