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April 1, 2008
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
He added that the Enlightenment and particularly the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined a new sovereign – the rule of reason - and questions of fact were no longer questions of power. They were questions to be answered by the body politic, using the best evidence and the rule of reason, and free debate with an implicit shared goal of finding the right answer for the best policy.
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.
Can this public sphere be opened up again and democracy revitalised? I do not think that this will come television in Australia--it is more likely to come from the Internet.
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