This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board. On the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday, I’d be interested in thoughts on our relationship to the British monarchy.
Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
John Quiggin 
Could the Queen have intervened in the 1975 Whitlam sacking? Could she have sacked Kerr and Fraser, reinstated Whitlam etc…
jolly hockeysticks
The new CEO of Telstra has the same surname as the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Rrujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull said of Trujillo, ” He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch.”
No doubt it’s a coincidence, but a happy one. We are, after all, a Banana Republic and our half-government-owned, sort-of-government-regulated telco, where the government appoints all the Board memebers, would not be out of place anywhere in Latin America
The new CEO of Telstra seems to have been plucked off the global scrap heap.
This coincidence struck me as well, but it appears that Trujillo is a common surname.
The “skilled” and the “unskilled” are terms that we would love defined.
Often used by politicians,economists and many.
Back to basics.
Who are these people and what is the difference?
A skilled person is someone with a certificate in an area at a guess.
Isn’t more like a banana Constitutional-Monarchy?
In labor party terminology:
“skilled” is usually only used in the context of “worker” or “tradesman”.
“Skilled workers” are distinguished by the fact that they sometimes slip into the top tax bracket, which causes consternation in labor party ranks because it is reserved for white collar workers.
White collar workers are neither “skilled” nor “unskilled”, but are distinguished by the fact that they really don’t deserve the fruits of their labour and should be taxed at closer to 100%. Except if they’re public servants.
Public servants are extremely talented and would almost all do better in the private sector. They really deserve tax cuts in return for their selfless devotion to the state, but that would aid the unworthy white collar workers, so instead they get very generous taxpayer funded superannuation.
Mark Latham has returned as anon.
Are you “skilled” or “unskilled”, when you have spent 5 years working for Toyota making cars.
If you lost your job,sadly,methinks you would move into the latter.
So farwell then Angela Catterns
Or “Ange” as Gran always calls you.
Leaving Sydney ABC Local Radio Mornings
For a cool half mill. Pieces of silver.
Your new call sign will be “Nova”.
But you’ve been round so long
It’ll be more like Old Tat.
“The new CEO of Telstra seems to have been plucked off the global scrap heap.”
–
Yeah a really great track record at both Qwest and FrOrange.
Anyone want to run a book on how long he lasts?
As far as I can tell, we’re a republic already. Sure, our Head of State might be Her Majesty, and sure, her successor will be (unless she’s voted out sooner, or he dies, or something similar) Charles III, but she sits at our pleasure, and renewed her power through our fully democratic vote. If we were not already a republic prior to the date the Governor-General signed the bill that allowed a referendum on the matter of our Head of State, then we became a republic at that moment, and not a minute later. We would not be the first republic to have had a Head of State whose term lasts (unless terminated earlier) till their death; neither would we be the first republic to have had a Head of State whose successor is their son.
Benno asks if the Queen could’ve intervened in the Dismissal. Indeed, she could have (by appointing a Governor-General, she gives up no power, though of course within the bounds of the Constitution the Governor-General could act to limit the Queen’s power). I would say she should have. The House of Representatives passed a vote of no confidence in the new Prime Minister, which they presented to the Queen, but she refused, claiming it was an Australian matter, for us to deal with. However there is significant value in having three parties tied up in our Government (the Prime Minister, the Governor, and an Appointer, current HM Elizabeth II), with the ones who hold practical power able to dismiss each other, even if working at arms length. Each party has a responsibility to act to maintain our democracy in its generally current form (unless there is a submission to the Population for a referendum, which should not of course be prevented), but that in general such maintenance would only be through the ability to dismiss.
When she refused to intervene, I think the Queen gave up her job as Australian Appointer and the job should’ve been passed to someone who did have a continuing interested in Australian matters—something a European cannot. Like the Queen, the Australian Appointer would be an automatically-selected person (or body, as in the McGarvie Model) which lasted essentially for life. Unlike the Queen, an Australian Appointer probably wouldn’t be generally accepted on the international stage as our Head of State; Governors-General would finally be recognised for the role they have had for many years.
I always wonder at the sheer stupidity of Mal(content Fraser). The country, at the time under Whitlam, was probably the closest it ever came to economic and political collapse. IF Mal(content) had waited until the next election I don’t think we would have had a Labor party in existence to today. Damn, dreams never come true.
John:
I am surprised you haven’t brought up the topic of the European referendum. As someone with more than a passing interest in such matters I personally thought it was the biggest issue the world has experienced since 911, but without buildings getting attacked. I mean this could be seen at a later stage as a world-shattering event.
We now have financial markets seriously doubting the viability of the Euro as a long-term prospect and issues like enlargement- meaning Turkish entry- is out the 10th floor window.
I am very happy to see this abomination die the miserable death it deserves. Particularly amusing is it was the frogs that decided they had enough. As a nation of optimists who see opportunities in free trade, movement of goods and services within the region as a good thing (just kidding) the frogs voted against the constitution.
My bet is that the Euro won’t see the decade out and with it that silly idea that Europeans are the same people
There was some excellent coverage of the EU referendum at Crooked Timber, so I thought I’d leave it to people more knowledgeable than me.
“As far as I can tell, we’re a republic already. Sure, our Head of State might be Her Majesty, and sure, her successor will be (unless she’s voted out sooner, or he dies, or something similar) Charles III, but she sits at our pleasure, and renewed her power through our fully democratic vote.”
Not quite, Tristan. I invite you to peruse our much-vaunted “republican” constitution. When you get to Section 59 you’ll read:
“The Queen may disallow any law within one year from the Governor-General’s assent, and such disallowance on being made known by the Governor-General by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, shall annul the law from the day when the disallowance is so made known.”
Now consider the following situation: legislation is passed conduct a referendum aimed at abolishing all references to the monarchy in the Constitution and replacing them with republican forms (a herculean effort in itself).
This legislation passes through Parliament and is signed into law by the G-G.
The electorate returns a Yes vote.
Then within a year the Monarch “by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation” disallows the enabling legislation.
The referendum is thereby nullified by constitutional means and Australia is a monarchy again.
Now, is that how any republic ever known to mankind has ever worked?
Wow, that just blows me away.
Hm. But part of any referendum would be the removal of that clause. If it’s no longer in the constitution, how can it be constitutional to rely on it? The Queen still has to act according to the constitutional structures of the day, doesn’t she?
No Tristan. The proclamation of the Monarch annuls the legality of the legislation that enabled the referendum that purported to alter the constitution.
Thus the referendum itself would be declared ultra vires.
The genius of this device is that a monarch determined to remain monarch of Australia can wait to see how the referendum turns out.
There is a way around monarchical power. The enabling legislation for the referendum can remain unexercised for one year and one day. At that point the monarch may not annul it.
However, consider the following:
Section 60: A proposed law reserved for the Queen’s pleasure shall not have any force unless and until within two years from the day on which it was presented to the Governor-General for the Queen’s assent the Governor-General makes known, by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, that it has received the Queen’s assent.
This states that a pro-monarchist G-G (or for that matter any G-G) may sit on any piece of legislation that has passed through Parliament. After the elapse of two years this legislation ceases to be a valid Bill.
It’s up to the monarch to decide whether a G-G continues to serve at his/her pleasure.
Katz:
Get real dude. This is the English Queen you are talking about. Other than just musing, if you believe she would nullify a republic I have a bridge to sell I think you may be interested in.
Not arguing practicalities S Brid. Simply countering the assertion that the Australian Constitution is a republican constitution.
And your remark about “getting real” is more apposite than you might imagine. Any constitutional arrangement ultimately rests upon consent. Without effective consent every constitution is the same thing — an anarchy.
Not that there’s anything wrong with anarchy. But then, I’m a very special kind of leftie.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with anarchy. But then, I’m a very special kind of leftie.”
I’ll say. A leftie that is in favour of letting people control their own lives!!? What’s left of left?
What’s left is prudence.
Government is a necessary evil.
Prudent libertarians should be thankful to social democrats because, mostly, they have made good on Elizabeth I’s false promise not to “make windows into men’s souls”.
Every other organised political movement, regardless of its principles, has attempted to make windows into men’s souls.
On the negative side, social democrats tend to be fussy old nannies. But they have proven to be quite good at keeping the monsters of the Right at bay.
Katz;
I can understand leftism to the extent it wants control people. I obviously get conservatism. I once toyed with libertarianism but realized if one is to become a true follower you are longer human. You can’t have opinion on anything other than Government is bad.
“Quite good at keeping the monsters of the Right at bay”.
Would Ronald Reagan, Dwight E, Barry Goldwater, Rob Menzies, Maggie T fall into that category? Or is that just an “opinion”, Katz.
Interesting ragbag of rightist icons S Brid. Do I detect a fugitive spirit of ownership?
Let’s try to address them one at a time.
Barry Goldwater was kept at bay.
Ronald Reagan did unwind much of the New Deal. The good folks of the USA did seem to accept his policies. He played footsie with the religious right, but quit after the foreplay, leaving them hot and bothered. He did finally learn from the CIA how to defeat Communism and did that quite effectively.
Margaret Thatcher pretended to roll back government, but left it with its hand as deeply in the pockets of Britons as she found it. She destroyed the Tory Party for a generation by trampling on its history and traditions. Well done, Maggie!
Bob Menzies and Ike managed the lure of Keynsianism by mostly giving in to it.
Conservatives? Depends on semantics. Monsters? No. (Maggie’s hairstyle was a bit scary though.)
The dirigisme that you detect on the left tends toward the pocket or the shining promise of nation-building. The Lefties who ran up against your pantheon of more or less successful Tories were hardly the church-burning, nun-raping sort of Leftie.
Government is currently a necessary evil. But in large part this is a consequence of the accumulated actions of government, and as for the rest, a consequence of fallible human actions (as the Gospels say of divorce laws, “these things were given for your hardness of heart”).
None of this amounts to a justification for accepting government rather than working to wind back both the necessity and the practice. It would ge good to get the turkeys to vote for that particular Christmas, but there are ways around that too. If we were not able to work to elimnate evils in the face of current necessity, we would still have slavery. In the face of acquiescence and complicity, it is even part of human nature to internalise the values involved and become sincere apologists for the evils as well as the practices.
I thought the real monsters of the right went out of style in 1945. Reagan seemed to acknowledge this when he decided to lay a wreath on the graves of SS soldiers.
PML,
What are the steps required to wind back government?
I must be honest and say I don’t agree with your assertion. My own feeling is that, essentially, government needs to made vastly more responsive to the society it controls. And to ALL sections of that society as well, rather than the somewhat uneven responsiveness we see today.
But I am curious about what a more libertarian solution actually involves.
” Reagan seemed to acknowledge this when he decided to lay a wreath on the graves of SS soldiers.”
So THAT’S what he was doing! Well suck half my brain out and call me the Gipper.
More likely Reagan’s minders didn’t do their homework and left Ronne holding a wreath and nothing to do with it.
In any case, a darker reading of this gesture might be that Reagan’s minders were commemorating the desires of General George S. Patton, who, in May and June of 1945, wanted to unleash the combined might of the allied Armies and the Werhmacht on his “Gallant Russian Allies.”
It was both Reagan’s minders initially did not do their homework and Reagan who felt that he could not let Hemult Kohl down after the White House had accepted and Kohl’s office had made the public announcement. It was not a cemetary of SS punks. It contained a only a few. Reagan relented to Kohl for two main reasons:
1. Kohl wanted to demonstrate to the world that Germany had finally joined the human race, and:
2. It was a demonstrtation that barbarity also took a great toll on German lives.
Of course, the context of the times also has to be put in perspective. The West was fighting a cold war at the time.
But guys, please. I hope the barbs about Reagan are being used to just needle people. You couldn’t possible associate Reagan and Nazism. Could you? Say it ain’t so.
Katz:
“In any case, a darker reading of this gesture might be that Reagan’s minders were commemorating the desires of General George S. Patton, who, in May and June of 1945, wanted to unleash the combined might of the allied Armies and the Werhmacht on his “Gallant Russian Allies.â€?
Katz, Edward De Bono did write a book telling his readers that we ought to think laterally. However taking it to absurdity get’s you to the above comment. So I would suggest enough lateral more vertical for you.
What’s left of the left with anarchy? No less than its essence. Anarchy depends utterly on the leftist sine qua non of human nature being fundamentally good.Â
There are 3 proactive political viewpoints: individualist/libertarian, hierarchist/conservative, and left/socialist. The first think human nature immutably bad and their social prescriptions are structured to take that into account. The second, the Tories, think human nature bad-but-can-be-made-good. Their prescriptions allow to train people to pull their weight and so fit in as useful contributors to society. The left assumes human nature good and their prescriptions scorn incentives and leaders other than charismatic ones. The left sees people as corrupted by the greed- and power-mongering of the other two positions. If it weren’t for them, the govt could “wither away”.Â
JQ’s mention of the Kinks reminded me to chase a song, Uncle Son, which celebrates the fourth position. One stanza perceptively compares all four:Â
Liberals dream of equal rights/ Conservatives live in a world gone by/ Socialists preach of the promised land/ But old Uncle Son was an ordinary man.Â
The first position is Hobbes, Thatcher, James Bond; the second is Confucius, Eisenhower, Sir Humphrey Appleby; the third is Rousseau, Eva Cox, Clive Hamilton – as well as anarchists Proudhon and Kropotkin; the fourth is Homer Simpson, Svejk, the cartoon characters by Leunig and Petty, and those people who pour money into poker machines.  Â
In a healthy, well balanced society, the first three are in a never-ending competition for the allegiance of the fourth. Disaster is when one of them wins.Â
The great culture war of our time is between the first and third, nowhere more evident than in the blogosphere. The second, dominant for thousands of years, are now without honour, and relegated to bureaucracy keeping the infrastructure ticking over. They run everything but beyond “the right chap in the right job” and “follow the rules” they are more or less ideology-free.Â
The division in the ranks of the anti-hierarchical forces became visible 200 years ago. Bentham tried to resolve it with utilitarianism. JS Mill tried with the “harm principle” and more recently Rawls and Nozick attempted it. All fail on logic grounds. Â
American right wingers (ie libertarians) tend to regard the conception of human nature as the be-all and end-all. Political science generally would more likely say that the crucial marker of the division is between liberty and equality (of outcome). Of course, the hierarchs (Burke, Oakshott) simply say that there is no liberty or equality without order.Â
So Katz, you’re saying that, in practice, no law, including constitutional amendment, limiting the powers of the Queen have any guaranteed validity until after a year since their passage? Well, there goes that theory. And Katz, even your ‘way out’ isn’t going to work (if I understand it correctly), because the Referendum needs to be presented to the qualified voters of each State and Territory between two and six months of being accepted by the Parliament.
What an ugly constitution we have, then.
Mike Pepperday, with thoughts like those you should run a blog that I may read it everyday and take it for my gospel.
There are 3 proactive political viewpoints: individualist/libertarian, hierarchist/conservative, and left/socialist.
I imagine the big three ideas as ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, in pure form: capitalism, communism and fascism. I don’t think this is necessarily based on some assumptions about the human nature, just a basic set of pure ideals of the Enlightenment: individual freedom, equality and nationalism.
I agree that in a healthy society all three are in a never-ending competition and that any one of these ideals prevailing inevitably causes a disaster.
Katz, the Queen only acts on the advise of her ministers.
The idea that the Queen’s Australian ministers would advise her to disallow a referendum is absurd.
“Katz, Edward De Bono did write a book telling his readers that we ought to think laterally. However taking it to absurdity get’s you to the above comment. So I would suggest enough lateral more vertical for you.”
Glad you appreciate my work.
“Katz, the Queen only acts on the advise of her ministers.
The idea that the Queen’s Australian ministers would advise her to disallow a referendum is absurd.”
Ben:
1. That’s the convention. It has the same weight as the convention that a GG would sack a democratically elected government that hadn’t suffered a vote of no-confidence. Remember 1975? So much for conventions.
2. Imagine the following: Governing Party A sponsors a referendum, which passes against the opposition of Opposition Party B. Thereafter, Party A loses government to Party B. Party B advises the monarch to nullify the enabling legislation. Unlikely, but not impossible, and therefore not absurd.
Perhaps you meant to write “unlikely” rather than “absurd”.
Unlikely a referendum would pass without the support of both major parties, too…
There are 3 proactive political viewpoints: individualist/libertarian, hierarchist/conservative, and left/socialist.
If you haven’t seen it, here is an interesting site that maps political views onto a “compass”, where the east-west axis is left/right, and north-south is authoritarian/libertarian: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
You can fill in a short questionaire and then see which quadrant you lie in, and compare yourself against world leaders. Well worth a look, particularly comparing yourself to your friends and family.
moderation test
“anon” now appears to be moderated out. JQ, what is your moderation policy? Anyone who doesn’t agree with your viewpoint? If that’s the case, shouldn’t you be up-front about that?
This is anon’s post that was just moderated and failed to appear. Judge for yourselves:
There are 3 proactive political viewpoints: individualist/libertarian, hierarchist/conservative, and left/socialist.
If you haven’t seen it, here is an interesting site that maps political views onto a “compass�, where the east-west axis is left/right, and north-south is authoritarian/libertarian: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
You can fill in a short questionaire and then see which quadrant you lie in, and compare yourself against world leaders. Well worth a look, particularly comparing yourself to your friends and family.
The anti-spam software is a bit overactive at the moment, but I haven’t banned anyone for some time. The comment mentioned by anonymouses appeared without my intervention, so I’m not sure what is going on.
Well, looks like it did appear, after first being moderated away. Am I the only commentator on the greylist? [you can tell if your post says “your comment is currently being moderated” after submission, rather than appearing immediately.]
Ok, another one for the cockup over conspiracy pile. My apologies JQ.
I pasted the following to the Condorcet thread by mistake. It belongs here.
Anon mentions the political compass site http://politicalcompass.org/. Its questionnaire is good fun. There is a more academically respectable application by political geographers, Hermann and Leuthold, at http://sotomo.geo.unizh.ch/research/. These guys have developed some elaborate, partly animated, cartography around a form with liberal-conservative in place of libertarian-authoritarian.
Note that this is different from the four types I described. These dimensions do not yield the Kinks’ “ordinary man� at all. Moreover the two dimensions are continuums and cannot logically yield discrete types – as indeed Hermann and Leuthold’s studies show empirically. (If you ponder the four types I described you will have to say they are discrete; between them is a logical void.)
One David Nolan claims to have invented this mapping in 1970 see http://www.lp.org/lpn/9908-Nolan.html but Milton Rokeach (The nature of human values, 1973) has two dimensions formed by freedom high and low versus equality high and low which I think comes to the same thing. According to him, Lo-lo is fascism; Hi-hi gives socialism; low freedom, high equality yields communism and high freedom, low equality makes capitalism. He did some extensive text analysis of writings of Lenin, Hitler, Goldwater and mixed socialist authors to statistically confirm his categorisation. Again the dimensions are continuous and again our ordinary man is absent. He makes four types from what I described as three proactive political positions by splitting the left into two varieties.
Rokeach was a prominent American psychologist. He is unknown in political science, which is a pity.
The fourth type, the ordinary man, is a person who is delivered up to luck and fate, who does not connect cause and effect very well. This person is entirely rational and these people play a part in all polities.
I would like to mention the fifth (and final) type: the socially detached individual. This is the hermit, autonomous, existentialist, stoic, Taoist, Diogenes, Nietsche, Camus, Buddha, Thoreau, HL Mencken, Steppenwolf – and not a few academics. What social role these people, who are usually older men, play is an open question.
I am keen to hear about such typologies.
“Government is currently a necessary evil. But in large part this is a consequence of the accumulated actions of government, and as for the rest, a consequence of fallible human actions (as the Gospels say of divorce laws, “these things were given for your hardness of heartâ€?).
None of this amounts to a justification for accepting government rather than working to wind back both the necessity and the practice. It would ge good to get the turkeys to vote for that particular Christmas, but there are ways around that too. If we were not able to work to elimnate evils in the face of current necessity, we would still have slavery. In the face of acquiescence and complicity, it is even part of human nature to internalise the values involved and become sincere apologists for the evils as well as the practices.”
PN in princple we’re in agreement. I devote a fair bit of work precisely to reducing the need for government funding of social services.
However, I think we need to recognise the current necessity of government and as well as the long-term desirabiltiy of reducing the role of government.
Otherwise where in the position of an ocean-liner with no life-preservers because the Captain thinks swimming lessons should be mandatory.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/actaidusa/111722294385.htm
ActionAid USA concludes that up to 90% of government aid from developed countries “is not genuinely available for poverty reduction in developing countries.”
If these claism are correct, this is not a problem confined to any one country – both France and the US are claimed to be amongst the worst offenders. (Although not mentioned in the article Japan has also been notorious for its abuse of tied aid.)
Then too, not all aid is intended to directly bring about poverty reduction in any case. There are, after all, other legitimate aid purposes such as promoting democracy and human rights, protecting women’s rights; national security and protecting biodiversity, to name just a few.
Examples of the misuse of aid include – the overstatement of the value of technical assistance; overpricing of tied aid and high adminsitrative and transaction costs.
The authors of the reprot would probably argue that aid processes need to be reformed and that the volume of aid needs to be increased.
I’m not adverse to either of those ideas, but I can help wondering if there aren’t more effective uses for the estimated $30 billion a year in misused aid.
Here are a few:
– compensate farmers and industrial workers in devleoped countries for reductions in tariffs on imported goods from the developing world and other measures to reduce undesriable trade distortions such as export subsidies;
– increase trade insurance capacity and other means to facilitate imports from the developing countries;
– X-Prize style cash incentives for companies developing new treatments for tropical diseases such as malaria; and
– promoting investment in venture capital and developing country stock markets. (CelTel, the African-owned mobile phone company with mobile phone networks in countries such as Uganda and Rwanda has probably done more for Africans than all the aid from the develoepd world over the past decade.)
S. Brid: “I can understand leftism to the extent it wants control people.”
Actually that statement shows very clearly you don’t understand “leftism” in the least.
What’s this ‘ordinary man’? Anyone, any ordinary person should be able to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a few basic questions, questions describing specific situations, if not abstract concepts. This should allow you to find a spot for this ordinary person somewhere on this freedom/equality plane.
As far as the basic assumptions about human nature, isn’t it rather obvious that human nature is both good and bad? People are both cooperative and competitive, greedy and generous – depending on the circumstances. Everyone knows it. So, how could a rational philosophy be based on a manifestly silly assumption like ‘human nature is fundamentally good’ or ‘human nature is fundamentally bad’?
The Palestinian Authority has executed four ‘criminals’ seeP: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15591009-23109,00.html
Has the international left let the Palistinians off the hook on this one? Perhaps, not for the first nor last time. 😦