I missed out in being one of the 1000 participants to Rudd's 2020 Summit that was meant to facilitate the fostering of creativity in the form of the generation of breakthrough ideas. In fact two of the groups I applied for --those on cities and a digital world -- disappeared into the ether. The digital economy was to be a separate strand, now it is slotted along side education and innovation under productivity.
What does that say about Rudd Labor? I don't really know apart from it being a turning away from the Web 2 is a part of the knowledge society. Is it all about experts and technocrats? Is the core of the summit idea the elimination of dissent, by presenting political questions as technical ones as solvable as a mathematical equation, as Guy Rundle argues?
That doesn't mean we have to leave the issues global warming, public ownership, indigenous Australia, more livable cities, the creative economy etc) to others. The others are the best and brightest selected for 2020 and they are tasked to come up with Australia's next big ideas, help sort out Australia and indicate the way that the internet and information technology underpins the information economy.
We can explore things by have a look at what is happening in the salon des refuses. In The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage published in Fiber Culture Axel Bruns argues that a unique type of media experience has emerged from the user-led Web 2.0 environment – that of produsage. He notes, the boundaries between media producers and consumers are currently breaking down to enable ‘the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement’.Bruns understands Web2.0
He uses Wikipedia to illustrate this but the content creation and development processes also apply in open source software development and multi-user online games:
a description of Wikipedia (or even of any of its pages) as a ‘product’ in the traditional sense is no longer appropriate, if by product we understand a distinct, defined, fixed entity which is packaged and distributed to its users as we have discussed it above. Instead, Wikipedia pages and the encyclopaedia in its entirety are at any one moment simply artefacts of their continuing and continuous content development processes, temporary outcomes which are likely to be revised again soon. It is no more appropriate to describe these artefacts as products than it is to describe a single television image as a complete programme. At the same time, however, in spite of its continuing provision of content over time, Wikipedia content is also not a service similar to broadcast content, since the temporary artefacts of the continuing Wikipedia content development processes can be used in much the same way as the products of traditional encyclopaedia production. Thus, Wikipedia content constitutes a continuing process just as much as, when isolated from the process and thus frozen in time, a product-like artefact. Wikipedia content development itself is therefore neither production nor service provision, then, but a hybrid process which – as it is carried out by users who are also producers – can be described as produsage.
Bruns says that the growth of Web2.0 as a general model will certainly help generate a broader technical understanding of how Web-based produsage environments work, and those produsers who are already members of Generation C are likely to have a working understanding of the motivations for Web2.0 and produsage environments in opposition or as an alternative to Web1.0 and traditional industrial content production
The Rights of health consumers is on the political agenda now that the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care released a draft National Patient Charter of Rights in January 2008.This is an attempt to empower consumers vis-a-vis the health system.
On the 20th of March Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson signed the Close the Gap Statement of Intent along with a coalition of health leaders. As we know the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation is large, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have a life expectancy 17 years less than other Australians.The campaign calls on Australian governments to take action to achieve health equality for Indigenous Australians within 25 years through:
increasing annual Indigenous health funding by $450 million to enable equal access to health services
increasing Indigenous control and participation in the delivery of health services
addressing critical social issues such as housing, education and self-determination which contribute to the Indigenous health crisis
The Statement of Intent committed Australian governments to closing the indigenous health gap by 2030. It was not the first national plan for Aboriginal health. However, this is the first time that an Australian government has a signed up to a time frame. It is a bold step — and it is even more significant that this is a bipartisan commitment.
In his 'One thousand days' article in The Australian David Burchell argues that there seems to be - at least on the basis of the public record - a serious strategy deficit in the Rudd Government. He says:
There is a series of initiatives in particular policy areas. Many of them are worthwhile and long overdue; some of them (the seemingly endless list of ritual inquiries into petrol prices, the rental market and the like) are fairly superficial in character. But there's no obvious guiding thread linking them together into a general rationale for Labor governance in the complex and paradoxical environment of today's Australia.
It is a strange argument. He rightly argues that Australia needs policy that's integrated, not facing in different directions. He then links this to the political persona of Rudd. Burchell says that:
This sense of strategic deficit seems to be reflected in the curiously Janus-faced public image Rudd has been crafting for himself lately. At one moment it appears the PM is the father of the nation, articulating our sense of regret. At the next he's the diligent but passionless accountant of the nation's books, stressing one more time his essential economic conservatism. But here's the trick. It seems he's always one or other of these figures: never both at the same time. He's the altar boy or the accountant, but rarely a figure of rigour and compassion simultaneously.
One the one hand this is a so-called revolution based on doling out public funds to families, indiscriminately, to subsidise their home computer use. On the other hand it relies on a series of warm-hearted but disconnected instincts about increased funds for disadvantaged schools. Yet all the while a much more radical and integrated approach to the sector as a whole is clearly in order.
Burchell ends by warning:
A Labor government will generally be no better than the guiding conception of itself with which it sets out on its journey. And governments that begin without a crystal-clear sense of direction are liable to drift ever further from the path. In short, Labor in government needs to define its strategy and vision far more clearly than it has so far. Soon enough it will be too late.
In his review of Bill Readings The University in Ruins Dominick LaCapra says that the contemporary academy is based on a systemic, schizoid division between a market model and a model of corporate solidarity and collegial responsibility. Firstly:
The market model is employed in the prevalent idea that undergraduates subsidize research and graduate education and that they are not getting their money's worth, notably at a time when tuition is very high and has been outpacing the general rate of inflation. The market model has also played a significant role in the establishment of criteria for teaching and reward in departments and in the setting of salaries and perquisites for individuals. The idea here is that a department, to be competitive nationally, must conform to national criteria, for example, with respect to faculty that it is trying to recruit. And major increases in an individual's salary or other perquisites have typically depended on the reception of an outside offer from a peer institution.
On this model, departments and individuals should be bound by the value of dedicated service to the institution independent of market considerations, even if such service is not directly rewarded in material ways. The solidaristic-collegial model is particularly prominent in the idea that faculty have a special if not quasi-priestly responsibility for the education of nation's youth. Here to complain about tendencies in the academic system may be tantamount to saying that it has become overly aligned with the modified market mechanisms operative in the rest of the economy and society.
The essay in the current issue of The Monthly (March 2008) is "Sorry Business: the road to the Apology" by Robert Manne opens with an admission. Manne says:
In a recent conversation the novelist Alex Miller told me he thought people who claimed that they hadn't known, until relatively recently, that Aboriginal children had been forcibly removed from their families were lying. I didn't have the heart to tell him that, until the publication of Bringing Them Home in 1997, my own ignorance about Aboriginal-child removal had not been feigned but real. Like very many Australians, I was shocked, moved and ashamed when I read its account of the systematic decades-long practice of separating Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their mothers, families and communities, and of the physical and psychic suffering so many had endured, as a consequence, for the remainder of their lives. This was a chapter of recent Australian history I had not taken the trouble to understand.
In the Menzies Research Centre’s report on Aboriginal education written by Gary Johns of the Bennelong Society entitled Aboriginal Education: Remote Schools and the Real Economy (2006) Johns advocates that we should remove Aboriginal culture from the school curriculum because it prevents Aboriginal children from progressing in their education.The report argues that:
Western education cannot and should not preserve Aboriginal culture….Too often educators continue to defer to Aboriginal culture without recognising that Aboriginal culture is the problem. Can a culture that is pre-literate and pre-numerate survive in an education system that is meant to make children literate and numerate? Can a welfare culture that has no work ethic be in a position to prepare its children for school?
Johns can say that in the light of this kind of visual work? Or hold that this enhances the principles of liberty, free speech, competitive enterprise, limited government and democracy that the Menzies Research Centre stands for?
There is an interesting paper by Patrick Hutchings in Before Pangaea: New Essays in Transcultural Aesthetics, which are the papers from the Second Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics in 2004. These are published in Literature and Aesthetics (Dec 2005), the journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. In this paper entitled Australian Aboriginal Art he states that:
Founded/‘founded’ in 1788 a year before the Enlightenment’s sharp end, the French Revolution, ‘Australia’ was never an Enlightenment project. Nor was it a project of empathy. Actually to understand what the [indigenous] Australians feel for the land, their song-lines at once hymns and mental maps, is something that would have been utterly incompatible with the project of imperium. Empires take land, destroy cultures: the English do this with a bland air of benevolence.....the (indigenous) Australians were left, by and large, with what the Imperium did not want: and it wanted more than Sydney.
An Enlightenment Australia was overlaid on Australia as a penal colony? Or did the penal colony transform into Australia as an Enlightenment project? If so, when? Under under terra nullius indigenous Australians c were nobody, because their land to them at once useful and sacred belonged now, under laws which they could not understand, to the Empire.
In Culture Wars: Liberalism, hospitality and sovereignty in Borderlands Elaine Kelly asks the following:
What marks this period - neo-liberalism - from the last? What is 'new' or 'beyond' in relation to liberalism signified by the 'neo'? What does the disjuncture look like, and how do we mark it? Is it something radically different from liberalism and what is its connection to this theoretical and institutional heritage? This framework, its historical contingencies and structural racisms, informs contemporary limitations and possibilities for hospitality. How does it reiterate and transform the relationship between sovereignty and hospitality?
Such visa categories and the management of bodies is part of a morally inflected neo-liberal immigration structure ideologically underpinned by liberalism and its end point: racelessness. If a deconstruction of liberalism reveals the epistemological whiteness of the individual and the structural privileging of the group rights of whites, the proliferation of visas as legalistic determination and programmatic response to uninvited asylum seekers, exposes the investments of the centre; it reveals its own role in projecting itself as occupying the position of 'pure innocence'.
Liberalism internationalism adopts a multilateralist, as opposed to a unilateralist, view of the world of nations. It works with international cooperation, international law and international institutions.
Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz in Dead Center:The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the US argue that:
The polarization of the United States has dealt a severe blow to the bipartisan compact between power and cooperation. Instead of adhering to the vital center, the country’s elected ofcials, along with the public, are backing away from the liberal internationalist compact, supporting either U.S. power or international cooperation, but rarely both. President Bush and many Republicans have abandoned one side of the liberal internationalist compact: multilateralism has received little but contempt on their watch. Meanwhile, the Democrats have neglected the other side: many party stalwarts are uneasy with the assertive use of U.S. power. As the partisan gyre in Washington widens, the political center is dying out, and support for liberal internationalism is dying with it.
The New York Times reports on shared political blogger households in Washington:
Group living in the nation’s capital is nothing new. In Washington, the work-life balance often seems less balance and more all-consuming overlap.... the presence of a blogger house reflects the increasing number of online pundits in the capital. The Flophouse bloggers may not be part of the traditional mainstream news media, but they are certainly part of the mainstream blogosphere that is helping drive discourse in the city and the country.
These political blogger households don't exist in Canberra yet.
Neo-liberalism's orientation is the nemesis of traditional social democracy. In his essay ‘The Principles of a Liberal Social Order’, Theodore von Hayek provides a working definition of neo-liberalism:
The central concept of liberalism is that under the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct, protecting a recognisable private domain of individuals, a spontaneous order of human activities of much greater complexity will form itself than could ever be produced by deliberate arrangement, and that in consequence the coercive activities of government should be limited to the enforcement of such rules, whatever other services government may at the same time render by administering those particular resources which have been placed at its disposal for those purposes.
Neo-liberalism fails to take into account the operations of organised capital and the vested interests of the powerful; ignores that T markets in capitalism do not tend toward equilibrium, nor do they operate under conditions of perfect competition; markets did not arise spontaneously. They required a huge increase in political control, regulation and intervention.
Economic sociology is the application of the sociological perspective to economic phenomena as well as to phenomena which are economically relevant and economically conditioned. If we think Max Weber or Pierre Bourdieu, then a historical perspective is introduced. So Karl Marx and and Georg Simmel would undoubtedly belong to the internationally recognized canon in economic sociology. Is economic sociology a recognisable subfield in Australian social science as distinct from Marxist political economy? Has the former filled the void left by the demise of the latter?
In this text Johan Heilbron says that In a general article on the ‘economic field’ (Bourdieu 1997), Bourdieu proposes a systematic outline of his view.
What he calls the economic filed is the product of a process of historical differentiation which has allowed the economy to function according to specific laws (‘business is business’). This particular social world is, first of all, seen as a field of forces between actors. The relations between these actors, usually firms, are based on the volume and the composition of their capital. The concept of a field is thus distinguished from the interactionist view which characterises both game theory and network analysis. The economic field is, secondly, defined as a field of struggle, as an opposition mainly between established powers and their challengers. Here Bourdieu treats a series of questions about the conditions and strategies of change (and in particular the role of technological capital). The competing actors or agents are no homogeneous units: firms and other institutions are themselves fields, consisting of competing groups. In order to avoid a mechanistic image of the field dynamics, Bourdieu thus differentiates his analysis further and in the last part of his paper introduces the notion of ‘economic habitus’ to replace what he considers to be a scholastic notion: homo economicus. As a ‘socialised subjectivity’ the habitus informs the ways in which economic and other interests are actually perceived and pursued.
Angela Mitropoulos's Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony in the 2007 Sara Reader--Frontiers is concerned with John Howard's declaration of a de facto state of emergency over remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. This was justified by the protection of children from abuse – or, more specifically, the release of the report by the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse in the Northern Territory. Mitropoulos asks a good question:
The obvious question being posed here is why, after cutting health and welfare services to indigenous communities, it has required a paramilitary intervention to, purportedly, ensure the health and welfare of those same communities.
In both these instances, what have been ongoing and widely-reported occurrences (undocumented boat arrivals and child abuse) were reconstructed as singularly alarming events providing the pretext for authoritarian displays of sovereignty – that is, declarations of an exceptional situation demanding, without question, the suspension of the normal functioning of the law so as to restore the presumed integrity of the Australian body politic.
New Formations has a digital archive in which we find Phil Cohen's A Place To Think? He says that before we dismiss the idea of the university as having something to
do with a community of scholarly practice as a cynical cover story:
perhaps we should try to understand how this notion plays in the wider political context. Is it possible to see the university as the site of an old fashioned Marxist contradiction, between the (increasingly socialised) forces and (ever more individualised) relations of knowledge production? Can the ‘crisis of the university’ be traced to a growing tension between, on the one hand, the creation of a mass higher education system, charged with the training up of collective knowledge workers and on the other, the persistence of highly localised and hierarchical structures of academic self governance, competitive scholarship and symbolic narcissism, associated with the formation of an independent intelligentsia? Or are there important contradictions within this contradiction which cannot be dismissed as ‘secondary’ just because they do not fit into the Marxist schema? Not to mention a whole lot of other mediations going on?
He asks whether there is another way to reformulate the idea of the university in a way that neither harked back to the Ivory Tower elitism of he old Liberal academy nor espoused the crude commercialism of its neoliberal successor. Is there a third way and, if so, then what might it look like?
Cohen addresses the crisis of the liberal university as the society, the university becoming ever more marginal
as a locus for its production and dissemination of knowledge. He says:
The aim in Britain was to resolve the crisis of the university by gearing its different functions much more tightly into specialised niches in the knowledge economy. According to this dispensation the top ranked
‘research universities’ (that is to say, where there were existing major inhouse research facilities supported by a critical mass of internationally rated scholars) will continue to educate the future governing elites of the network society according to the latest inter-disciplinary protocols; meanwhile the task of the less well endowed institutions is to train up routine ‘knowledge workers’ by means of a thoroughly vocationalised curriculum while undertaking some applied research or as it is now called ‘ knowledge transfer activity’ to help balance the budget.
The student radicals, who had now graduated to positions of power within the Academy in the 1980s viewed these developments with considerable alarm. Especially if they are located in the ‘polyversities’, as many are, they argued for a return to the academic gold standard as a means of resisting the dilution of their disciplines, the de-skilling of their teaching and the devaluing of their research knowledge.
Wendy Brown's first chapter in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics is concerned with the role of critique in dark times. The dark times--- a reference to Hannah Arendt---is interpreted by me as the constellation of a neo-liberal mode of governance, social conservatism and the conservative denunciation of critique. Brown's response is that:
The rebuff of critical theory as untimely provides the core matter of the affirmative case for it. Critical theory is essential in dark times not for the sake of sustaining utopian hopes, making flamboyant interventions,or staging irreverent protests, but rather to contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely. If the charge of untimeliness inevitably also fixes time, then disrupting this fixity is crucial
to keeping the times from closing in on us. It is a way of reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne by the charge of untimeliness.
Critique presupposes a critical condition, for when we call a political moment in time critical, Brown says:
we signal the need for accurate assessment and effective strategies of action, all in a context designated as urgent. A critical condition is thus a particular kind of call: an urgent call for knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action to stave off catastrophe.
Michael Rustin has an article in New Formations archive on the future of social democracy in the UK which can be used to help us understand the dynamics Rudd Government in Australia and its policy agenda. Rustin opens by saying that In his article ‘New Labour’s double-shuffle’ (Soundings 24, Autumn 2003) that reworks Gramsci:
Stuart Hall characterised New Labour as a ‘hybrid regime’. The leading position in its repertoire is held by ‘its grim alignment with the broad global interests and values of corporate capital and power - the neo-liberal project’, while ‘another subaltern programme of a more social democratic kind’ runs alongside it. The subordinate programme is needed to maintain support for the dominant project among Labour’s supporters.
‘New Labour’s long term strategy or "project" is … the "transformism" of social democracy into a particular version of free market liberalism.’ The public sector is ostensibly defended, even slightly expanded, but also incessantly ‘modernised’, that is, transformed into the nearest equivalents that can be found to corporate institutional practice. ‘Spin’ is the device functionally necessary to resolve the contradictions between a programme driven by one set of interests and values but needing to be mediated to popular constituencies which may have quite other concerns.
Rustin spells out Blair Labour in terms that characterise Rudd Labor:
Most of its agendas remain favourable to the interests of business. It remains reluctant to attack (growing) inequalities through the tax system; it fights ‘regulation’ of the labour market at a European level; and it seeks to create further opportunities for the operation of private capital within the sectors of health, education, social care, transport and telecommunications - all of which have an increasingly important role in post-industrial economies. The ‘modernisation’ of the public services of education and health, with overriding value being given to ‘consumer choice’, aims to erode the boundaries between private and public provision. The ‘freeing’ of hospitals and schools to operate as independent corporations within quasi-markets prepares the ground for their fuller privatisation, when and if public opinion can be persuaded to accept this.