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November 28, 2005
I've been listening to the Senate debates on the industrial relations legislation during this afternoon and the evening on Sky News television.
If you dig beneath the standard rhetoric Liberal and Labour Party polemics and partionship to what lies underneath then what is disclosed is significant and rarely addressed in the speeches. The legislation, and the accompanying welfare-to-work legislation that will be debated next week, signify a radical break with welfare/social state of the 20th century, a big shift in governance and a new way of thinking about the targets, mechanism and limits of government. It is a shift market by neo-liberalism.
'Neo-liberalism' is used purposefully. This legislation not a return to the liberalism of the nineteenth century as some have claimed: ie a 'freeing' an existing set of market relations from the social shackles and allowing the market as a quasi-natural reality to operate competitvely. It is more an organizing everyday life to enable a market to exist and to provide what the market needs to function efficiently. There is a rethinking of the social and economic where all aspects of social conduct are being reconceptualized along economic lines--as calculative actions undertaken by enterprising agents exercising their choice.
"Choice' is dismissed by many in the ALP as propaganda but they are missing the significance of the shift in governance. The neo-liberal mode of governance reworks our condict as free subjects: we are being shaped as rational and enterprising who are active (not relying on trade unions) in making choices to further our own interests.
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"There is a rethinking of the social and economic where all aspects of social conduct are being reconceptualized along economic lines--as calculative actions undertaken by enterprising agents exercising their choice."
I agree with you that these are significant changes. The talk is about choice, but it really isn't. They are enforcing their view of Economic Man on everyone else.
This is some of the worst of the shadow of the Enlightenment. People become merely machines and everything is instrumentalised. The neo-liberals try to make up for the dehumanising understanding of a person by trying to TACK on 'values', nearly as an afterthought. It is all the more insulting by punishing and humiliating people who do not conform to their ideal - by taking welfare for instance - with the punitive welfare-to-work changes.
Its nearly as if these politicians who lie as a matter of course in their worklives and are shamelessly self-promoting, are trying to mold the whole community to their way of working and living. How could it be wrong, they say?