John Quiggin

As I wrote before, my immediate (over-)reaction to George Megalogenis The Australian Moment, was driven by the ageist generational clichés that started on page 1, and reappeared periodically thereafter. But I promised to write something about the serious content of the book and here it is.

My one-line summary is that this is probably the best exposition of Australia’s political history, over the period of market liberal reform, and from the viewpoint of the reformers, that we have seen, or are likely to. In particular, it’s better than the main rival, Paul Kelly’s End of Certainty.
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Bob Brown has just announced his retirement from politics. It comes as a shock, but such announcements usually do. I can’t do justice to Bob’s thirty or more years of activism in a blog post, but there have been few people in political life who’ve achieved as much while not compromising their integrity to secure political support. The Green Party which Bob effectively founded and has largely embodied for many years, has made a big positive contribution to Australian political life

Given the rubbish in the comments threads recently, I’m going to be ruthless in moderating this one. There will be plenty of time for critical thoughts on Bob Brown’s political career and on the Green Party. If you can’t wait for a more appropriate occasion, take such comments to the sandpit. Anything in this post that crosses my subjective line will be deleted with prejudice.

My wife alerted me to this piece by Kristina Keneally at the Drum, and so I ran out a quick response.

Shorter JQ: Keneally is right that voter backlash against privatisation caused NSW and Queensland losses, wrong that the policy was sound and even wronger that Labor (at least in Qld) didn’t try hard enough to sell the idea.

The observation “Prediction is risky, especially about the future”, attributed to US baseball legend Yogi Berra, is true for more reasons than one. The obvious risk is that events may prove you wrong. But there’s a also the risk that your prediction may be misrepresented, a risk that’s particularly severe when you have enemies like the Murdoch Press. I courted this risk by being too cute with my prediction after the 2007 election, which began

The Liberal Party will never again win a federal election.

I followed up immediately with

This isn’t a prediction of unending Labor rule, rather an observation that the Liberal and National parties are in such dire straits that they can’t continue as they are. They haven’t got enough support, parliamentary representation or ideas for one party, let alone two.

The obvious option is a merger

but the damage was done.

The first sentence has been quoted by various rightwing bloggers, and most recently in the Daily Telegraph[1], as a suggestion that the conservatives would never get back in.

So, contrary to the claims of the Tele, the fact that the merged Liberal Nationals won in Queensland is a confirmation the prediction in the post. The post also predicted the defeat of the NSW Labor government in 2011, but I thought it unlikely, unless “things go badly wrong for Rudd or for one of the state governments” that the conservatives would win before then.

In fact, of course things have gone very badly for Rudd, and Labor has made catastrophic mistakes at every level. Nevertheless the prediction wasn’t far off the mark with Labor winning five state and territory elections and (by the narrowest of margins) one federal election, and losing two over the relevant period.

At the federal level, the idea of a merger seems to have died, though the current situation is absurd . The National Party leaders in both the House and Senate are members of the merged LNP in Queensland. Still, it seems likely that this misshapen coalition will win the next Federal election. If that happens, I will gracefully admit that my prediction was wrong. But until then, to use another US sporting catchphrase, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings”.

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So, I just went and voted (Green) in Indooropilly, a seat held by Labor until the last Parliament[1]. In the entire campaign, I’ve seen no sign of activity on the part of the Labor candidate (a commenter tells me he’s a law student). This continued at the polling booth, where there was no-one handing out Labor how-to-votes, the first time I’ve ever experienced this. I’ve heard from other sources that the party machine has been desperately trying, and failing, to round up volunteers.

This is a disaster worse in many ways than the wipe-outs of the 1970s when at least the party faithful were, well, faithful. The Bligh government’s sellout on asset sales wiped about 10 percent of its support overnight and, except in the immediate aftermath of the floods, that hasn’t changed.

And yet, the ALP is still in denial about the whole thing. Wayne Swan is expressing his hope that Andrew Fraser, the main driver of the asset sales can be saved. And Bligh’s defenders are pushing the line that electors are finally responding to their desire to punish the government for the sins of the Beattie era. The idea that you lose votes by doing something that’s directly opposed to your platform, that you’ve promised not to do, and that voters hate, seems not to compute

I said in my last post that I wasn’t looking forward to two terms of Newman. But unless Labor wakes up to itself, they could be out for a lot longer than that.

fn1. The Labor member, Ronan Lee, defected to the Greens before the 2009 election, which was won by the Liberals.

Barring a miracle, the Queensland Labor government will suffer a defeat tomorrow, comparable in its severity to the Joh-era election of the 1970s, when the caucus was reduced to the size of a cricket team. The great majority of Labor MPs are likely to lose their seats. While I regret the fact that matters have come to this, and like and respect quite a few of those MPs (including, for that matter, Anna Bligh[1]), I will be shedding no tears over this outcome.

Minor update I found a report listing Paul Hoolihan, Jo-Ann Millar, Amanda Johnstone Dean Wells and Lindy Nelson-Carr as members of caucus who opposed the sales. I have met and been impressed by the last two, and I’m sorry that most of this group seem likely to be swept away along with the rest.
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A couple of days after Labor united behind Julia Gillard, allowing her to implement her commitments, we get
this (somewhat belatedly denied) and
this.

Meanwhile, in Queensland, Labor is marching towards a defeat that has been inevitable ever since Bligh’s post-election announcement, in 2009, of a massive, and economically unjustified program, of asset sales. Despite the fact that most of them are going to lose their seats, and that the policies violates both election commitments and Labor policy, hardly a single member of the Labor Caucus has opposed this, or even dissented from the retribution dealt out to the ETU and others who did stand up.

In the wake of the Labor leadership ballot, I tried to think a bit about new directions for public policy in Australia. My conclusion, in short, is that there aren’t any. I’ve hammered the point that Gillard is a policy-free zone, and even her supporters haven’t pushed back on this. I have to concede though, that while Rudd’s challenge speech was impressive in many ways, he also failed to produce much in the way of new ideas.

The problem isn’t just one for social democrats and Labor supporters. Abbott is the worst kind of poll-driven populist, and Turnbull, the only person on the conservative side of politics who has anything resembling a clue has been permanently marginalized.

Finally, there’s the policy elite represented by the Fin, the Oz and the various establishment thinktanks and policy talkfests. After thirty years, they haven’t come up with anything better than the tired old 80s agenda of market-oriented reform, competition and productivity, encapsulated in Workchoices, rejected by the Australian public in 2007 and totally discredited by the GFC.

The Greens are the best shot, but under current conditions they can’t hope to do much better than their current role of supporting a minority government and/or holding the balance of power in the Senate. That gives them the chance to make a small number of non-negotiable deamnds (eg carbon price), and to exercise some influence. But in broader areas like economic policy, they remain marginal. Even though they have some good ideas, they aren’t treated as serious players in this field.

The best that can be said is that, as long as the terms of trade continue to boom, the cost of missed opportunities will not be all that great. Australia remains a lucky country, run by second-rate men (and now also women) who share its luck.

By contrast, US politics seems to be opening up to the ideas of the left, at the same time as the Repubs are spiralling off into the Delta Quadrant. All in all, a lot more color, interets and hope than the drab prospects before us.

A couple of points that have emerged in the debate over the Labor leadership need a response

First, there’s the claim that there are no policy differences between Rudd and Gillard. This is often presented as if the two had independently arrived at the same position. In fact, as the equation in the post title implies, it’s because Gillard is a policy-free zone. Her independent ventures into policy making amount to a disastrous set of pre-election moves on carbon policy (no tax promise, consultative assembly, cash for clunkers) and a series of failed attempts to resolve the asylum seeker problem. Now that the Rudd agenda has mostly been passed or abandoned, Gillard has no policies whatsoever, a point I made some time ago. Her abandonment of the Gonski report, which she used as an excuse for doing nothing when she was Education Minister, is typical.

Second, and with somewhat more justification, there’s the fact that Gillard has been successful in getting policy passed where Rudd failed. The unusual circumstance of a House of Reps minority has led most people to overstate the relative difficulty of Gillard’s task. She has needed the Greens and three of five independents, normally being Wilkie, Oakeshott and Windsor. Rudd needed the Greens, Xenophon and Fielding, which was obviously harder. It’s true that Rudd made the mistaken choice of freezing out the Greens and trying to negotiate with the Liberals, which made no sense given that the Greens were bound to hold the balance of power sooner or later. A more comparable test is that of asylum seekers, where Gillard has done no better than Rudd, arguably worse.

*This equation was allegedly written by a notable, but somewhat obscure economist with his own name in the place of Rudd, and that of a better-known researcher in the same filed in the place of Gillard

A showdown over the ALP leadership, and therefore the Prime Ministership, has been inevitable for some time, and Kevin Rudd has finally brought it on, resigning as Foreign Minister in the face of direct personal attacks from Simon Crean (himself, apparently, a covert contender for the top job) and others.

Readers won’t be surprised to learn that I support Rudd. I have two reasons for this.

First, whatever his problems with interpersonal relationships and administration, Rudd is a serious leader with ideas for Australia’s future. Gillard has shown herself to have no ideas worth the name. Her policy agenda has consisted, almost entirely, of implementing policies introduced by Rudd.

Second, Gillard has totally lost the trust of the Australian people and if she leads the government to the next election, there is no chance whatsoever of a Labor victory. The result will be the election of Tony Abbott, someone who matches Gillard in terms of a lack of any consistent principles or concrete achievements, but adds to it a reactionary ideology and determination to undo the policies brought forward by (Rudd) Labor. Labor’s only chance of retaining office is to go back to Rudd.

Anyway, feel free to have your say

I haven’t been paying much attention to the Oz since it went behind the paywall, but I happened to pick up a copy of today’s paper edition, and came across a fascinating piece by Christian Kerr (who, IIRC, used to write for Crikey as “Hillary Bray”). Trying to talk up public opposition to equal marriage as a reason for Labor hesitancy to push hard on the issue, he cites a survey showing that around 25 per cent of Australians agree with the proposition homosexuality is immoral. Conscious that 25 per cent is, well, a minority, he decides to look at individual electorates.

What’s really striking is Kerr’s discovery that ‘In 80 of the 150 federal electorates, an above-average number of people support the proposition’. I did some quick math of my own, and it turns out that 80 is almost exactly half of 150. So, next time you see a sample estimate that doesn’t suit your case, be sure to check subsamples. You, too, may find that half of them are above the average.

In a piece that pretty much writes off Julia Gillard as PM, Laurie Oakes reports

ALP polling has produced a finding that has startled those around the prime minister.

It shows that, while only 30 per cent of voters plan to vote for the Gillard Government, 38 per cent describe themselves as Labor people.

The conclusion drawn from this is that the Government has to be seen as ‘more Labor’. It has to show more concern about, and become more identified with, things that are regarded as `Labor issues

Wow, how could anyone have predicted that?

The date for the Queensland election is now set. Last year, when it was clear the Bligh and Fraser were going to push on to their end with their appalling plans for privatisation, I said that I planned to put Labor last, behind the LNP. Nothing much has changed with Labor, but the choice of Campbell Newman as the LNP leader has led me to revise my views. Newman was a terrible Lord Mayor of Brisbane, pushing through a bunch of uneconomic PPP projects like the Go-Between Bridge. He’s even more addicted to hard hats than Bligh (admittedly, he’s an engineer, so I would be happy for him to wear a hard hat if he had stuck to that line of work).

So, I’m going to take advantage of the marvellous institution of optional preferential voting. I’ll give the Greens my first preference, followed by any acceptable independent or minor party candidate. Labor and the LNP won’t get anything from me this time.

Looking at the latest TV news I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m sick of the confected outrage surrounding the Australia Day incident. On the other hand, if this is what it takes to make the Labor Party realise they have to go back to Kevin Rudd, and sooner rather than later, then I suppose I can live with it.

Gillard’s abandonment of pokies reform means, as far as I can see, that she has reached the end of the set of reforms she promised as the price of independent support after the 2010 election. Most of the agenda she inherited from Rudd has similarly been either implement, or put on the road to implementation, (typically in a watered-down form) or else abandoned. A visit to the ALP website seems to me to confirm this impression. There are plenty of glossy pictures, but the ideas seem mostly to be taken from Rudd, though drastically watered down in most cases, for example, “School Reform” in place of “Education Revolution”. The only thing that sounds more like Gillard than Rudd is “Trade Cadetships” which reads like a rebadging of Howard’s “New Apprenticeships”.

Can anyone point to any genuinely new initiatives taken by this government (that is, not forced on it, or inherited)? It would be nice to think that there is something more on offer than “Not Abbott”.

Update With brilliant timing, I wrote this post the day before Gillard announced that she was in fact breaking her promise, and would not bring the legislation to a vote. Presumably she had already signalled this to the media, which was why the accusations of a broken promise were being made, accurately if a little prematurely. Yet again, Gillard has lived down to my lowest expectations, while Abbott has (of course) been even worse End Update

Regular readers will know that I’m no fan of our current PM and a strong supporter of legislation to limit the damage caused by pokies and other forms of gambling that rely primarily on problem gamblers for their viability. And, having been overseas for much of last year, there may be some political nuances I’m missing.[1]

Still, I can’t see how Gillard can be accused of breaking a promise to Andrew Wilkie on pokies on the basis that she has failed to get the numbers for it. On that basis, for example, Rudd broke his promise on an ETS, not when he dropped the idea under pressure from Gillard and the NSW right, but when the Senate rejected the legislation. And every government in recent history has made election promises then had their proposals rejected in the Senate (the silly idea of a mandate, supposed to require the Senate to acquiesce in government legislation, never had any effect on this). Occasionally, such rejections lead to the PM being criticised for lacking negotiation skills. But I’ve never before seen such a case treated as a broken promise.

fn1. Most obviously, it might be that the government is secretly encouraging other independents to oppose the law. I haven’t seen any suggestion to this effect, but it’s about the only thing that would make sense of the “broken promise” claim.

John Howard’s endorsement of Ian Plimer’s children’s version of his absurd anti-science tract Heaven and Earth has at least one good feature. I can now cut the number of prominent Australian conservatives for whom I have any intellectual respect down from two to one. Howard’s acceptance of anti-science nonsense shows that, for all his ability as a politician, he is, in the end, just another tribalist incapable of thinking for himself[1].

Although not all the tribal leaders are old men, an old, high-status man like Howard is certainly emblematic of Australian delusionism . Like a lot of old, high status men, he stopped thinking decades ago, but is even more confident of being right now than when he had to confront his prejudices with reality from time time. Like other delusionists, Howard has no scientific training, shows no sign of understanding statistics and almost certainly hasn’t read any real scientific literature, but nonetheless believes he can rank clowns like Plimer and Monckton ahead of the real scientists.

The situation in the US is similar but even more grimly amusing, with the sole truthteller in the entire Republican party, Jon Huntsman, recently reduced to waffling (in both US and UK/Oz senses of this term) because he briefly looked like having a chance to be the next non-Romney. This tribal mindlessness is reflected in the inability of the Republican Party, at a time when they ought to be unbackable favorites in 2012, to come up with a candidate who can convince the basis s/he is one of them, but who doesn’t rapidly reveal themselves as a fool, a knave or both.

And, as evidence of the utter intellectual shamelessness of delusionism, you can’t beat the campaign against wind power, driven by the kinds of absurd claims of risk that would be mocked, mercilessly and deservedly, if they came from the mainstream environmental movement.

The global left is in pretty bad shape in lots of ways. Still, I would really hate to be a conservative right now.

fn1. I’m not saying that all Australian conservatives are mindless tribalists. There’s a large group, epitomized by Greg Hunt, who understand the issues quite well, but are too gutless to speak up. Then there is a group of postmodern conservatives of whom Andrew Bolt is probably the best example, who have passed the point where concepts of truth or falsehood have any meaning – truth is whatever suits the cause on any given day.

The desertion of Liberal (or LNP?) member Peter Slipper to take up the Speakership offers the Labor government a great opportunity, but also the temptation to mess things up disastrously. The opportunity is to see out a full Parliamentary term, long enough to put the carbon tax and MRRT in place in a way that the Opposition will either have to accept them, or announce a credible plan to replace them – something that is clearly beyond the capacity of its current leader.

The temptation is that the corrupt hacks who infest the ALP machine will use the extra vote to renege on the promise to Andrew Wilkie to tackle the scourge of poker machine gambling through precommitment. A large section of the ALP has been tied to the hotel and club industry since time immemorial and have obstructed any reform that would challenge the interests of this industry.

Even disregarding the issue of principle, it would be really stupid to break the deal with Wilkie. The government’s only chance is to survive past the point when the scare campaign about the carbon tax and MRRT will be shown up for what it is. If Wilkie abandons them and one ALP member has to leave Parliament for some reason, the government will fall. In that case, electoral support or opposition from the poker machine lobby will make no difference.

That’s the title of my piece on the passing of the carbon price/tax legislation, in Thursday’s Fin. It’s over the fold

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I’m out of the country at the moment, and possibly missing some nuance. On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember the ill-will the unions built up in the 1970s, with snap stoppages designed to inflict maximum disruption on the public and thereby maximise pressure on employers to settle quickly and on the government to broker a solution. The announcement, without warning, of a lockout by Qantas seems to be straight out of the same disastrous playbook. Even if it works, it must surely kill off any political goodwill for Qantas in the future, or at least as long as the current management is in charge. That’s bound to be costly given the importance of political decisions on things like landing rights for airlines, and the favourable treatment Qantas has had in the past (partly a leftover of its days as a national flag carrier).

Can anyone make a case that Joyce’s action makes sense?

Two great outcomes in successive days[1], and neither would have happened without a hung parliament. I never accepted the horror with which many commentators viewed the election results (after all, minority governments have been common at the state level and have generally worked fine), but now I’m a positive enthusiast. It would be a pity if the independents who supported the government are punished by their electors – I’d say we need more independents of all kinds as a check on the executive power of the PM and the majority party
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… but the legislation for a carbon tax/fixed price emissions scheme has finally passed the House of Representatives, and is assured of passage through the Senate. Assuming the government can survive that long, it will come into force at the beginning of 2012-13.

Before any analysis, some (qualified) congratulations are in order. The Greens (with my support at the time, for what that was worth) took a big gamble in rejecting the badly-compromised Rudd-Turnbull deal, and have contributed to the passage of a much better bill now. Still, it turned out to be a long-shot. If the Gillard government had either won an absolute majority or lost to Tony Abbott, there would be no carbom tax. Kevin Rudd laid a lot of the groundwork, but failed to call a double dissolution, which he would surely have won, when the first version of the emissions trading scheme was blocked. Malcolm Turnbull has been a voice of sanity throughout, but still voted the party line. Last but not least, Julia Gillard, having almost succeeded in killing the whole idea in 2010 demonstrated her skills in getting an exceptionally contentious piece of legislation through, despite disastrous polls and the most fragile conceivable majority.

Now, a bit of a look towards the future

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In the event that Julia Gillard lasts as PM until December, she’ll presumably be faced with a resolution making equal marriage rights part of Labor policy. Gillard’s handling of this issue is emblematic of her disastrous leadership in general – simultaneously unprincipled, unconvincing and politically unsuccessful.

Unlike our PM, I’m just old enough to remember when the phrase “living in sin” could be used with a straight face to describe living arrangements like hers. So, I find it hard to believe that her stated opposition to equal marriage rights is sincere (unlike with Kevin Rudd). Rather it’s the result of the kind of political calculation standard on the right wing of the Labor Party (see also Kristina Kenneally), in which the ‘real’ Labor voter is typecast as an aspirational bogan[1] whose views on social issues are unchanged since the 1950s. The key text here is Michael Thompson’s Labor without Class. There’s no evidence for this – views on social issues in Australia are largely uncorrelated with social class.

Allowing that some Labor voters are socially conservative, Gillard’s strategy is still politically stupid. Given the desperate state of the polls, she can’t hope to win by caution on an issue like this. It’s probably too late now, but a strong stand in favor of equal marriage rights might have done something to stop the drift of Labor voters off to the Greens, independents or the kind of apathy that makes it easy to shift to the Liberals, given an attractive promise or two.

fn1. To be boringly clear, I don’t use or endorse the term “bogan” to describe anybody. But the stereotypical image of a bogan coincides perfectly with the Labor Right view of Labor voters.

The case against Bolt began with a series of clearly defamatory claims against individuals, shown in the court decision to be false[1]. That’s never been part of the concept of free speech in Australian law, so, as far as the facts in this particular case are concerned, there is no problem. The main issues are whether it would have been more appropriate for the complainants to rely on ordinary defamation laws, and whether this case sets a precedent that might be used against legitimate expressions of opinion, for example on the appropriate criteria for determining indigenous status.

On the first issue, Mark Bahnisch (at LP, no link because of an annoying bug that stops me reaching the site from here) makes the point that the complainants wanted to address the attack on indigenous people in general embodied in Bolt’s piece, rather than simply the attack on their individual reputations. This is a strong argument. However, for cases of this kind, it might be better to change defamation laws to make racial attacks an aggravating factor, and evidence of malice, so that someone defamed because of their race could secure a judgement that made this clear, both in the findings and in the determination of damages. In particular, in a case like this, there should be no need to prove particular damage: the defamation should be sufficient for a judgement and damages.

As regards defamatory statements about a racial or religious group, of the general form “All/most Group X members display Bad Characteristic Y”, it would be possible to extend existing laws to allow class actions. That hasn’t been allowed in the past, but there is no good reason for a distinction between defaming someone as an individual and as a member of a group.

That would leave the case of statements that might “offend, insult or humiliate” members of some group without being defamatory in the ordinary sense of the term. While it’s easy to imagine some very troublesome cases, there are a number of defenses in relation to academic discussions, public interest matters and fair personal comment, and so far there isn’t significant evidence that the provisions have in fact worked to constrain free speech in any meaningful way. Still, if there are changes needed, this is the place to look.

fn1. In this context, the defence that Bolt honestly believed the claims to be true would be irrelevant. In any case, he obviously took so little care in his research that a defence of this kind would fail to meet the test of reasonable belief.

An open thread on this topic. Obviously, please avoid anything that might be seen as defamatory, either of Bolt, the plaintiffs, other commentators or anyone else.

The stages of grief when a political leader is doomed differ a little in sequence from the classic Kubler-Ross order, since bargaining is a real process rather than an adjustment mechanism. Altering the order to Denial, Anger, Depression, Acceptance and Bargaining, I’d say the Labor Caucus is now in the Depression stage. Acceptance must happen before too long – the evidence that Labor will be crushed under Gillard is overwhelming and no-one really wants to try a third leader in less than two years.So, after Acceptance, it will be time for Bargaining. The key is for Rudd to accept enough collegial control to prevent a repetition of the failure last time.

I’m not always in tune with the political zeitgeist, but my decision to run a post advocating a dignified resignation for Julia Gillard was made just ahead of the rush. Of course, the option of voluntarily stepping aside has now been foreclosed. When Gillard goes (I don’t think there’s a remaining question of “if”) it will be as a result the usual messy and unpleasant process of assembling a sufficient number of votes (not necessarily a majority) to render her position untenable.

Both because I don’t want to see any last-minute stuffups, I hope the carbon tax and mining tax legislation is passed before she goes. Certainly, whether or not she supported these measures, she did the hard yards to get them through.

On the question of her replacement, I had previously dismissed Rudd, on the basis that his abrasive personality and micro-management tendencies (not apparent in his public persona, but well-attested) would make him unacceptable to his colleagues. However, the High Court decision on asylum seekers changes all that. Rudd has more credibility on this issue than anyone else in the party. Labor has no choice but to revert to a more humane position and stress the point that the Court decision undermines Abbott as well as Gillard. It now seems highly unlikely that a policy based on long-term detention of people who have already been assessed as refugees can stand up, wherever they are held.

Stephen Smith seems like the natural choice for deputy, and it would be sensible to find a ministerial spot for Gillard, all of which would permit a reshuffle.

No one can tell for sure, but I think the return of Rudd would put the spotlight on Abbott’s total fraudulence, maybe even paving the way for the Rudd vs Turnbull election we should have had last time.

I’ve never been a big fan of scandals, but occasionally you can’t ignore them. That’s true of the scandals currently afflicting the Labor government. As regards the Thomson accusations, if he is guilty he should resign his seat and will in any case be forced to do so if convicted. That will probably end the government if it happens, but there’s not much I can add in the way of political analysis.

The accusations against Julia Gillard published, and quickly retracted, by The Australian under Glenn Milne’s byline are a different matter. Not only has the content of the retracted article become public knowledge, but News Limited appears to be walking back from what at first appeared to be an unreserved apology, notably in comments by Hartigan and in Andrew Bolt’s column on the topic.

In these circumstances, Gillard has no alternative but to disprove the allegation that she derived a financial benefit, even unknowingly, from the fraud committed by her former boyfriend. That seems like a pretty clear-cut question of fact, which should admit a resolution even nearly 20 years after the event.

On the other hand, if the falsehood of the allegation can be proved, the case that News Limited in Australia is playing the same dirty tricks as its UK and US operations becomes all that much stronger, as does the case for treating the entire organisation as a political propaganda/lobbying operation rather than a newspaper publisher in the traditional sense. And, of course, Gillard would have a very strong case for defamation.

All of this pretty much kills my suggestion for a graceful exit by Gillard after the passage of the carbon tax. Until she can put this one to rest, a resignation would look like an admission of guilt.

I’ve been planning for a while to write a post arguing that the one thing Julia Gillard can do to (at least, potentially) salvage her place in the history books is to secure passage of the carbon price package (and preferably the other outstanding items left over from the Rudd era, such as the mining tax legislation and health reform), then step aside, and let the Labor party choose a new leader. I was going to wait until the package was passed, but for various reasons, I’ve decided it’s time to speak up on this.

I’ve been very critical of Gillard, but I’m probably less hostile to her at this point than the majority of Australians. On the other hand, her success in holding a fragile government together, and in securing agreement on some complex pieces of policy, suggest she is much more appealing in person than her public persona would imply. My limited contacts with people who’ve worked directly with her support this view, as does the clear belief of her supporters that, if only we could see the “real Julia” we would all like her.

Unfortunately, that’s no longer a relevant possibility. After more than a year in office, there seems very little likelihood that the negative view of Gillard, based on her public record, is going to change, no matter how many rebranding exercises she undertakes. Her last chance, a big bounce when the release of the carbon price package showed the spurious nature of Abbott’s scare campaign hasn’t come off. Moreover, despite her contribution to getting the package together, she can never get past her promise that there would be no carbon price under her government. Only with a change of leader can Labor sell the carbon price.

As regards the choice of alternative, my natural inclination is for Rudd, but it seems clear that his colleagues won’t go that way, and he is doing a good job as Foreign Minister. Wayne Swan has been a good Treasurer, but he is too closely tied to the coup against Rudd and the dumping of the CPRS. Greg Combet would be my preferred choice, but Stephen Smith would also be good.

Given a change of leader, and if they aren’t forced to an election early, I think Labor still has a good chance. Abbott is incredibly unpopular, considering the circumstances, and the hostility towards Labor is very much focused on Gillard personally. If the government can survive long enough to see the carbon price in place, Abbott’s scare campaigns will collapse completely.

The House of Lords has taken ‘unprecedented’ action to stop Lord Monckton claiming that he is a member (his closest approach was receiving zero votes in an election among hereditary peers). That’s typically the opening lie in a Monckton presentation that misrepresents everything from the United Nations to the laws of arithmetic. It’s hard to imagine how many cease and desist letters would be required to stop all the falsehoods, or what would be left of his presentation if they were removed[1].

But, as I said previously, the real point here relates to the Australian political right, who have embraced Monckton with universal (if sometimes feigned) enthusiasm. And not just Monckton, but a long string of conpsiracy theorists, charlatans and cranks, who keep on repeating the same lies despite being repeatedly refuted (Ian Plimer on volcanoes can stand in for a multitude of examples).

As I said previously, it’s hard to tell who is most blameworthy here. Is it the’crazy uncles’ represented by people like Nick Minchin and encompassing the majority of conservative supporters, who actually believe this stuff, the weathervanes like Tony Abbott who will happily say 2+2 = 4,5 or 73 according to what their listeners want to hear, or supposedly serious conservatives/liberals who know it’s nonsense but keep their mouths shut.

In the short term, and aided by some spectacular own goals on the Labor side, this intellectual catastrophe hasn’t had any political costs for the right. But that won’t be true forever. And for any intelligent person of conservative inclinations, the knowledge that political activity on their preferred side requires (at a minimum) tacit acquiescence in this kind of thing must be pretty appalling.

fn1. Indeed, bearing in mind Mary McCarthy’s famous remark about Lillian Hellman, it’s hard to imagine that even prepositions and conjunctions would remain.