To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when he has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient an active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all it is passive as far as the growth and liberation of one’s own person are concerned….The situation of mankind is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues - least of all demagogues who are attracted to destruction - or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality humans are endowed with - the love of life.
Erich Fromm (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, page 438
Today, at around lunchtime, the Cleaner Energy Future bills passed the Senate.
This is a very notable step for Australia, and although the policy is in many ways imperfect, something to be wholeheartedly welcomed.
It’s also a very significant political win for both Julia Gillard and the Labor Party and for The Greens, whose insistence that carbon needed to be priced this term was at the core of their negotiations with the ALP over support for the minor government.
In thinking about the meaning of this event, it’s worth separating out process, policy and politics. Of course, that’s a somewhat artificial separation, and the failure to address all three in a deft fashion has been probably the most important reason why the road to a carbon price has been such a rocky one.
It’s fashionable to dismiss the import of the committee process which led to the framing of the bill. But I’d like to suggest that an inclusive process, which sought to maximise the support for legislation from as many possible parties in the Parliament, forms a good model.
While releasing the parameters for the legislation prior to articulating its exact shape may have been unwise politically (at least in the short term), there is no doubt that it did lead to a more deliberative policy process. In particular, campaigning and communications efforts by non-parliamentary actors may prove helpful in broadening the package’s popular support, and the level of energy and policy activism around the issue must be welcome.
At a policy level, obviously it’s an imperfect compromise. But establishing the principle in legislation is a necessary step towards refining the model over time (remembering that the effects of climate change, as well as international action to mitigate it are both complex and stochastic). The symbolism of action from a nation such as Australia will also change the international game, and that’s obviously something which may bear much fruit.
The probability is also high that this reform will endure.
Finally, on the politics: much ink has been spilled, and will no doubt continue to be, over the implications for partisan politics. We need to think less about this, and more about what the ‘debate’ says about the power of unreason in public life, and sheer self-interest on the part of powerful actors. But I derive considerable hope from the fact that it’s been shown that amidst an unprecedented volume of noise, big things can still be done, and from the fact that it’s more than possible that reality may now prevail over irrationalism.
Elsewhere: Ben Eltham at New Matilda, Andrew Bartlett at The Drum and Bernard Keane at Crikey.
Tonight I went to Paul Keating’s book tour at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
There’s a real sense, as I argued recently at The Drum, that we still live in the John Howard era. But only because the evil angels of this country are continually conjured up by the straighteners and the fixers, the apostles of narrowness, of Whiteness, of backyard boredom.
And they are real.
But, we also, paradoxically, still live in Paul Keating’s Australia.
Perhaps that’s particularly evident from where I write; from a place adjacent to and over-written by the Brisbane River, a Powerhouse that when I was young, was a ruin, but now is a public space that breathes the air of creativity, of culture, of openness, of everyday democracy, that we ought all to want to see more of. It’s transcended arguments about “elites” to become a place where anyone, most anyone, can find something to stir the soul, to sit and watch the river circle back on itself, and to relax, and feel comfortable.
A post-industrial space, too, and there’s something significant in that.
Keating gestured, not just, I think, because he was in Brisbane, to the memory and legacy of ‘Red’ Ted Theodore. A visionary, Keating said, an expander. And Theodore lived not five minutes away from the Powerhouse on the bend of the river at New Farm. On Lower Bowen Terrace, and you don’t need to read his biographers to summon up, or conjure his ghost. You can read all about it (and Theodore, among other things, was a man of the mass media, the founder of The Women’s Weekly) in Vance Palmer’s wonderful Golconda Trilogy.
Rest from your labours, smoke your pipe, play with your daughter, make art on the expansive terrace of a Queenslander.
Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep. The right to live like that, to live time easily like that, was a result of struggle. The struggle of the workers, of the labour movement, of the Labor Party, of the toilers, and of the feminists who were so prominent in Brisbane’s early radical history.
The better angels of our nature, as a country, and of this place, this country, in particular, sang to us tonight.
There is no reason not to have hope, and to be filled with that hope, about the sort of country this land can be, a country that does justice to its Indigenous inhabitants, whose presence is so pervasive, a country that conjures creativity. That’s a certain vision, and it’s one for which people have fought, and the legacy of those battles is never so present as in the minds of Brisbanites who struggled against the dead cold hand of Joh Bjelke-Petersen to create - something just like this, a warm and pleasant November night where people of good will can gather together; unionists, artists, poets, people - gather together and listen to a vision. And take heed.
Because there were struggles in the 1970s, and 1980s too.
Let them not be forgotten.
NB: I’ll have more to say about what Paul Keating said tonight; but I think I want to speak to what the truth of the cultural moment, which was not possible outside a certain vision of the state as transformational, meant to me on this night.
Julian Assange, a little late to the party, penned an op/ed for Fairfax last week defending Andrew Bolt’s ‘right to free speech’.
It’s an odd piece of writing.
Assange asserts, all John Stuart Mill-like, that:
The best policy decisions result from robust and uninhibited debate.
Oh, really? It’s intriguing that Assange does not see fit to provide any concrete examples of parliamentary wisdom emerging through robust challenges to majoritarian opinion. If this sort of nineteenth century bourgeois liberalism is his credo, it’s signally interesting that, after defending parliamentary privilege (and wishing that totally privileged speech be extended to the rest of us), the sole actually existing Parliamentarian he names, unfavourably, is Barnaby Joyce.
He elaborates:
Democracy depends on the free flow of information and ideas. Opinions must be shared in ”a free and open encounter” because it is the competition between ideas that produces the truth. As Fredrick Siebert explained: ”The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other.”
He goes on to conclude:
Free speech must protect all speech, however offensive. Debates that offend the ”ordinary” or ”typical” Australian are precisely the debates we need. It is precisely when the majority shares a view that it needs to be challenged, because if it is wrong, then we are all imperiled.
But there’s been an elision here. Referring to the judgement in Eatock v. Bolt, Assange distorts the test of offensive and hateful speech Justice Mordecai Bromberg applied to Bolt’s columns. As I’ve previously pointed out, excerpting Bromberg J’s judgement, the judge considered the material effect on the self-identification, social inclusion, confidence and rights of Indigenous Australians likely to be harmed by Bolt’s discourse on “light-skinned Aborigines”.
It’s actually Andrew Bolt who wants to enforce a certain representation of the “ordinary” or “typical” Australian - one which is normatively White, unmarked by racial difference and concealing that racial difference in the name of “unity”.
In a very neat critique of Assange’s piece, Andrew Elder points out:
The idea that Aborigines are an inferior people, unfit for or incapable of participating fully in Australian society, puts the lie to Siebert’s wish. This is one of the most prevalent ideas in Australia. It is also false and unsound. No amount of patient engagement and disproving, nor frequent and exuberant demonstration of excellence by Aborigines, can eradicate this lantana-like idea.
Exactly.
What Assange is really defending is privilege, and not just parliamentary privilege. He’s defending the right of Andrew Bolt to disseminate a wish that Indigenous people disappear. This may or may not be the view of the “typical” or “ordinary” Australian (and I hope it is not), but it’s a majoritarian view in that it typifies, it is the ordinary form of how racial privilege and Indigenous dispossession manifest themselves in Australian public culture. And in Australian public policy, where lamentable things like the ‘Intervention’ hardly emerged from an interchange of robust and truthful debate, but rather from a frame where Indigenous people are re-colonised again and again, and dispossessed of their right to speak unless they echo the views of the “typical” or “ordinary Australian”.
All of Elder’s post rewards reading. It’s an acute and devastating critique of Julian Assange’s sloppy reasoning, and of the falsehood thatEatock v. Bolt was ever about ‘free speech’.
If Frederick Siebert can express a “wish”, I’d like to make one too: that people who have found themselves caught up in a cult of political celebrity around Julian Assange reflect on his actual speech, and its positioning.
In parsing an excerpt from Julian Assange’s memoir, Anna North at Jezebel reflects on Assange’s self-justification over the allegations made against him in Sweden. The crux of the matter is quickly reached:
Assange implies that his only crime was a failure to understand women’s complicated feelings. He was deluged with offers of sex yet confused by women’s expectations for a relationship - any man, since they’re all autistic, would make the same mistake.
North concludes:
…we know what he thinks happened emotionally: chicks got weird on him. And his assertion that he and all other men are simply incapable of understanding feelings neatly absolves him of any responsibility for this. Assange’s memoir doesn’t shed any light on the actual allegations made against him by A. and W. What it does do is further popularize the idea that women cry rape when their strange, unpredictable little hearts get broken. In so doing, it does everyone a great disservice.
Precisely.
Think back to the febrile defences of Assange when he was first confronted by these allegations. We were told that it was some weird Swedish thing, crazy feminist law which would never be countenanced in a “typical” and “ordinary” country like Australia. The “typical” and “ordinary” Australian rushed to absolve Assange of any responsibility to answer the allegations - it was all a CIA conspiracy, after all.
At the same time, with disturbing celerity, names were thrown around, all manner of accusations laid at the feet of or implied about the women who dared to speak back to Julian.
Julian Assange claims to be an apostle of free speech. But his speech acts, the discourse of the “normal” or “typical” or even the “offended”, are blind to the voice of the atypical - and in his world, that’s women. And Indigenous people. Famed for speaking truth to power, he actually speaks power rather than truth. It is, it would seem, his privilege.
And just like Andrew Bolt, his speech carries, even as he shuts his ears. It’s everywhere, precisely because it’s “normal” or “typical”.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the traps about Adam Bandt’s statement yesterday about what the government should have done, or left undone, with regard to the Qantas dispute. Some of Bandt’s post seems to echo criticism from journalists and the opposition of the Gillard government’s role, for instance by saying: … And it should have entered the negotiating fray itself, helping bang heads together. Leaving that aside, though I think there is an element of piling on Julia Gillard at work, Bandt makes a number of claims, one based on a factual error, and the other encompassing a confusing elision between claiming the “government shouldn’t be taking sides” (which the government itself has claimed not to be) and an apparent belief that a suspension of the bargaining period, as opposed to a termination, would somehow have resulted automatically in industrial victory for the unions. Or perhaps Bandt is making or implying an argument that it’s undesirable, generally, for ‘third parties’ to intervene in industrial disputes. Let’s get a number of facts on the table, first: (a) The government, represented at FWA on behalf of the Minister, Chris Evans, argued either for a termination of the bargaining period, or for a 90 day suspension. That’s clear from a reading of the decision by Guidice J, Watson SDP and Roe C, right at the outset. The government was actually being consistent with the thrust of its own Act, that such matters ought to be subject to judicial determination, and, like the other parties involved, was following normal industrial practice by envisaging a range of outcomes which the tribunal might give effect to. It’s important to recognise this, and as far as I can see, it’s been completely overlooked, because it is highly pertinent to the Tony Abbott line that the Minister should have used the powers available to him under section 431 of the Fair Work Act. (b) Bandt says: Ever since John Howard’s WorkChoices, the spirit of which still lives in the current legislation, many unions have sought to bargain for an outcome and avoid arbitration. Why? Because the outcomes you’re likely to get in an arbitration are widely thought to be less than what you might get in bargaining. Especially over matters that impinge on managerial prerogative. Like job security clauses, a key claim of the unions in the Qantas dispute, because they are concerned about ‘offshoring’ and contracting out of their work. Partly, this is wrong, and partly, again, it’s confused. FWA gives greater scope for arbitration than WorkChoices in the case of low paid workers, in particular, and where both parties consent to conciliation and arbitration. It’s true that the provisions regarding the availability of arbitration to settle disputes are not substantially changed from WorkChoices (with a very important exception, which I’ll come to). But this gives the lie to his logic. How could unions have been seeking to avoid arbitration, when arbitration has not been a legal option except in exceptional circumstances such as would trigger the termination of a bargaining period? It doesn’t make any sense, and in fact, the whole thrust of the reforms since, arguably Paul Keating’s Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993, and certainly since the Peter Reith/Cheryl Kernot Workplace Relations Act 1996, has been to de-emphasise and radically restrict arbitration. Certainly, from WorkChoices onwards, the choice has simply not been there for unions. So it’s hard to know what he’s saying here. That’s why various analysts of Australian industrial relations have characterised the system we had as ‘voluntary collective bargaining’. One of the most important changes ushered in by the Fair Work Act was to remove the right of management to refuse to negotiate with unions. So we have probably returned, not to a regime which offers a choice between conciliation and arbitration and bargaining, but to one of compulsory collective bargaining. The enhanced provisions for union recognition, and for good faith bargaining, are precisely what business has been screaming about. So I think Bandt’s claim that “the spirit of [WorkChoices] still lives in the current legislation” needs heavy qualification. Under WorkChoices, the most likely outcome would have been freer rein for Qantas to pursue a naked strategy of de-unionisation. Peter Reith’s very vocal calls for ‘free collective bargaining’ are exposed for what they are by his references to Margaret Thatcher in the same breath. What I suspect Bandt actually has in mind, and this is taking us closer to the crux of the matter, is the degree to which unions in strong bargaining positions have been able to influence (but not determine) managerial strategy through “job security clauses” and restrictions on contract labour, or agreements that contractors be paid the same as employees. Typically such agreements have been reached in labour intensive industries where time constraints (and penalties for non-completion) are a factor, and where competition is minimal. Construction is the obvious one, and mining is another. But I’m unclear as to why Bandt thinks, or could be read as thinking, that issues regarding job security may go more in Qantas’ favour under arbitration. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t fall within the scope or ambit of the dispute, because they are “employment matters” (and Australian industrial jurisprudence has always sought to wall off management prerogative). Certainly the Act envisages the distribution of labour between full time and other employees and the role of contractors as matters that can be subjects for an enterprise agreement. Another very significant change between WorkChoices and the FWA was the removal of the severe restrictions of matters on which parties could bargain. Given that there are few disputes in recent times which have reached the point of arbitration, I can’t see any reason on the face of it why there would be an assumption that job security clauses would not be matters on which FWA would make a determination. It may be that he is thinking of the very strong line in the sand business is drawing in resisting these clauses, which is, again, one of the key planks of the anti-FWA campaign. The assumption by some, such as Dr_Tad, who have seized on Bandt’s rather confused remarks (and he does a nice line in trying to be happy and shiny and appealing to everyone - “reach a negotiated outcome by supporting the whole of the airline, management and employees, with an eye to the country’s long-term interests”) that a suspension of the bargaining period would somehow lead to a victory for the unions seems to me to be highly questionable. Syndicalist sentiment aside, sometimes, sadly, the workers united are defeated. It’s not clear to me that the interests of pilots, baggage handlers and engineers are identical, nor that they would not become separable during a 90 day bargaining period (and let’s not forget, 42 days are potentially available under the FWA decision). But, more broadly, I’m unable to see: (a) that the industrial muscle exists to produce an outcome favourable to workers’ desire to restrict the company in its pursuit of its strategy of offshoring, cost-shifting and outsourcing; (b) how, in the absence of arbitration, Alan Joyce would be shifted from his stated intention to again lockout the workers. All he would have to do is endure negotiations for 90 days before the bargaining period recommenced, and there’s no legal lever to exert pressure on Qantas to negotiate on job security, which it’s made clear it does not want to do. With arbitration, there is. Or, at least, there potentially is. It needs to be remembered, and FWA took note of this, that Qantas could also, and probably would, lockout its workforce again on the resumption of a bargaining period. I doubt there’s much, if any willingness, on Qantas’ side to reach agreement on job security issues, which are what remain in the air, not pay. In short, I don’t think Bandt has much warrant for saying this: As it is, a Labor government has tipped its hand and sided with Qantas. Whatever Fair Work Australia decides, Qantas now knows the government will help it get to arbitration. However, he is right about one thing. In a statement today, he writes: “Now that the government has done what Qantas wanted and removed the workers’ capacity to protect Australian jobs, the government has a responsibility to outline how it will prevent Qantas from off-shoring its workforce.” The first bit is wrong, for the reasons outlined above. The second is right, because it’s only through political rather than industrial action that a serious challenge can be posed to Qantas’ aim of effectively closing down its international operation in favour of joint ventures and subsidiaries which would offshore jobs and radically drive down labour costs. “Job security clauses” would be a useful restraint on this form of aggressive management strategy, but the Australian industrial relations regime simply doesn’t empower workers to determine or even co-determine management strategy. Nor are the industrial interests of the various workers and unions identical with a political strategy to maintain airlines as providers of an essential public good (which is why, of course, Qantas should never have been sold in the first place). The specious rhetoric of Qantas management about competition and cost needs exposing for what it is (and one benefit, incidentally of arbitration is that it would allow the claims by unions that it has been cost-shifting to make its international operations appear unviable to be tested). Similarly, we need a debate on whether or not we, like other countries, need to get back into the realm of owning airlines, precisely so that management thuggery can be curtailed and so that public goods can be provided publicly (and no one disputes the financial viability of Qantas’ competitors which are government owned). In other words, we need to resist the logic of the market and contain and constrain it through politics. We need to start reviving the idea central to the social democratic project of de-commodification, of progressively challenging and removing the inexorable logic of the market through collective action, including through action which seeks to utilise and reshape the institutions of the state. That option exists, and it exists precisely because public suspicion of corporate behaviour and the excess involved in capitalism is fast reviving. It may well be that these hopes are incapable of fulfilment by the Australian political class. But it’s a disappointment that The Greens, in the persona of Adam Bandt, are chasing a rabbit down a bolthole by trying to score political points against the Labor government. Much more worthy of highlighting would be the mechanisms I mentioned in my post on Saturday which Bob Brown himself has sponsored, through amendments to the Qantas Act, which might usefully and fruitfully challenge corporate power. By contrast, the argument that the bargaining period should be continued (and the Dr_Tad corollary that this would necessarily lead to victory for the unions) seems to me not making the perfect the enemy of the good, but the unachievable the enemy of the ambivalent. That ambivalence is best ended by continued political action around the central issues at stake here: the need to rein in and constrain aggressive market capitalism in the interests of workers and the public good.
The actions of Qantas in locking out its workforce yesterday, led by CEO Alan Joyce who on Friday received a 71% increase in his remuneration, have huge potential to backfire.
Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy:
Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant reasoning of a terrorist.
If the result of his massive disruption of the Australian transport system is the further shredding of the Qantas brand, which began under Geoff Dixon and which has accelerated rapidly under his Irish successor, and leads to further service cuts as Australians turns their back on the airline, that’s fine.
It will merely expedite his plans to offshore-by-stealth Qantas, wrecking the Australian-based operation while he sets about establishing lower-cost, more competitive foreign-based services.
To this end, a furious reaction against the airline for its act of malice toward Australian travellers is a price well worth paying; indeed, it may be part of the longer-term plan.
Joyce’s actions and motivations are almost a parody of the globalising logic that profits are all, workers, customers and any notion of public service or good nothing. And it’s in that quality of excess, in the gamble for high stakes, that his house of cards has the real potential to come tumbling down.
It shouldn’t escape notice that the Chair of the Qantas Board, Leigh Clifford, hails from Rio Tinto, a company long known for its overt deunionisation strategy. There is undoubtedly an element of union busting in all this, as well as a broader push from the more militant elements of the Australia corpocracy to smash the Fair Work Act. Peter Reith’s high profile interventions have to be seen in this context.
Hence, Qantas’ other play here, through keeping its cards close to its chest and failing to inform the government of the planned lockout (let alone passengers), was to force the government to bring the dispute before Fair Work Australia. Hence, too, Anthony Albanese’ fury.
But, as Bernard Keane also observes, there is real opportunity for the government.
There is no doubt that Qantas’ public relations offensive has failed. Essential Research found last week that 43% of respondents supported renationalisation of the airline, a large number blamed Qantas management rather than workers, and very large majorities opposed offshoring and thought Joyce’s remuneration too high.
The polling is not unambiguous, but there’s a plethora of pointers to how Joyce’s sneak attack has resonated, from a Facebook protest page which garnered almost 4000 likes in less than 24 hours, to the reaction on Twitter. The timing, coming on top of his huge pay rise on Friday, and the massive disruption and frustration caused to passengers on a Saturday afternoon, is so stupid as to beggar belief.
Joyce has exemplified the mindset of the 1% at a time when the Occupy X movement has successfully put systemic critique back on the agenda.
So, how does all this have the potential to backfire on Joyce?
First, it’s being discussed by many as the most spectacular example of management aggression since Patrick’s locked out its workers on the docks in 1998. Unlike the waterfront dispute, the impact on the public is much more palpable and much more direct.
Secondly, as Ben Schneiders correctly observes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, there is the potential for Fair Work Australia to arbitrate the dispute, a power now rarely used, and only available to the tribunal in the case of significant disruption to the national economy. The Minister, Chris Evans, could also make orders to both sides to cease industrial action, though that would be a last resort. The Fair Work Act emphasises bargaining in good faith, and it may well be that the tribunal will find that Qantas has not been. Then, there are legal questions over whether extending the lockout to employees who were not engaging in industrial action, and standing down others, is lawful.
Given that Qantas is seeking to put FWA on trial, and that the legislation is so closely identified with Julia Gillard, the arguments put by the Commonwealth will repay close watching. It would also be surprising if there were not pressure to tighten the provisions whereby management (unlike unions) does not have to give genuine notice of its intent to pursue industrial action. Qantas’ actions in grounding its fleet immediately, and alleging that the lockout would not begin on Monday, are specious in the extreme.
It’s crucial to remember that Joyce, far from pulling his fleet from the sky as a “response to union action”, has himself, according to the legal definition, taken industrial action.
More broadly, as Schneiders comments, there may be momentum for a broader use of the arbitration power, to protect the public interest.
Thirdly, Qantas faces some pointed questioning over its obligations under the Qantas Act which enabled privatisation. There are specific provisions, reflected in the airline’s own constitution, which require it to maintain its operations in Australia, and restrict it from flying internationally under another name. The unions have corresponded with Qantas about this, and the management line has been that subsidiaries are not bound. But Senate hearings have been examining legislation introduced by Nick Xenophon and Greens Leader Bob Brown which would close off this option. If such amendments were to be supported by the government, we would be in a very interesting place indeed.
And finally, as Bernard Keane writes:
Voters, it seems, just want their old Qantas back. In the view of Joyce and the Qantas board, they can’t get it back in the airline’s current form, not given continuing strong competition from government-subsidised foreign airlines and the high dollar. The only way to get the old Qantas back may indeed be to nationalise it and subsidise it, or to return to the days when competition from foreign airlines was even more tightly restricted than it is now.
And no one in federal politics is pushing those options. Well, not yet.
In a climate when the recklessness and contempt of corporate power reveals its naked face, the government would have little to lose, and much to gain, from reining it in. We shall see.
Alan Joyce is being crazy brave. So, too, should Julia Gillard be.
Update: Laura Tingle.
In my piece for The Drum the other day on how there is a sense in which we are still living in the Howard Era, I made this comment about Tony Abbott:
Tony Abbott promises a Howard restoration, flanked by spectral shadows – Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews and Philip Ruddock.
Abbott’s program, as has been repeatedly noted over the last little while, seems to consist solely of a desire to have as many elections as it takes to undo everything the ALP in office has done since 2007. It’s as if he wants to stand at the window of the Lodge with bell, book and candle and exorcise the spectre of Howard’s defeat, and damn the historical memory of Labor’s ascension.
Tony Abbott’s project is in fact oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present.
It’s in this sense that his dream is impossible, and that may well be his downfall.
It’s out of kilter with reality in more than one way. I alluded to the first in my piece, noting that the Abbott/Howard dream of compulsory Anglo suburban patriarchalism no longer reflects anything but a vanished and defensive norm, though it’s a norm which retains power to manifest itself in a retrogressive racial and social protectionism. The other sense in which Abbott’s project is incapable of realisation is in his failure to understand that it will prove impossible to turn back the clock. The Repealathon will never take place.
I also said this, in comments on the LP discussion of my Drum article:
Governments have to govern for minorities as well as majorities, which is something Tony Abbott does not understand. The notion that everyone will jump for joy, or simply acquiesce, if he tries to undo everything done by the current Labor government is an absurdity, and one which will be his undoing, if indeed he ever becomes PM.
It’s been customary to gesture to Kim Beazley’s futile promise of the repeal of the GST in 2001 in discussion of Abbott’s Repealism. But the more relevant analogy is with John Howard’s learning to live with Medicare, and indeed much of the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments. Despite the fact that, in many instances, he undid much of it by stealth, he was intelligent and perceptive enough as a politician to realise that settled policy needed not to be overtly disturbed.
There is, of course, the fact that Medicare was extremely popular, while the carbon price is not. The NBN is, and the pokies pre-commitment pledge is probably a matter of indifference to most voters. It’s here, of course, that the hope of its architects that it will be seen in perspective after its introduction is salient. But, over and above that, the belief on which Tony Abbott is acting, that opposition is deep as well as broad, is a misprision. Ravings about ‘tyranny’, megaphoned through the media, are not identical with the views of most voters.
The Coalition would do well to reflect, here, on Tony Abbott’s own profoundly mediocre polling.
Finally, there are the many absurdities and inconsistencies in the ‘blood pledge’, ranging from the ludicrous nature of ‘savings’ which would be necessary in budgetary terms to the dangers of trying to govern from opposition (which is the actual effect of Abbott’s warnings to business), among others that can be cited. An Abbott government with no other program than reaction, and a petulant demand for an early double dissolution, is and will be deeply unappealing. Nor is it at all unlikely that Coalitionistas enamoured of a return to the ministerial benches would be prepared to chance throwing such comfortable accommodations away in pursuit of the ‘blood pledge’.
In truth, though, the media cycle, here spiralling into the future and making the topic of the present something that may never occur, may have done Tony Abbott no favours. And the likelihood is not at all insignificant that all this frenzied and febrile discussion may prove to have been moot, as a Labor leadership change would fundamentally alter all political calculations.
Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.
I have a piece published at The Drum today which suggests that we, in many respects, appear still to be living in Howardia.
After the Occupy Melbourne event was forcibly (and it appears, disproportionately violently) cleared by the Victorian Police at the instance of Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle, Dr_Tad has been reflecting at Left Flank on some of the criticism of the actions in Australia by “ostensibly progressive bloggers”. He focuses in particular on Grog’s Gamut and Possum Commitatus.
As Kim observed in her previous post on the Occupy X movement, much of the critique is predictable and unsophisticated.
That seems to be the case in respect of this “ostensibly progressive” critique too. It’s a wonkish critique, and rests on two foundations: first, the comparison of American and Australian economic and social statistics (forgetting that the Occupy X movement has also taken flight in the UK, and is in many ways paralleled by social uprisings in countries such as Spain and Greece). Secondly, there’s the perennial ‘what do these people want?’ cry. Protests, it would seem, ought to be focused on a particular issue and a ‘demand’ translatable into policy terms, rather than take the form of a social movement.
As Dr_Tad indicates, the US comparison is neither here nor there in many ways, and in any case the sunny side up stats disguise alarming levels of comparative inequality. (Ask not what the unemployment rate is, but how the unemployed subsist, and how low the wages and high the living costs of many of the employed are.)
In many many ways, the thrust of this argument is a Labor Right one, one particular to the Canberra political class, which also blinds itself to the economic causes of much of the right wing unrest.
What the movement actually goes to is the sense of elite domination of politics and life. Here, Dr_Tad astutely cites a number of essentially liberal observers:
US foreign policy realist Stephen Walt, hardly a fringe radical, describes well the factors that have led to the rapid spread of occupations despite the differing conditions in various countries. He lists: (1) Economic globalisation causing growing inequality between and within countries, (2) new technologies allowing much more rapid spread of information, and (3) the “incompetence and/or corruption of governing elites … and the tendency of governments to do too much to protect wealthy and powerful interests and not enough to help ordinary people”. Paraphrasing a colleague, he adds that, “the present combination of economic inequality and political gridlock is fatal to the proper functioning of democratic orders”.
He goes on to quote Nouriel Roubini:
Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.
The model of organisation and dialogue involved in these actions, about which Greg Jericho is so flippant and dismissive, is in fact a necessary form of social ordering, democratic in and of itself, in that it does not presume to stipulate a form of social ordering dignified or given by the state or ought not so to presume. How the 99% seeks to counter the rule of the 1% is an open question, and ought to remain so.
The question remains, though, why Occupy Australia can be dismissed in such a fashion. (It’s related to an analogous question about the level of intensity - I don’t say size - of the movement in Australia compared to those in the US and the UK and elsewhere, which Jericho and Possum gesture to, but misframe.)
As well as being a wonkish Labor right argument, the Jericho/Possum critique resembles Leibniz’ argument in form. Yes, there are social evils. But such evils are amenable to limited redress. But there must always be inequality because in some way it is functional to the greater good. So, in effect, we live in the best of all possible worlds, and a wonkish tweak here or there might sometimes be necessary to ensure social mobility, but we have no ground for critiquing the underlying structure which produces and reproduces that inequality. (Or rather, it is something to which the observer must blind herself).
This is the essence of what I have called Gillardism as the philosophy of the Labor party. That phenomenon, the reduction of the political philosophy of the labour movement to a kind of ameliorative social liberalism (which is not so liberal when it comes to those who must suffer social inclusion by diktat - Indigenous people, poor people in Western Sydney subjected to ‘income management) in itself would repay much more thought. What has gone wrong with the Labor Party has a lot more to do with this than Julia Gillard’s personal style or whatever.
The question for me, then, is why the Jericho/Possum Labor Leibnizism resonates. And there is no doubt that it does. Why is Australia a “bubble”, seemingly insulated from the winds of change blowing throughout the world? I hesitate to do more than sketch an answer. But it’s a question that must be posed.
I think, in teasing this out, we need to consider:
(a) the specificity of Australia as a social formation, one which in many, many ways, as has been argued, represents the export of particular class fractions on 19th century Europe, making it very distinct from its antecedents and “always already modern”, remembering that class struggles in Europe had a history and a social trajectory going back many centuries;
(b) the particular social utopian imaginary of Australia as a settler society constituted by dispossession;
(c) the very incomplete and fragmented nature of political and social globalisation.
I think those three things go a long way to accounting for the fact that the waves of change and upheaval, which are very significant indeed, wash over these shores only as ripples on the beach.
In the trajectory of Australian social democracy (a concept that if mentioned in the ALP, before the early to mid 80s, would have met with derision - the right were “democratic socialists”) it’s the full stop of having given up any transformational ambition and conceded the field to (neo)liberalism that is significant.
I don’t think it’s just “Hawke & Keating” though. The real shift happened when the ACTU, (then) CPA, the intellectual reformist left and much of the SL gave up just at the point that Australia Reconstructed appeared on the scene. Even Kelty’s restructuring of unionism still had reference to the idea of the labour movement as such and as a transformational one.
But the point I am getting at is that we circle back around, culturally, to the idea that we are some sort of workers’ paradise in the South Pacific. Gillard’s social liberal rhetoric, and all the statistical mystification beloved of the sorts of people Dr_Tad takes aim at, exemplifies this. I wonder whether we are not also going back a century with the mad obsession with borders and contamination.
We are all Deakinite liberals or Sir Samuel Griffith paying a polite visit to Trades Hall now?
History doesn’t move in a straight line. It has backwaters and reverse currents, too. We’re stuck in one.
Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.
From Matt Condon’s Brisbane (2010:157-158)
Later, thinking about the arrival of Bowen… made me think of the governor up on the hill in the big house, and my grandmother in its shadow, in a wooden worker’s cottage held off the ground by stumps and joints salvaged from railway tracks. I thought of commandant and convict. Governor and subject. Parliamentarian and constituent. I thought of how, in this hilly city, the toffs always had the finest land on the ridges, and the workers sufficed with the gullies. The moneyed and powerful had views. The rest looked at each other in the hill folds. Even in Toowong Cemetery, the gentry have the high points, and the poor are interred in the gullies.
