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
fn1. For subsequent record, the passage through the House of Representatives of the carbon tax/price legislation, followed by the rejection of the government’s “Malaysian solution” and the subsequent announcement of an end to off-shore refugee detention.
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John Quiggin 
I wonder if it was a Liberal government with say a bunch of libertarians holding the balance of power whether your enthusiasm would persist. I suspect that your admiration for hung parliaments is more about this hung parliament because it is delivering an agenda you’re broadly in agreement with.
The next parliament will not be a hung parliament. Although there will be some metaphorical hangings at the next election. I suspect that at least two of the independents if they run again will not be troubling us next term. Oakshott in particular is gone, gone, gone.
The govt forced to do what most voters want in defiance of the shock-jocks and their running dogs in News Ltd! Extraordinary!
Most voters did not want a carbon tax.
Most adults don’t want to go to the dentist either. But they take themselves anyway because they know it is in their long term self-interest to do so.
Overall, any weakening of the major parties, Labor and Liberal (who are suborned, subservient and grovelling towards corporate capital) is a good thing. Increasing power to a loose alliance of Greens, Democrats, social democrats and general moderate left independents will be a good thing too.
TerjeP also says, “I wonder if it was a Liberal government with say a bunch of libertarians holding the balance of power whether your enthusiasm would persist.”
Dream on TerjeP. Libertarianism is the American disease. It won’t take hold here. It simply does not make sense to Australians. Australians understand democracy because they actually have one. Australians understand that for democracy to be effective, democratic government must be effective and not reduced to a minimalist condition.
Libertarianism = The Dictatorship of Capital.
Terje, they haven’t got one.
you cannot buy a permit if it was a carbon tax. you could not then buy and sell the permits if it was a carbon tax.
I am staggered that both parties focus groups have people supporting an ETS but not a carbon tax and this is why they do not like the present set up.As I have said previously this is yet another wonderful triumph for those brilliant ALP political advisors.
Most voters didn’t want a GST either. Nor is an election result a mandate for anything. People vote for multiple reasons. All economists want a price put on externalities.
It has always been my view that every parliament should have a make-up that has a balance of power, preferably of Independents not ideologues like Labor, Liberal/Libertarian, Greens under the current system, to moderate the extremes of the major parties. If the major parties don’t like what they raise as issues, they can join together and oppose it, moderating the cross-bench’s extremes.
This is politics is how it is meant to be – the art of compromise.
Terje proposal would never happen a group of libertarians will never get elected & there are none left in the Liberal party (at least none with any influence) so it is not worth considering as it is not a realistic option.
I thought Windsor again really good on tel yesterday and just wish that lazy, apathetic voters would at least make a token effort to acquaint themselves the political life of this country.
Most of all the silly half senile gooses and illiterates who do Alan jones rallies.
Err….. sorry but you comment didn’t make sense to me. If liberal party is the balance of power which two parties would be the major parties in politics? Labour, Greens, Democrats, Independence? I would love to see any two of these parties become majorities because then the political issues would be different and I don’t think any of these parties other than liberals like News Ltd. A party can only be called in “balance of power” when it is a minority party.
@Ikonoclast:
“Libertarianism = The Dictatorship of Capital.”
Amen – that’s *exactly* what it is – the conflation of the political process with market processes. Which suits those shoulder-deep in capital very nicely thank you.
The asylum seeker thing reminds me of Churchill on the US:
“[They] can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Capital is just stuff like tractors and shovels. I don’t think we are every likely to have tractors and shovels as our overlords.
You’re deliberately not getting it.
What happens to, in your simplified, rhetorical example, the people who don’t have tractors and shovels?
Spot on, that is what “exactly” is happening in the US. A country where they like the whole world to believe that they have “democracy” or “liberty” is forcing people to sell their homes; living in cars and basements; choose between how many meals to have a day; what food they can afford; working more than 60 hours a week “just” to feed themselves; and getting told to get a job when they work more hours than we do here in Australia.
Terje has a point.
Alternatively, replace “libertarians” with “Hansonites” and rerun the argument.
Terje
This is just blatant dogma and a sign of pure ignorance. Marx was very clear on this in Ch 33 of Capital and elsewhere, and it is clear that “stuff like tractors and shovels” are only capital under particular social circumstances (ie capitalism). Under socialism they would just be ‘means of production’.
Capital is also a sum of finance that has been accumulated from workers.
@Robert Merkel
Yes – it is Terje’s dream.
You can replace Libertarians with Terjenism and rerun the argument.
My point is that a hung parliament with a bunch of Hansonites holding the balance of power could produce some pretty horrible outcomes.
@#6
You cannot reasonably specify, in a democratic system, who gets to hold the balance of power. What you can do is recognise that the Labor/Coalition monopoly of power in the House of Representatives is an artefact of the electoral system and move to propositional representation. Since 1949 the share of the popular vote held by the major parties has fallengrom an average around 92 per cent from the 1950s to the 1980s to an average of 84 per cent elections since 1990.
Although the Senate is inherently malapportioned, the Senate electoral system has been much more successful in actually representing what the electorate wants.
You would use the same STV system as the Senate. You would make each of the small states and territories a single electorate. You would divide the large population states into electorates with an odd number of members between 5 and 9.
The major parties are obsessed with a level playing field in the economy but strangely reluctant to allow it in the House of representatives.
Ha. Most voters want to sit on couches eating snack food that has been designed to appeal to pleistocene tastes but produces type II diabetes, while addictively watching tv programs that are designed to appeal to tribal social instincts. This doen’t make sedentry death syndrome a great idea. 🙂
Marginal votes for Labour/Liberal’s have fallen over time, but there is a problem with that is a lot of the Liberal voters are average Australians whom don’t really have any economic knowledge (no disrespect here, I’ve always understand the difficulty of making a living, abd to take time to do researches about unmodified news or economy knowledge are not possible for a large proportion of people). So a majority of them obtain information from the media of Australia which the majority is owned by News Corp and not known that News Corp works for Corporations and don’t care about the general public at all. While a larger proportion of labour voter (comparing to liberal voters) are well educated/caring people that really cares about misforunate people, but they are the people that swings their votes between labour, greens, independence etc. The problem here is that Greens and Independence will never have the number of votes to get them into power and voting for them would just give the liberals a bigger chance of winning which would be worse than labour being in power.
TerjeP is probably just trolling flippantly of course. But just in case he doesn’t know the difference between “capital”, “capital equipment”, “inventory”, “miscellaneous assets” etc. About.com gives the following definition of “capital”;
“The term Capital has several meanings and it is used in many business contexts. In general, capital is accumulated assets or ownership. More specifically;
Capital is the amount of cash and other assets owned by a business. These business assets include accounts receivable, equipment, and land/buildings of the business.
Capital can also represent the accumulated wealth of a business, represented by its assets less liabilities.
Capital can also mean stock or ownership in a company.”
It is clear that I meant “capital” in its widest sense. (Though my argument would not be obviated by any narrow view of a sub-set of capital.) Terje”s flippant attempt to reduce the definition to one physical subset is of course an attempt to pretend that the physical and inanimate nature of this subset means that “capital” has no social or economic meaning, force or power beyond its actual physical inert existence. It is an attempt to pretend that the particular modes of ownership and use of capital (in its various forms) have no impact on economic, social or individual life. It is crude reductionism, easily refuted and very typical of libertarian “intellectual” argument in general.
Yeah, it’s pretty vapid stuff. If it wasn’t so well-bankrolled, I doubt it would have any intellectual traction at all. Of course, as Michael Hudson points out, a lot of mathematical economics is ultimately just PR/an intellectual(ish) veneer for the policies expedient to the people who paid for the “research”.
@Tom
Classifying your opponents as fools and your supporters as wise may be comforting but it does not really advance the argument. There may be someone, somewhere who that believes their supporters are fools and their opponents wise, but I have not heard of them.
I am surprised to hear that Independents and Greens will never get into power, given that they now determine which of the major parties is to govern. In any case, under preferential voting you cannot waste your vote. If your vote cannot elect a Green or Independent by all means give a second preference to Labor.
The ALP really needs a better pitch than all our opponents are dumb and the Greens can’t win seats.
No, you’ve miss read my post. I did not say all opposition voters are fools at all. I’m saying that a larger proportion of labour voters understands economics than liberal voters. I have also said that not many people have time to do researches about information and knowledge which I understand because making a living is not easy and that the media (News Ltd) presents news in favour of liberal party. In what way did I say that opposition voters are fools? Just because people don’t understand economics doesn’t make them fools, hell I don’t understand how to build a computer from scratch, how to design a home and there are a lot of things I don’t have the knowledge of. If there are people that misunderstood my comment, please accept my apology for my poor grammar.
@Ikonoclast
Yes – and Terje [deliberately] missed the obvious point – under capitalism, owners of tractors and shovels can become overlords. They just need to ensure that everyone doesn’t have the same rights or opportunities to accumulate capital.
It was all explained in the reference Terje has not been able to read.
today,a description in the fin of the application of large amounts of vested interest money to rev up fear of another effort to restrain parastitic behaviour on another small,vulnerable and lucrative section of the community.
a re-run of the miners misleading squawk.
a quite long piece beginning in the front page about the continuing “fake fear” program.
lots of money,blanket misconceptions.
easiest repudiation would be stick on strips about the width of the fin and 5 or 6 cm deep,block letters,white on black and black on white, straight across the face of any reachable poster.not blocking any print if possible.
and the words?
FAKE FEAR
maybe it’s not illegal.
would be quite inexpensive.
oh well.
and the current topic?
the so called hung parliament?
working rather well.
all this debate ,i can see why the opposition doesn’t like it.
it gets in the way of the knee jerk sloganeering that disguises their lack of costed policies.
@Robert Merkel
Just so Robert. While the Indies we have are clearly on the right of the spectrum, those supporting the ALP are not doctrinaire crazies. Wilkie, Windsor and Oakeshott seem to make a genuine effort to seek out evidence as the basis for policy, and Oakeshoot and Wilkie are arguably liberals.
What we have is a centre-right government depending on a slightly centre left fringe to hold onto power.
What Terje said was silly: when somebody talks about ‘dictatorship of capital’ it’s clear the usage is metonymous and not literal.
But it’s also silly to denounce ‘blatant dogma’ and then without pause to invoke Marx as if his words must settle the matter.
I think that the Greens picked up a seat in the HoR, and their seats in senate, through Labor being deliberately obtuse before the last election. Labor chucked a landmark policy (ie CPRS/ETS), chucked a sitting prime minister in Kevin Rudd, and then proposed a ludicrous “Citizen’s Assembly” of 150 voters, picked out of a hat.
I can only guess how other people responded to Labor’s behaviour, but for me it pushed me towards the Greens and away from Labor. I felt at the time that the Citizen’s Assembly was a ploy to hold onto voters who still wanted an AGW policy of some sort. Once the election happened, and the minority Labor coalition government formed, Labor had little choice than to dust off the climate change policy and to run with it again; the Greens would have chucked the government out if AGW wasn’t addressed at some significant level. It is still to the credit of the current government that the Carbon Tax policy has passed through HoR, and I believe the PM Julia Gillard has shown real mettle in seeing it through to this point in time.
Quite frankly, the irony of watching people who had claimed the Greens were alarmists now being the ones claiming a carbon tax is economic armmageddon—just precious!
What Terje said was silly. The expression ‘dictatorship of capital’ is obviously metonymous and not literal. It would make no more sense to say that as swords will never be our overlords there can be no ‘dictatorship of the sword’.
But it’s also silly to denounce ‘blatant dogma’ and then without pausing invoke the words of Marx as if they must automatically settle the point in dispute.
Here’s a paper by Andrew Scott which is germane to this thread.
Click to access 131.pdf
Libertarianism is not just a dictatorship of capital, it is also, and more perniciously, the projection onto society of the psychopathology of extreme misanthropes like Ayn Rand. A society run along libertarian lines, with grotesque inequality a given, cannot but be cruel, unjust and dominated by sadists, utterly indifferent to the fate of others.
@J-D
Exactly so J-D. Terje has tried this piece of equivocation on several occasions here. I usually just raise my eyebrows and move on.
I’m not sure though that Chris cited the reference to Marx to settle the point as much as to lend it context. The use of capital in this way alludes directly to Marx and for Terje to pretend not to know this and build a cheap shot on it called this response.
“My point is that a hung parliament with a bunch of Hansonites holding the balance of power could produce some pretty horrible outcomes.”
The interesting thing is we done get Hansonites or libertarians as independents, we get moderates that want to get things done. I’m sure there is a lesson in there for Liberal and Labor party.
This “hung parliament” has delivered a progressive government that gets things done. We wouldn’t have a carbon trading scheme without it, the would be no attempt to curb clubs fleecing the vulnerable and even though all other options were tried first; no sane solution to a handful of people arriving on our shores in boats.
It is a pity it requires the alignment of several moons to have such an event.
And as for TerJeP, do yourself a favour and read some Dickens before trying to have a rerun.
I don’t know about Terje, but when I see the expression ‘dictatorship of capital’ I don’t automatically think of Marx. To me, it’s not obviously a direct allusion to Marx. Hence my suspicion of the automatic reference to Marx in response.
Pr Q said:
Be careful what you cheer for. For sure the carbon tax legislation is a great result after inauspicious beginnings with the late un-lamented carbon trading scheme. But the ecologic and economic science of carbon taxing is pretty settled.
I would not be so confident about “good outcomes” for the new policy of on-shore processing of asylum-seeker claims. Howard’s off-shore processing, whilst undoubtedly tough on genuine refugees, stopped the people smuggling and stopped people drowning. Back in May 2004 I argued that off-shore processing had reduced the incidence of people-drowning.
And sure enough, throughout the middle of the noughties the incidence of people-smuggling and people drowning fell off dramatically. A “good outcome”, although cheered by no one in the media-academia complex.
Then, after the election of the ALP in 2007, the GREENs and Rudd got in on the act, shutting down Nauru, authorising community detention and generally giving the green light to people smugglers. Result: the boats flooded back in, and we ended up fishing survivors of off the waters of Christmas Island.
Predictable. As I observed back in 2004 if “political acts to be judged by their intentions” then dont expect “great outcomes”.
Gillard, to her credit, got the mail and set out on a more humane version of off-shore processing, acting on the sound advice of her department, who might be expected to know a thing or two about such matters. Subsequently the relevant officials were publicly traduced by Bob Brown in an ugly attack on the Westminster tradition of free and fearless advice by anonymous public servants. He’s not a man who greatly relishes swallowing ideologically unpalatable facts.
I’d say the odds are better than even that there will be another mass drowning episode within the life-time of this Parliament. And if so, who wants the Minister of Immigration’s job of standing up in Parliament and accepting responsibility for all the bodies washing up on our shores? I can well understand why Bowen argued strenuously in cabinet for accepting the resurrection of Nauru as the lesser of the remaining two evils.
I’m guessing that in the event this happening the GREENs and their camp followers will suddenly go very quiet, for a change.
Boat arrivals aren’t really affected by refugee policy. It’s all just a pantomime for the “benefit” of the electorate.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/04/17/why-andrew-bolt-should-be-sodomised-with-a-calculator-–-part-142/
@Dan
I agree boat arrivals are not much effected by refugee policy and the principal motive is a pantomime for certain voters in marginal seats. However I think there are elements of both government and opposition who are so drenched in the managerialist religion that they think good policy can solve anything. I suspect that the prime minister and the opposition leader may actually be sincere in their folly.
Oh, no. I am sure potential boat people get the latest on Australian refugee policy with a special app on their iPhones.
Jack Strocchi
Gillard had a policy, it was the Malaysian solution, “whilst undoubtedly tough on genuine refugees” it was regional solution, it was voted down by Abbott.
Now every boat that arrives is a reminder of Abbott’s failure to adopt the solution that was “undoubtedly tough on genuine refugees” and forced onshore processing.
Mu ha ha ha ha ha.
I love a political manoeuvres that puts the protagonist right in it.
Mu ha ha ha ha ha.
I think the current hung parliament only works because the independents we have aren’t ideologues bolted to fixed policy on all positions, even if they individually have specific issues they won’t back away from. They seem to be hard workers willing to do their homework – I don’t believe they’ve supported carbon pricing or all the other legislation that’s gone through blindly. Even if they aren’t necessarily extraordinary I think we are extraordinarily fortunate to have MP’s like them; One Nationites or Bush Tea Party types would prefer to remain ignorant to preserve the purity of their thinking than do the homework that doing the best for our nation truly requires. In that context even Managerialism without ideology can look good.
Time and brain work assessing what comes before them is something that members of governments with clear majorities in both Houses aren’t required to do. In the case of Coalition members and climate/emissions policy close scrutiny of the problem and potential solutions is something they seem required to avoid doing.
Robert@17,
While we are playing “what ifs”, take News limited out of the picture and I believe we have a stable Green/Labour coalition for a long time. This is because you cannot take Climate Change out of the picture as it is neither democratic, subject to legislation, or convenient.
News Limited = Limited News
The other great thing from the hung parliament – which has yet to happen, is the pokies legislation. Neither the ALP or the coalition would have put this legislation forward itself.
John, I’m going entirely OT and asking a question, in the light of the “occupy wall street” protests.
It seems to me that the protesters have had enough of the conservative argument, “If you take any money off the rich, everyone will suffer”, and its corollary, “If you give to the rich everyone will benefit”.
I would think, that there is some income/wealth distribution that maximises overall happiness. Do economists have any idea what this distribution is? Is there any realistic goal for the “occupy wall streeters” to aim for?
John,
Happiness is a really nebulous concept. How people subjectively experience happiness, and the extent to which their economic circumstances predicate it, is only really measurable through proxies. Also, don’t forget the intergenerational aspect of this – supposing it was possible, should the current generation have all the economic benefit leading to happiness at the cost of innumerable future generations?
So, to sum the answer to your question up: No.
Although in any event I think it would be mitigated by culture and history anyway.
(Using something like the weak anthropic principle: if such an solution was available, it would have made a lot of reform a cakewalk, and we wouldn’t have any need for OWS.)
(There’s a sci fi dystopia story in this concept, imo)
Hmmm. Dan, I’m not sure that happiness is that nebulous. While you can be fabulously rich and unhappy, there are many fairly straightforward things that get in the way of happiness.
Hunger is a biggy. Unstable housing is a bit of a downer. Insecure income doesn’t help. Poor health makes it harder to be happy.
I find it hard to believe that we can’t fix these things……….
Sure, but that’s basic provisioning though – some of the proxies I referred to – not happiness per se. And there’s definitely a variety of arguments in favour of differing levels of “free enterprise/individual responsibility” vs. “social safety net” as far as the greatest level of overall happiness goes (I tend towards the latter camp myself). But it’s even more complicated than that, however, as the utilitarian calculus resulting in the best hedonic result overall might throw some people to the wolves, a result that I know I’m not the only one with deep misgivings about.
Leaving economic/distribution questions aside, though – measuring happiness – actual happiness – is hard. I have a good psych hons degree and I can promise you that was one of the take-away messages.