Australia has a hung parliament with the balance of power being held by three regional independents as a result of a growing discontent with the Westminster system of two party system of liberal democracy and a desire for multilevel democracy. Australia is taking the first hesitant steps towards recognizing that the world as a whole is changing towards more complex and multi-party politics.
The reforms requested by the three regional independents are contained in this letter to the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though limited---they do not address the executive being in a powerful position relative to the legislature, nor proportional representation for the House of Representatives--they are significant and they may help to sway some more voters and politicians towards backing reform.
TO JULIA GILLARD and TONY ABBOTT
Requests for information
1. We seek access to information under the ‘caretaker conventions’ to economic advice from the Secretary of the Treasury Ken Henry and Secretary of Finance David Tune, including the costings and impacts of Government and Opposition election promises and policies on the budget.
2. We seek briefings from the following Secretaries of Departments:
1. Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
2. Health and Ageing
3. Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
4. Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
5. Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
6. Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water
7. Defence
8. Resources, Energy and Tourism
3. We seek briefings from caretaker Ministers and Shadow Ministers in the above portfolio areas to discuss their program for the next three years.
4. We seek advice as soon as possible on their plans to work with the Clerks of the Parliament to improve the status and authority of all 150 local MP’s within parliamentary procedures and structures. In particular, we seek advice on timelines and actions for increasing the authority of the Committee system, private members business and private members bills, matters of public importance, 90 second statements, adjournment debates, and question time.
5. We seek a commitment to explore all options from both sides in regard “consensus options” for the next three years, and a willingness to at least explore all options to reach a majority greater than 76 for the next three years. Included in these considerations is advice on how relationships between the House of Representatives and the Senate can be improved, and a proposed timetable for this to happen.
6. We seek a commitment in writing as soon as possible that if negotiations are to take place on how to form Government, that each of these leaders, their Coalition partners, and all their affiliated MP’s, will negotiate in good faith and with the national interest as the only interest. In this same letter of comfort, we seek a written commitment that whoever forms majority Government will commit to a full three year term, and for an explanation in writing in this same letter as to how this commitment to a full term will be fulfilled, either by enabling legislation or other means.
7. We seek advice as soon as possible on a timetable and reform plan for political donations, electoral funding, and truth in advertising reform, and a timetable for how this reform plan will be achieved in co-operation with the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The three non-aligned MP’s will now be heading home to families, electorate duties, and a long-standing appointment with the Governor-General (unrelated to this political deadlock). We have agreed to be back in Canberra on Monday for the full week of meetings in relation to the above.
We expect all the above information to be made available through best endeavours as soon as possible, so that formal negotiations with all stakeholders can begin by Friday 3rd September – if, based on final counts, negotiations are indeed needed at all.
This letter is Julia Gillard's response. The Prime Minister says yes to the requests and is committed to parliamentary reform at the two levels, namely:
increasing the authority of the Committee system, private members business and private members bills, matters of public importance, 90 second statements, adjournment debates, and question time.
a reform plan for political donations, electoral funding, and truth in advertising reform, and a timetable for how this reform plan will be achieved in co-operation with the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The Westminster system is designed to produce strong, single party government and the election results signify the death of two-party politics. In Australia it has taken this long simply because Labor and the Coalition had such an iron grip on power. The big issue is that despite the Greens winning 11.4 % of the vote, they only gain 1 seat? How is that democracy?
The Financial Times is hosting a debate on the new austerity on the new austerity which they've constructed in terms of austerity v stimulus. This is a debate in economics in which the stimulators say the danger lies in spending too little and the austereians from spending too much. Each side also has their own economic champion: the stimulators follow the banner of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, while the austereians are forming up behind the recently reformed former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.
In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial Greenspan argued that the best economic stimulus would be for the world’s leading debtors (the United States, U.K., Japan, Italy, et al) to rein in their budget deficits, a strategy dubbed “austerity” by the press. Greenspan explains that because lower deficits will restore confidence, diminish the threat of inflation, and allow savings to flow to private-sector investment rather than public-sector consumption, the short-term pain will lead to gains both in the mid- and long-term. Rather than redistributing a shrinking pie, this approach allows the pie to grow. Greenspan’s austereian view has been echoed loudly in the highest policy circles of Berlin, Ottawa, Moscow, Beijing, and Canberra.
Australian conservatism has a neo-liberal strand and a statist one. These can be seen in its responses to the welfare state, which is celebrated by social democrats as civilizing capitalism. However, the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficult of the key terms of political theory now having a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings.
The term "the welfare state," commonly denoted an industrial capitalist society in which state power was deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces. There are three types of welfare state activities: provision of minimum income, provision for the reduction of economic insecurity resulting from such "contingencies" as sickness, old age and unemployment, and provision to all members of society of a range of social services.
In Australia, as in Britain, where the crisis of the 1970s was diagnosed as one of Keynesianism, neoliberalism emerged as a radical anti-Keynesian movement that sought to dismantle major Keynesian institutions and policies. In this context, the welfare state, a fundamental Keynesian institution, was identified as a part of the ‘problem,’ and became subject to the neoliberal ‘solution.’ The welfare state was a problem in that it has discouraged people from seeking work, and it has created a large, centralized, uncontrolled and unproductive bureaucracy.
The aim of the neo-liberal mode of governance is to roll back the welfare state in order to limit government. This tendency can be seen in the various proposals to reduce welfare dependency and getting people to stand on their own two feet. The phrase "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is often used.
Neoliberalism is is usually characterised in terms of the free market, small government, privatisation, and the separation of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and the rule of law. It is frequently traced to Friedrich Hayek's classic text The Constitution of Liberty. The neoliberal state ensures individual liberty through the provision of ‘choices’, which individuals then take responsibility for. Social solidarity is downplayed in favour of the virtues of self-reliance.
A neoliberal state can include a welfare state, but only of the most limited kind.Using the welfare state to realise an ideal of social justice is, for neoliberals, an abuse of power: social justice is a vague and contested idea, and when governments try to realise it they compromise the rule of law and undermine individual freedom. The role of the state should be limited to safeguarding the free market and providing a minimum level of security against poverty.
Conservatives argue that the unfettered market is amoral and destroys social cohesion. The statist strand in Australian conservatism can be seen in the compulsory income management of welfare (unemployment) payments and requiring the unemployed to relocate to centres of high job growth to find work or lose their payments. This accepts that the welfare state is with us, for better or worse, that it is necessary to "make prudent accommodations", and to use the welfare state for conservative ends. So we have the conservative idea of the welfare state being accepted in order to preserve the position of the bourgeoisie in an unequal society: --property's ransom for security. The minimal welfare state serves a politically functional role to ensure social stability and cohesion.
The problem for neo-liberals is that just straightforwardly hacking away at government spending, doesn’t have an impressive track record both because voters don’t much care for austerity budgeting, and (more importantly) because the government and civil society are so intertwined. Those neoliberals who have become convinced that the minimal welfare state they favour is politically impossible, do not usually become social democrats. Most opt for a paternal, conservative welfare state, which aims to prepare people for the labour market, rather than promoting any idea of social justice and equality.
The statist strand represents constraints on individual freedom and is at a odds, or in tension with, the neo-liberal strand that appeals to the ethical basis of the neoliberal state--the concern for negative freedom and the rule of law. Hence the contradiction within Australian conservatism.
This contradiction is resolved in the rhetoric of limiting government and empowering local communities.This pathway is one of advocating a transfer of responsibility — for schools, hospitals, police forces — to local governments and communities. In a nation with a vast and creaking welfare state the rhetoric is one of people putting more faith in voluntarism, charity and the beleaguered two-parent family.
I've just come across The Journal of Public Reason--one of the few open access e-journals in philosophy---via Public Reason, a blog for political philosophers.
In the June 2010 issue there is a review of G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) by Kevin Gray. Cohen's text is insightful critique of elements of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice and on a certain strand of liberal thought that has emerged from dominance of A Theory of Justice.
This is a liberalism that holds that, so long as the well-being of the worst off members of society is not made worse, any arrangement that increases the well-being of better-off members of society is morally acceptable. This is a liberalism that allows rampant inequalities and holds that justice does not in fact require equality.
Cohen wants to rescue equality and justice from Rawlsian liberalism, and to restore the rightful place of social existence to political theory. Gray says that in the first section (‘Rescuing Equality’), Cohen attacks what he sees as the inequality countenanced in Rawls’ name. Gray points out that:
... it is thought just, under most Rawlsian approaches, to sanction differences in income if they benefit the worst off in society. The question is, however, in what way are they likely to benefit the worst off? And why is it the case that the best off need be better off to help the poor? In many cases, it is thought that differences in income will benefit the worst off by causing the more talented (and presumably better off) to work harder: a rising tide raises all boats, so to speak. If it is the case, however, that the best off will only work harder if they them- selves will benefit, at a minimum it would seem that we are rewarding people’s selfishness; second, it would be a very poor argument indeed to allow the rich to argue for greater wealth based on their own greed.
The Rawlsian formulation loses sight of the fact that individuals exist not only within a polity, but within a community as well: to encourage selfishness is to allow an anti-egalitarian ethos to flourish. It would allow the rich to hold the poor hostage by refusing to work harder if they did not see sufficient benefit in it. It would only make sense to adopt this condition if we separate the state from the population, and we call justice what the state does, regardless the actions of the population.Rawls misapplies the difference principle when he restricts its application to the design of the basic structure A more thoroughgoing egalitarian would hold that it should also apply directly to the actions of individuals and inform the ethos of a just society. Distributive justice, Cohen insists, requires equality, but the difference principle sacrifices equality in the name of Pareto gains. The difference principle is thus not a fundamental principle of justice, but a compromise between justice and other values.
Fundamentalism, at least in its U.S/Australian Christian form is related to the outdated values and repressive code of small-town Australia; it has an inclination toward the lowbrow and the vulgar; is s marked by authoritarianism; is characterized by a lack of historical consciousness and the inability to engage in critical thinking; is identified by literalism, primitivism, legalism, and tribalism; and is linked to reactionary populism and the "paranoid style."
Is this a liberal stereotype of fundamentalism as a "cultural system"? One plausible argument is that religious fundamentalism can be seen as a counter-movement, or backlash, to the onwards march of secularisation, a process which ultimately leads to the political and public marginalisation of religion in liberal democratic societies. Karen Armstrong writes in the Harvard International Review:
Religious fundamentalism represents a widespread rebellion against the hegemony of secularist modernity. Wherever a modern, Western-style society has been established, a religious counterculture has developed alongside it in conscious rebellion. Despite the arguments of politicians and intellectuals, people all over the world have demonstrated that they want to see more religion in public life. The various fundamentalist ideologies show a worrying disenchantment with modernity and globalization. Indeed, every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation. All are convinced that the modern, liberal, secular establishment wants to wipe out religion. Each fundamentalist group has sprung up independently; each even differs significantly from other fundamentalists within their own faith tradition. But at the root of all these movements is the same visceral dread that is rapidly being transformed in some quarters into ungovernable rage. This should not surprise us; culture is always contested, and the proud secularism of Western modernity was almost bound to inspire a strong religious reaction.
Opponents of the secularisation thesis argue that the current era is characterised, not by the decline of religion, but by the widespread resurgence of religious ideas and social movements, which is one of the most unexpected events at the end of the twentieth century. The social upheaval and economic dislocation associated with modernisation leads to both secularisation and a renewal of traditional religions as a response to a general ‘atmosphere of crisis’.
Religious fundamentalism is nearly always premised on a rejection of the values associated with liberal democracy. Christian fundamentalism appears to be an anti-modernist backlash against science, industrialization, and liberal Western values: religious fundamentalists, feeling their way of life under threat, aim to reform society in accordance with religious tenets. The fundamentalists’ fear is that modern society wants to purge itself of religion. The terror and alienation of fundamentalist Protestantism is shown in its apocalyptic vision, which sees the world as so wicked and perverted that God has to smash it in a final, fearful cataclysm.
Christians are ‘fundamentalist’ in the sense of wishing to get back to the fundamentals of the faith as they see them. The ‘born again’ worldview is embedded in certain dogmatic fundamentals of Christianity, with emphasis placed on the authority of the Bible in all matters of faith and practice; on personal conversion as a distinct experience of faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour (being ‘born again’ in the sense of having received a new spiritual life); and, evangelically, in helping others have a similar conversion experience.
The features of the Christian fundamentalist movement in Australia are:
(1) a desire to return to the fundamentals of a religious tradition and strip away unnecessary accretions
(2) an aggressive rejection of western secular modernity;
(3) an oppositional minority group-identity maintained in an exclusivist and militant manner;
(4) attempts to reclaim the public sphere as a space of religious and moral purity;
(5) a patriarchial and hierarchical ordering of relations between the sexes’.
Karen Armstrong says that fundamentalism becomes more extreme when attacked because the assault convinces fundamentalists that the establishment really does want to eliminate them. She says that:
fundamentalism is inextricably tied to the modern world, and, rather than being merely a temporary aberration, it is here to stay. Fundamentalist movements may hearken back to a Golden Age, but they are essentially modern and could have taken root in no time other than the present. Christian fundamentalists may claim to be reading the Bible in a traditional way, but their literalist approach is essentially the product of the scientific age. In the premodern world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all relished highly allegorical readings of Scripture, which, as the Word of God, was infinite and capable of multiple interpretations. Until the invention of printing made it possible for every Christian to have his or her own Bible and until universal literacy made it possible for them to read it, nobody could subject the Bible to the close and detailed reading employed by fundamentalists today.
Michael Christie at Eurhythmania makes an import distinction between neo-liberalism as ideology and governmentality in his Governing the biosphere post. He says that despite claims that the Global financial crisis is the death knell of Neoliberalism, as a set of practices and techniques that are combined with forms of reasoning and goals, Neoliberalism continues as the dominant governmentality, if not as the dominant ideology.
Then he adds:
The distinction I am making here between ideology and governmentality is essentially a Foucauldian one, and it seeks to cut through the seeming paradox of an essay in which Rudd professes his social democratic beliefs, offering a critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, while his government continues to practice key Neoliberal techniques of governing our conduct, such as an unemployment services sector where the unemployed person is subject to a barrage of self-monitoring and self-governing actions designed to empower and enable them to make choices through which a more flexible and entrepreneurial self is formed. I’m not arguing that the regime of deregulation, privatization, financialization and so on is not Neoliberal. Rather, I’m seeking to make what I think is an important distinction between the social democratic or even Marxist critiques of Neoliberalism—whose essential argument is that the state has abandoned its protection of the citizenry while the capitalist market has been given free reign—and the Foucauldian critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, which seeks to understand it as the governmentalisation of the state rather than its shrinking and disappearance. It is not so much that under Neoliberalism the market is what governs us as the social state has vacated the field, it is that in many of the significant spheres of life we are conceived of as human capital, and thereby we are conducted to be entrepreneurs of ourselves: to risk manage our lives, make investments with our time, to manage a portfolio of interests and activities, to seek to appreciate our assets.