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November 09, 2007
Mark Latham, the former leader of the ALP, has an article in the Review section of the AFR called 'Merging into Nothing' (subscription required) on modern politics, federal elections, public policy and governance. It's an interesting argument and as the article is not online, I will spell out the argument.
The political class and the media hate Latham with a vengeance because he exposed their under the table workings in his insightful Latham Diaries with this truth telling about the dark heart of Australian public life. He had argued that our political culture is ‘broken’ and he exposed the claustrophobic, unhealthy and curiously apolitical relationship between journalists and politicians. The political/media response was to create an image of a wild, howling monstrosity who should be laughed at, ridiculed and despised.
They ignored Latham's argument that the conditions that sustained the old social democratic ‘project’ of the earlier twentieth century no longer applied, and that we needed different, more dispersed, solutions. So the political/media crowd will, more than likely, dismiss rather than engage with yet more truth to power, which steps behind the veil of the ongoing economic twitter and political chatter. You can find comments at John Quiggin.
Latham starts innocently enough, when he says that:
...the two trends, the rise of globalism and self-reliant individualism, have hollowed out the role and effectiveness of the nation state. It has less work to do. And with less work, there is less to argue about across the party political divide. In large part, this explains why the great ideological struggles of the postwar decades have disappeared, replaced by the modern pattern of policy convergence and manageralism.
Who could disagree with that pattern? its why we find this election campaign so boring and tedious. Nothing much happens at a policy level. The differences are blurred and muddied so much that we are unsure of who holds to what policies.
Latham then says that the policy convergence on a neo-liberal mode of economic governance--- balancing budgets, corporatising services, privatising assets and mimicking the methods of the private sector-- has transformed the nature of politics. He adds that the major parties at election times spend large amounts of money on telephone polling and focus groups to find out what the public are thinking. A core message comes out of this group: money.
He's pretty right on that too. The dollars are being tossed everywhere by everybody with promises of lots more. It's around $50 billion of them so far, with another $20 billion or so to come.
It is money and how to put more of it into the pockets of middle class voters in marginal seats. Latham says:
Hence the emphasis on campaign issues such as tax cuts, interest rates and penalty rates--the so-called financial pressures facing working families. Social democratic concerns such as community building, public participation, poverty alleviation and the redistribution of income and opportunity have fallen off the political agenda. Indeed they are perceived as an obstacle to winning power...Consequently, in this campaign, neither party has been willing to embrace social justice or redistributive strategies
A period of policy convergence poses new challenges for the political system. The major parties need to develop new arguments to convince their supporters that differences still remain between them and their opponents; the media need to create new issues and controversies to maintain their commercial viability as it is difficult to fill the news bulletins each night withe same old story about policy consensus.
This regime of truth means that:
The nation state has less work to do , but the political class needs to keep itself in work. When no issues exist politicians have an interest in manufacturing them, creating an artificial sense of crisis.All political representatives and candidates do it. I certainly did it. It is the nature of the system. The media, with its propensity for exaggeration and hysteria, is happy to play along. It is worth asking , however, are we really a nation in crisis or does the political system have a vested interest in spinning misinformation to this effect?
He addresses this question by looking at several current crises---housing affordability, hospitals, skills, climate change that currently circulate through the political system. These are seen as spinning misinformation camp, then he introduces a real crisis:
The greatest threat to the corporate world is from the culture of consumerism and its corrosive impact on nature. Capitalism is eating itself alive. And no truly global institution or policy tool has been developed in response. The nation state, the dominant political institution of the past two centuries, is ill-equipped to deal with the problem. My judgement is that global warming will worsen considerably before decisive action is taken. By necessity this will involve rethinking the West's materialistic values and developing a new economic and social order.
Latham then comes back to the current election and makes some critical comments about a Rudd Labor government would mean in actuality. These comments will be picked up by the media to create controversy, and then seized upon, and twisted, by Coalition politicians to attack the Rudd ALP as a duplicitous entity that we should be scared of. Latham says:
Undoubtedly, many people in the Labor movement are expecting Labor in power to be far more progressive than its stated election promises....I think that the reverse is true. I expect a Labor administration to be even more timid, more conservative. This has certainly been the pattern at a state level...this is precisely what a new labor ministry will do: pandering to the conservative interest groups, enjoying the comforts of office, and, over the long term, trying to establish itself as the natural party of government. Any attachment to radicalism and progressive reform in the ALP ended a long time ago.
So if people vote for a change in government in this election they will be replacing one conservative administration with another. No matter which party wins Australia will still have:
a conservative economic policy and a decentralised productivity-based industrial relations system...a conservative foreign policy dominated by the United States and its mis-management of the so-called"war on terror"....still have conservative social policies: overfunded elite private schools, huge subsidies for private health insurance and bucket loads of middle-class welfare.
Latham finishes by saying that we have reached the zenith of of policy convergence in Australian public life. Everything else is just play-acting, a bit of media melodrama to keep the public entertained. Australia, he concludes, is having a Seinfeld election, a show about nothing. This is the bit the media picks up on.
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Good run down of the article I felt. All I have to say is I was shocked to see Latham's article was only available on subscription, I went to the Fin Review site, which I never go to, and was disgusted in their poor business plan of having brand new content already on subscription restriction. Someone should scan Latham's article and put it online for us to read from the hard copy paper.
What a joke. I use Google News aggregator all the time, and less than one percent of newspapers have such foolish online content restriction. I am appalled.
From a business point of view, I would be more inclined to visit the fin review site, and hence take in ads on the site, if the foolish restrictions did not apply.
I am not going to buy a subscription just to read what was 1% of a hard copy on the 9th of november for a dollar fifty or something.
Newspapers are dying. And the foolish restrictions on online content here I've seen at the Fin Review are just bad business.
Not going in my bookmarks Fin Review online!!!!! No way.
I'll bet someone will put up lathams full article...
But thanks for you for summarizing it and posting extracts...that's great.