In Spaces of Hope David Harvey calls for a revitalization of the utopian tradition as a way to regain the possibility to think of real alternatives in opposition to the hegemony of market rationality under the conditions of globalization that means we all live within the world of capital circulation and accumulation. This subjects our bodies to physical and social processes which ‘produce’ different kinds of bodies. So the overall forces of capitalist production which operates on the global scale intersect with bodies which function on a local scale.
David Harvey describes neoconservatism thus:
the neoconservative project, which is not only about the mobilisation of moral authority; it’s also about the imposition of order, a militaristic sense of order. I don’t think democracy is what they are about at all. I think the only democracy they have in mind is the kind of democracy that exists in the US, which is the democracy of money and raw military power. My view of them is best described, I think, by Karl Rove’s dream, to have the US follow China. We have a one party system called the “Republucrats”; beneath it you have a raging, completely unregulated capitalism.....To mobilize that, I think neoconservative morality is not just simply an abstract morality; it is hierarchical. And since it is hierarchical, then it is always therefore about the hierarchal imposition of order....Neoconservatives are not against the market system, but they want it to be like China.
I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have this interview with George Soros on the global financial crisis. In response to the question, 'Was this crisis avoidable?', he says:
I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.
Each time, it's the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them.
The Bush administration’s narrative around torture after 9/11 is a familar one. Al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy, deadly and shadowy. It targeted civilians and didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions or any other international rules. Nevertheless the Bush administration had acted judiciously, even as it moved away from a purely law-enforcement strategy to one that marshaled all elements of national power.The events at Abu Ghraib were the actions of a few bad eggs and had nothing to do with the broader policies of the administration. The administration’s actions were inconsistent with torture. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized and unconnected to the administration’s policies.
This account--The Green Light by Philippe Sands in Vanity Fair
In this review of George William's Human Rights under the Australian Constitution in the Melbourne University Law Review by Glenn Patmore and Mathew Harding highlight William' analysis of the methodology of constitutional interpretation.They say that in chapter four, which is called ‘Constitutional Interpretation and Human Rights’. Williams follows the development of constitutional interpretation from Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd to the present.
He argues that the legalism and, more particularly, the literalism for which the Engineers’ Case stands, is a mask that the Court employs to disguise in value neutral terms what are in reality judgments based on policy and judicial values. By ‘legalism’ Williams means a close adherence to legal reasoning that creates ‘a reliance on technical solutions rather than considerations of policy.’...] Williams illustrates the impossibility of a pure literalism with a clever observation about the Engineers’ Case itself. He reveals that in rejecting the use of US authority as a proper source of guidance in constitutional interpretation, the majority in the Engineers’ Case actually relied upon non-textual considerations...
Williams contends that the selective application of literalism by the High Court has led to an ‘unarticulated tendency’ to defer to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Such an approach is no less political than one which seeks openly to foster human rights; it simply has different objectives. Furthermore, in a post-legalist era, when new concepts are beginning to inform constitutional interpretation, the Court has not developed a consistent approach, and as a result ‘[t]here is no articulated vision for constitutional rights in Australia.’
James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland, does go on and on about the badness of a bill of rights is in various op-eds in The Australian. This time he is referring to the panel on the future of Australian governance at the 2020 Summit, and he notes that it consists of three retired High Court justices associated with implied rights and none who have that interpretively conservative outlook that characterises the present High Court. Allan adds:
Not just any retired justices but the ones who gave us the execrable implied rights jurisprudence. Those were the cases from the 1990s where the High Court discovered (or, more honestly stated, made up) some implied rights, and it did this even though the founders of our Constitution explicitly rejected any US-style bill of rights. And it did this despite Australian voters consistently rejecting such proposals in referendums. The trick was to treat the idea of an implication as divorced from any actually held intentions of any real human beings, which is another way of saying it was judicial redrafting.
The general argument is pretty standard one. Conservatives say that Charter of Rights politicizes the courts, blurs the authority of parliament, shifts the primary power for making decisions about rights from legislatures to courts, transforms social and political questions into legal ones, creates a special role for the judiciary to comment on and determine matters of public policy, courts would become social laboratory's where the balancing of rights and interests would be undertaken according to the political leanings of the bench.
These arguments were advanced by John Hatzistergos, the NSW Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, in a speech to the Sydney Institute. The appeal to parliamentary sovereignty is a defence of (corrupt) executive dominance in NSW, and a blocking of checks and balances on the executive's political power to protect individual liberty. Democracy is equated with parliamentary sovereignty with individual liberty pushed into the background.
The Australian Constitution does use the language of rights, but in such a narrow sense that it has often been criticised for its scant protection of rights and freedoms. The Constitution contains few express rights. The main ones are:
s 41 – the right to vote;
s 51(xxxi) – the right not to have the Commonwealth acquire property, except on just terms;
s 80 – the right to trial by jury;
s 92 – the right that ‘trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free’;
s 116 – the right to freedom of religion; and
s 117 – the right to freedom from disabilities or discrimination on the basis of State residence.
As George Williams observes the High Court has found that the Constitution does embody a range of implied freedoms:
From the entrenchment of a system of representative government in ss 7 and 24 of the Constitution, which require, respectively, that the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives be ‘directly chosen by the people’, the High Court in Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth implied a freedom of political communication. The Court has also explored the possibility that rights can be implied from the separation of judicial power achieved by Chapter III of the Constitution. The Court has held that this separation of federal judicial power prevents the legislature or executive from imposing involuntary detention of a penal or punitive character and that the Constitution requires due process under the law, at least of a procedural kind.
Should use the records of the convention debates as a source of guidance when interpreting the Constitution. Presumably, but these texts and the way they signify the intent of the participants need not provide an appropriate blueprint for the interpretation of the Constitution.
Has there been a shift in the way the Commonwealth government views higher education with a change of , government? Angus McFarland, the president of the National Union of Students thinks so. In an op-ed in The Australian he says that a new Rudd commonwealth government allows us to re-conceptualise the role and function of the university student within higher education institutions and society. The shift is away from consumer to citizen and this shift undercuts the understanding of universities as ivory towers that offer no broader benefit to society.
McFarland's argument is this:
The Howard years involved the development of the neo-liberal, free-market view of the university student. Neo-liberalism positions economics as the basis of all relations in society. In this context, students were positioned external to universities. Students were clients. Students were customers paying fees for degrees. Universities were businesses providing a service to consumers. Two key policies of the Howard era illustrate this. The first was full-fee degrees and the notion that an individual's ability to pay should drive access over an individual's merit. Second was the introduction of voluntary student unionism, which framed students as consumers of student services rather than as members of a collegiate community.
There's the education revolution and the argument that education is central to national economic productivity. The Government has chosen to frame education as something that benefits society and communities, not just the individual. There's also Education Minister Julia Gillard's social inclusion agenda. She has put the case for access and participation in higher education and for a university role in community building and development. In essence, the Government wants universities to foster a productive society as well as a fair and equitable society.
This could happen by fostering student democracy which promotes the value of participation; broadening access to campus life; setting bold set bold equity goals to address access for indigenous students, low socioeconomic status students and rural students; integrating a commitment to community engagement into the curriculum; greater linkage of internship opportunities to community development projects, which could be achieved by giving preference or weight in assessment to community-building internships and academic credit for volunteer work; and rethinking of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme by expanding the Government's science and maths HECS cuts to areas of community building or development such as education, engineering or social work.
These are interest ideas. They break down the university as an ivory tower and reinvent the republican idea of active citizenship that had been lost under interest-group liberalism. Surprisingly, McFarland makes no mention of blogging, internship as public intellectuals or deliberative democracy. The emergence of a democracy-minded reform movement -- not just focused on limiting the role of money in politics but on expanding participation, broadening the scope of democracy, and connecting issues of process to substantive outcomes of public policy---has still to connect active citizenship with liberal democracy.
Neo-liberalism has manged to roll back social democracy. By that I don't just mean that Hayek blew the whistle on the fundamental problems of central planning as Nicholas Gruen argues at Club Troppo. Gruen's argument is that Hayek was right about the inadequacies of central planning and the significance of local knowledge.
Neo-liberalism also turned the regulatory world of social democracy on its head. As David Bensman
argues in Dissent
By deregulating financial markets, neo-liberal ideology cast financial institutions as our primary innovators—the principal engines of wealth creation. America returned to the pre-welfare state days when financiers hobbled engineers, when mergers and acquisitions (they were called trusts and monopolies back then) provided the fast track to profits and glory, when conspicuous consumption represented greatness.
‘Financialization’ is the name economists gave to neo-liberalism’s impact on the global economy. The notion that creative financing is central to economic growth has become so embedded in our consciousness that most of us don’t remember that this way of thinking used to be considered risky business.
David Hetherington, an executive director of Per Capita, a progressive think tank, says that:
When it comes to the international community of ideas, Australia has been sitting on the sidelines for a decade, unwilling to offer a fresh, independent perspective to global debates. In part, this stemmed from a political desire to march lockstep with our most important ally. But it also reflects an inherent suspicion about the value of big ideas. Our experience rightly tells us to be wary of them. Why? Because Australia's marketplace for ideas is broken.
Heatherington says that there are four main reasons why the big ideas struggle to break through.
Firstly, concentration of media ownership means that our public debate is dominated by a small clique of commentators who have held sway for decades....The second reason is that our public leaders emerge from a political system which fails to cultivate ideas. Political parties place a great premium on campaigning and organising skills, but little weight on articulation of values or development of policy thinking .... Thirdly, we lack a culture of investment in ideas. In Australia we give generously to volunteer associations, charities and disaster relief - all worthy causes - but investing in a marketplace for ideas is foreign to us. The Lowy Institute marks a welcome departure in this direction, but we have a long way to go to match our international peers ... The final barrier to a healthy marketplace for ideas is the least expected: our fantastic climate. For there is an inverse relationship between quality of climate and quality of public ideas.
Heatherington is optimistic, as he says that our marketplace for ideas is maturing. Ideas journals like The Monthly and The Diplomat are flourishing, and several new think tanks have emerged. The 2020 summit shows the Government's willingness to tap into the national brain pool, rather than run a closed shop.
The US is in recession territory. Investment banks are on the verge of collapse, the mortgage crisis is spreading, meltdown is happening, unemployment is rising and the Federal Reserve is taking on significant amounts of risk to avert further meltdowns on Wall Street and Main Street. The nation is reeling from the subprime crisis and the response of the Bush administration is more deregulation of financial markets. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is thinking about market deregulation and efficiency,whilst everyone else is worried about market survival. We gotta let the markets be markets says Paulson.
Paulson in his speech said, "I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current market turmoil." Paulson is saying that the US regulatory structure isn't at fault in the current crisis, even though he still wants to spend a lot of time and resources completely reforming it to allow more de-regulation. That will allow for more risk taking by bank and nonbank financial institutions.
Are we in a 20 year-long (or more) political experiment that will hollow out public life and corrode or destroy "public capital"? One where the notion of the public realm has been corroded by individualist, marketised ideology? A world where the relationship between the individual and government is characterised by widespread low levels of trust in government in a democratic state. Is Rudd simply Blair 2.0, to be it crudely?
These questions are suggested by Guy Rundle's op- ed in The Age, where he argued that the Rudd Government, which was always going to be a cautious centre-right government, is creating a style of government that is openly anti-democratic. My concern arises from why the liberal democracies are being so slow in tackling climate change.
If the trajectory appears to be one of the privatisation, enclosure and the withering of the public sphere, then are our democratic structures up to the task of addressing climate change? Could we say that a fundamental problem causing environmental destruction--and climate change in particular--is the operation of liberal democracy? The argument would be that liberal democracy's flaws and contradictions bestow upon government--and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance--an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society.
Al Gore, when introducing the British premiere of An Inconvenient Truth in Edinburgh in August 2006, addressed this issue:
In order to solve the climate crisis we have to address the democracy crisis. Especially in the US. I believe that in all democracies the conversation of democracy has been crimped and squeezed into little television soundbites and 30 second commercials. And as a result, people, average citizens, voters, have been pushed out of the conversation. A politics based on the public interest in the future dimension requires a very high level of ideas, in the political dialogue. Of course the Scottish Enlightenment was the epicentre of that kind of politics. It transformed the world. It started here
This is not happening today in either Bush America, Brown UK or Rudd's Australia. Gore, however, is fairly upbeat. He says:
I believe that a campaign that’s based on a very large set of ideas focused on the future and the public interest now faces such a withering headwind that a higher priority is to change democracy and open it up again to citizens – to air it out – and to democratise the dominant medium of television, which has been a form of information flow that has stultified modern life.