Unless there’s a sudden turnaround in the polls, Tony Abbott will become Prime Minister of Australia. This will be the third time in my life that a Federal Labor government has been defeated, the other two occasions being 1975 and 1996. On both those occasions, despite substantial and enduring accomplishments, the government had made a mess of macroeconomic management, and the electorate, unsurprisingly, wanted to punish them. And, despite my strong disagreements with them (and with the way Fraser came to office), the incoming Prime Ministers had serious views on how best Australia’s future could be managed. Fraser has only improved since leaving office, making valuable contributions on the national and global stage. My evaluation of Howard, following his defeat, starts with the observation that he was ‘the most substantial figure produced by the Liberal party since the party itself was created by Menzies’.
Nothing of the sort can be said this time. The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’
None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny.
Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.
Obviously, the fact that such a party and such a leader can be on the verge of victory implies that the Labor side has done something dreadfully wrong. It’s the oldest cliche in politics for the losing side to claim that the problem is not the policies but inability to get the message across. In this case, however, I think it’s true. Gillard lost the voters early on with stunts like the consultative assembly, and never managed to get them to listen to her for any length of time. Rudd was doing well in communicating his vision from his return to the leadership until he called the election. He then wasted three weeks on small-bore stuff apparently aimed at Katter party preferences. He seems finally to have rediscovered his voice, with the launch speech and his Q&A appearance, but I fear it’s too late.
Still, in the unlikely event that any undecided voters are reading this, I urge you to take a serious look at the alternative government, and place the LNP last on your ballot in both houses of Parliament.
John Quiggin 
@John Quiggin
Fair enough. For something different can I put in a plug for @WePublicHealth (citizen journalism project by Croakey) where we’re trying to get #climate&health on the agenda?
Given that Abbott is prepared to even abandon the 5% emissions reduction target, (as well as all the other concerns above) should all be doing what we can rather than arguing I agree!
@Val
Can you be specific about what the problem actually is? From your first post I gather it’s ‘unbalanced’ criticism. You seem willing to concede that the government at various points made serious mistakes and was morally in the wrong. To me that sounds like reasonable synonyms for incompetent and deceitful, so I don’t follow why these are unbalanced criticisms of policy. It might be unbalanced if there were never any discussion of policies that are to the governments credit but a quick perusal of this blog shows that’s not the case.
Alternatively it might be unbalanced if it were only the JG government as opposed to Rudd Labor or the Coalition that was criticised in this manner, but that’s not the case either. In particular, AFAICT the Coalition comes in for far more criticism than either Labour government, both on this blog and in progressive circles generally, so I cannot see how any reader would come away with the idea that Abbott was *more* competent or trustworthy.
Finally, on the subject of balanced criticism I’m also very confused by some of the accusations you make. For instance, you seem happy to accept the validity of all of the reasons that Ikonoclast gives for his criticism but call him irrational anyway. But more generally these comments seem to imply that critical left-wing commentators should somehow bear more responsibility for the probably Abbott government than Labor itself.
Abbott does have a coherent political philosophy. We can discern what it is from the fact of his weekly consultations with Cardinal Pell. However he knows it is political poison and has been remarkably successful at hiding it.
Since we are over 50 comments, I’ll repeat my request to defer discussions of misogyny and Rudd v Gillard for another thread. Anything I see after this will be deleted.
Deleted as stated above – JQ
I have a practical question on how to vote to attempt to keep the Coalition out on account of how I think the earth looks pretty with icecaps and Bangladeshi people look better when they’re not drowned. I just found out that I’m in the Federal Electorate of Hindmarsh. I admit that it took me ten years of living in the middle of it to find that out, which may seem a bit slack, but at this particular moment I am overflowing with civic virtue and I’d like to use my new knowledge to the benefit of my fellow human beings.
The internet tells me that in the last Federal election the votes went Labor 44.5%, Liberal 39%, Greens 12.1%, about 3.5% for little parties, and about 1% informal votes. So in the upcoming election a likely outcome is that neither Labor nor Liberal will gain a majority, which will cause preferences to determine the outcome. In this case, since the Greens get such a large portion of the primary vote, it seems likely that the preferences of the tiny parties would be what determines which party wins and the preferences of those who gave their primary vote to the Greens are unlikely to come into it. So if my goal is to minimize human deaths resulting from climate change, it appears to me that the most effective way I can vote is to give my primary vote to Labour and vote for the Greens in the senate. Does that seem reasonable or is my thinking flawed?
JQ:
I don’t find this obvious at all. I have no doubt at all that Labor have made many mistakes, of both substance and presentation, but there are one or two potential causal forces besides the behaviour of the major parties.
How about, for example, the character of the electorate? Mightn’t it have some responsibility in all this? I suspect a lot of motivated quasi-reasoning. Australians know full well that our treatment of Asylum-seekers is disgraceful, and equally that we must tackle the fossil fuel mafia soon, and head-on. The choice to look away from these realities and focus on fictions is just that, a choice, presumably motivated in part by a (common enough) failure of courage. Given Australia’s childish and rigid gaze-averting, there’s little a well-meaning political party can do short of staging a coup.
I thought Abbott had finally abandoned his ‘human shield’ strategy (ie. his daughters) for a ‘don’t let any candidates speak’ strategy, but apparently the human shields have been invoked by Abbott again today.
another letter from my invisible mp.
says i will be $500:oo better off after they ditch what they call “the carbon tax”.
it’s all plaque and don’t believe it.
he he.
i hope it comes through.
http://wonkette.com/527351/neverending-nice-time-aussie-pm-kevin-rudd-smacks-down-bible-guy-on-gay-marraige#more 527
@Ronald Brak
I think your reasoning is based on an incomplete understanding of how preferential voting works. You write ‘since the Greens get such a large portion of the primary vote … the preferences of those who gave their primary vote to the Greens are unlikely to come into it’. There is no such automatic relationship as would justify that statement.
RB,
I concur with J-D; even assuming that the primary votes exactly matched the previous election (the minors were actually 4.4% in 2010), it’s certainly not true that the Greens votes would not be counted. Until one of the two leading candidates secures an absolute majority (=50% + 1 of the formal votes), preferences continue to be distributed. In fact, the Labor candidate obtained fewer of the preferences of the minors than either the Liberal or the Greens candidates, and was still short of the holy grail, and the distribution of the Greens’ preferences was his ultimate ticket to re-election. If anything, it seems likely Labor will do relatively worse this time, so the Greens’ preferences will certainly be distributed.
The key to the ultimate effect of your vote is the relative placement of the Labor and Liberal candidates. I note that there are seven candidates in Hindmarsh and what will decide the effect of your vote even if you have Labor 6, Liberal 7 or vice versa, is whether one of the majors is ahead of the other. So given your expressed view (which I share) is a wish to minimise the likelihood of a Liberal victory, or if that is inevitable, to minimise the likelihood of a landslide, you should ensure that the Liberal candidate is placed below his Labor opponent on your ballot (and ensure that you indicate all seven preferences to cast a formal vote).
Those of us who said all along that the return of THLV would make no positive difference to the outcome are going to have to resist the urge to say “I told you so.”
It now seems certain that the ALP’s craven capitulation to Murdoch and its uncritical adoption of a policy as brutal as Howard’s on asylum seekers has been a complete failure. THLV has run the worst campaign I can recall, especially given that he had no challenger white-anting him.
Although I won’t be casting a formal vote, I’m clearly going to be unhappy at the result, but that’s what happens when both sides try to appeal to the most unworthy of human impulses.
J-D and PJF, yes, my thinking does appear to be flawed. While it seems certain that if neither Labor or Liberals get a majority the minor parties will have their second preferences distributed before the Greens do as the Greens will almost certainly get the third largest number of primary votes, but I can’t actually come up with a scenario where this matters. I’m glad I ran this by you. Thank you.
If Tony is going to hurt you guys just get ready for a possible celebration on Saturday with two events.
1. We might beat the Springboks.
2. The thoroughly obnoxious Sophie Mirabella looks set to get thumped in Indi by a very smart independent.
It seems to me that the LNP tap into some zeitgeist on cost of living because of the one item in the basket that no one talks about; the cost of housing. Seriously, my kids have much better jobs than I did at their age, but I would seriously question if their standard of living (after discounting for advances in technology) is much improved due to the huge price they pay for housing.
As for Mr Rudd, he appears to have adopted his own version of ‘whatever it takes’, which in the end has led to some very silly announcements (like sailing the Navy north, in the middle of an election, please?).
But what has struck me about this election is the level of economic illiteracy, not from the general public (which possibly may be excused to some extent) but from the media. Most media commentary that is not blatantly partisan (as in we all know whom) has mainly been simplistic reiteration of the promises/deficits meme. In this regard the ABC has been as bad as the rest. At first I thought they were just drifting to the right (for which there is some evidence) but after watching Leigh Sales interview both Mr Rudd and Mr Abbot, it became apparent from her line of questioning that she didn’t know the significance of her own questions, and therefore could not ask relevant follow up questions as she was merely channelling the MSM commentariat. All fluff and no substance.
But my favourite moment was Fran Kelly on Radio National asking the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, a person whose sole job it is to peddle excessive debt to households, and a task at which his organisation has been very successful (with household debt at about 140% GDP) whether Australia’s public debt was a disaster (at around 10% of GDP). The irony.
Unfortunately I have yet to hear from the MSM any serious discussion on unemployment, capacity utilisation, the role government can play through fiscal policy, the role of monetary policy and why QE in the US and UK has been so slow to kick-start their economies, what were the drivers of the GFC, and in which ways are government not like households. Yet everyone keeps saying it is all about the economy.
I just hope for all our sakes we don’t end up in ‘well, no one saw that coming’ moment.
@Fran Barlow
I am completely baffled. Who or what is THLV? After looking up Google for enlightenment I can only presume you don’t mean;
Taxe d’habitation sur les logements vacants (THLV).
@James
You are right about the level of economic illiteracy. However from my own experience, I can say the attempt to become economically literate from a layperson’s position is very difficult. The difficulties include but are not limited to (as they say);
(1) Economics, broadly understood, is not a science and can never be a science.
(2) The subject is properly Political Economy and not Economics in any case.
(3) Ideology, self interest and sectional interest are always at work.
From the layperson’s point of view there is the question of authority. Who can the layperson take as a reliable authority on economics? Before the 2008 Financial Crisis, a layperson might have taken the econonomic orthodoxy at that time to be a reliable authority. This would have been especially the case if said layperson was a not a reader of history or academic and philosophical treatises on economics or political economy. In other words, she or he would have formed an opinion based on current news, commentary and public debates.
The economic orthodoxy before the 2008 Financial Crisis was neo-classical and monetarist. It has been the dominant and orthodox position for about 30 or more years. One of the tenets of that faith was that the Great Moderation had occurred. This thesis and several others were blown out of the water by the 2008 Financial Crisis. Without paying close attention, you wouldn’t know this, because much debate has continued on as if the central theses of neo-classical and monetarist economics had not been refuted.
If you have been paying attention, the message is “don’t trust the orthodoxy”. Then the dilemma is which heterodox theory one should to listen to. As soon as you explore heterodox theories (and older orthodoxies) you just begin to understand how complex and contentious the field is.
And always the problem is this. Since the field is not a hard science how can any objective truth be determined about economics? Since politics always conditions economics how can economics be studied without reference to politics?
@James
And you are also correct to say;
“Unfortunately I have yet to hear from the MSM any serious discussion on unemployment, capacity utilisation, the role government can play through fiscal policy, the role of monetary policy and why QE in the US and UK has been so slow to kick-start their economies, what were the drivers of the GFC, and in which ways are government not like households. Yet everyone keeps saying it is all about the economy.”
To determine who is speaking bulldust I always use the heuristic (rule of thumb) that if they only speak about secondary nominal* phenomena (the budget position) and not about primary real phenomena (unemployment, capacity under-utilisation, availability of real resources) then they are talking bull. Of course, these (the real and the nominal) both have to be spoken about but in proper context and relation and with due attention to what is primarily important namely the real and not the notional.
* Note: An unemployed person is empirically real and so is his/her unemployed condition. Money and budget numbers are not real, they are nominal. Certainly, there is a secondary social reality to money and its operations but primarily in terms of materially measurable ontology it is not real. In its essential nominal aspect, it is not a real material-energetic existent. The very fact that fiat money can be created ex nihilo alerts us to the fact that is not real (it does not obey the law of conservation of matter and energy) and that its quantities are settings chosen by arbitrary or rational or rationalised means.
@Ikonoclast
I agree, and as an occasional lay reader in economics I am aware of the disjuncture between orthodox neo-classical (and their recent offshoots, as in JQ’s post on market monetarism) and the more heterodox alternatives, and the confusion this engenders.
But getting back to the alternative PM, I think the election debate (if it can be so called) makes more sense when subjected to a Foucauldian analyses. The political discourse is primarily about power relationships (in this case a naked accession to government), and the requisite jockeying for authority to both define and proscribe the subject matter through language and content.
In this matter Abbot has been far more successful than the fractured Labor team, and the lament by JQ that ‘None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny’ while of interest from an academic perspective is almost totally irrelevant (as we will most likely see come Saturday night).
The broader issue is that the political discourse has no internal impetus to align with rational argument or empirical evidence, and so can continue to produce toxic outcomes as in, for example, the breakdown between wages and productivity growth over the last thirty years, without collapsing from internal contradictions. The distinction here is not between democratic and authoritarian governments, but in the unceasing push for ascendancy by the powerful over the powerless.
The observation that the left have failed to produce a coherent alternative to neoliberalism largely misses the point, because a coherent alternative must also reframe the political discourse by effectively destroying the current orthodoxy, and we are nowhere near achieving that goal at this point in time. One has only to observe Labor’s failed efforts to sell limited social justice and equity initiatives from within the neoliberal framework. It is little wonder this appears to be both impotent and incompetent in the current discourse, and will most likely be rewarded as such.
@crocodile Two things that will make me very happy.
But it’s not enough.
I think an Abbott government could implode within a year. Triggers include austerity killing the recent 2.6% economic growth, the public wanting more than lip service on emissions and some kind of detention camp incident. Abbott is too doctrinaire to compromise on these issues. If he did adopt a softer stance for political survival the public may not take it well. Equally if he takes the hard man stance all the way to a double dissolution it could backfire. The LNP could remain in the doldrums for at least two terms. My gut feeling is that Abbott is a oncer.
Hear hear Ikon. Fran, stop the cute acronyms and call a spade a bloody spade. I assume you’re referring to Rudd. I quite disagree, but I think that you are definitely flouting our host’s request that we don’t talk about our current and previous PMs.
@Hermit Thankfully Hermit there appear to be clear signals that a Coalition government will not go down the austerity path. Which is a marked break from the right across the globe, but very welcome. I expect that the senior Treasury bureaucrats and the RBA will privately argue in the strongest possible terms against austerity, and Hockey I rate at least as highly as Swan (faint praise). It’s probably my greatest relief, that macro settings probably won’t be tinkered with too much.
@Ikonoclast
The current PM, with whose name I won’t profane this place, at least until he is defeated.
@James
I actually agree with your subjecting the debate to a Foucauldian discourse analysis. I consistently reduce political economy analysis to the material and do so in both a Marxist and a biophysical economics sense. It would only be a superficial reading of Marx which said “the (material) base conditions the (ideological) superstructure” and left it at that. The reality is that the conditioning goes both ways in continuous feedback loops and also that the ideological superstructure (as discourse for example) functions to legitimise existing material relations. The discourse also functions to rule some concepts “in court” and other concepts “out of court”.
You say;
“The broader issue is that the political discourse has no internal impetus to align with rational argument or empirical evidence, and so can continue to produce toxic outcomes as in, for example, the breakdown between wages and productivity growth over the last thirty years, without collapsing from internal contradictions.”
I think this statement sums up our dilemma very well. Perhaps I would substitute the words “inequitable and maladaptive” for “toxic” although “toxic” is also literally true when we look at the toxins our production system is releasing into the bioshpere without abatement or remediation.
Then you go on to say the system can go on doing this without collapsing from internal contradictions. It can do so for a long time (as compared to human life spans) but it cannot do so indefinitely. An internal contradiction is that wages cannot continue to lag productivity indefinitely; not in the sense that wages draw a lesser and lesser share of income compared to profits. This trend has an end-point at the point of revolution and/or the minimum reproductive cost of labour.
Also, external contradictions exist. That is contradictions between the system and the sustaining environment. Again, we cannot indefintely grow, with ever greater production, consumption and waste.
Thus while the the political discourse has no internal impetus to ever align with rationality it will at some stage have an impetus to align at least somewhat with empirical evidence and the final conditioning power and primacy of the material base, including the capacities of the biosphere. Even if it takes another 20 years.
@Fran Barlow
But what does THLV stand for?
@Ikonoclast
“The Happy Little Vegemite” (He once self-described in these terms). Occasionally, for variety, I’ve called him His Vegemiteness
@James
Despite having a political lineage far closer to Marx than Hegel, I find what you’ve written above an interesting application of the Foucauldian paradigm. It’s probably as good a tool as any through which to understand the absurdity of what counts as political in mainstream discourse.
Well done …
I’d like to agree but, as wilful says, there doesn’t appear to be much evidence the Coalition will actually go for austerity. In fact, on their current promises, they’ll take a little longer to reach surplus than a returned Labor government would. I’m unconvinced that a detention camp incident would affect public opinion (sadly). Numerous incidents in the past, including hunger strikes, suicides and riots, appear to have made precious little difference to public opinion, so I don’t see much reason to suppose they will in future.
As for climate policy, it seems very likely that the “direct action” policy (which is deliberately uncosted) is headed for the dustbin. Whether or not the Coalition will come up with some kind of alternative take policy remains to be seen, but it appears to me that public concern about climate change is rather diminished due to the years of partisan stoushing and confusing misinformation, as well as heightened concern over the economy since the GFC. Still, the windback of any substantial policy will ensure that climate change policy is still an arena for dispute and controversy for years to come. However, I doubt it would be enough to make the government implode.
If Abbott fails to achieve a conservative majority in the Senate, that may actually prove to be a benefit for his government. An inability to repeal the carbon pricing scheme would be unlikely to cause much political damage to his government (since he could blame it on his opponents), and, since the scheme is moderately effective and the price will drop once the ETS component kicks in, public opposition to it will almost certainly diminish substantially over time (as with the GST). A hostile Senate would also remove the ability for the more radical right-wingers in his party to push him to introduce ideological policies which could cause him electoral problems down the track (a la Workchoices). The result could be a relatively moderate Abbott government.
Of course, the way things are going, there could be a right-wing majority in the Senate.
“alternative take policy” was meant to read “alternative token policy”.
Thanks Fran. I was wondering about that myself. I must say I prefer this to your previous moniker for him.
@wilful
Just a bit of light-hearted banter. I can’t say I’m impressed with either choice so I don’t really think that you can really say that Tony is undeserving. Just reflect a bit on Kevin’s campaign and disect what he has done.
– Assumed the leadership with “No more negativity” and “A new way”. Didn’t happen.
Fail
– Completely unable to defend his debt and defecit position. Poor salesman
Fail
– Recruits the Obama team to run his campaign
Fail
– Parachutes Peter Beattie into Forde when a sound local was seemingly liked among the locals
Fail
– Parachutes Jason Yat-Sen Li into Bennelong to shore up the asian vote. The local Chinaman around here is a bit smarter than that. See right through it.
Fail
– Unable to defend his carbon pricing regime. Not a single mention of the investment opportunities for the business savvy wanting entry into an emerging market.
Fail
– Could not hold his senior ministry together. They’ve all retired for “personal reasons”
Fail
Can’t be bothered looking for any more.
Do you really want this buffoon to run the show just because he might be slightly better than Tony. The dearth of quality candidates on both sides is lamentable. What have we done over the last couple of decades to reach this point.
They may not be up to much, but the electorate cannot by the wildest imaginative stretch be said to be calling them to anything higher. The pollies we deserve, etc.
@Crispin Bennett
Yes Crispin, but why ? What has been done over last twenty years to get to this point. This is not rhetorical, I actually don’t know.
@Fran Barlow
But Fran, what do you do when a substantial part of the electorate shows itself (OVER and OVER) to be ignorant and racist, and subject to manipulation by the Liberal Party on that score?
To save the Australian Government from the Liberal Party’s slash-and-burn Commission of Audit (as in Qld), might it not be necessary to neutralise the refugee issue by appearing just as horrible as the Liberals?
It has just been SO obvious that the Liberals use refugees as a distraction from their impending cuts. When Tony Abbott was getting asked about costings, he brought out a new refugee policy. When he was copping heat about costs, he proposed buying Indonesian boats.
It just seems so plain that the Liberals manipulate not only racists but also enlightened people on the Left. The Libs know that they can push certain buttons and the Left (with the best intentions) gets distracted.
Maybe the Australian Left will one day learn what the East Timorese learnt when Indonesia wanted a civil war in East Timor as an excuse for a full-scale invasion. The East Timorese retreated. The Australian Left seems incapable of doing likewise, and so dooms the Australian Government to the control of people like Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey.
@crocodile
I’ve decided not. I’m not inclined to the view that he would be slightly better than Tony, at least in qualitative terms. This overpersonalises of course. THLV could be every bit as bad as he is now, but if his party was enacting non-fundamentally objectionable policies and Abbott was enacting such policies, despiute being entirely personable, I’d still prefer the THLV-led ALP. It seems an improbable scenario.
Allowed politics to become like sports — a series of sound bytes built around a narrow contest ebtween people pitching at the galleries so that they can enact policies that serve the privileged while kidding us that they want “to govern for all Australians”. Mr Abbott will say that on Saturday night, following an election night tradition, and it will be at least as bogus and self-serving as every previous one.
It’s not really about the candidates though. It’s about the paradigm of governance we have — and its configuration — which is designed first of all to secure the rights of the best resourced property holders against everyone else. Once you have that as your core system attribute, all else follows. Good, bad or indifferent — it doesn’t matter a jot, because they will be ignored by the executive whenever they can’t reconcile their proposals with that core system attribute. How that maps is mainly specified by the mass broadcast media in this country which is mainly an expression of Murdoch.
The major parties know this and unsurprisingly factor Murodch’s likely conduct into most of their public policy calculations. In political parlance, this is what they mean when they decide “how a policy will play” or to whom they have to “sell” it.
It’s little wonder then that few people distinguished by their perspicacity, policy insight and a desire for equity bother with politics in the traditional sense.
@crocodile If I could answer that with any degree of confidence, I’d be writing it up and then nudging my acquaintances to put me up for a Nobel. But I’m heartily bored of politician-blaming.
@Sad Sam
Assuming you don’t see these attributes as virtues which you could eventually deploy in favour of the privileged with you as broker …
You make your number one goal to subvert the dominant paradigm. You specify it in public. You return the attention of the public to that idea at every iteration of policy. You accept that this means that you will often be out of office and are not the natural party of governance because your principal goal is to serve working humanity rather than its enemies.
You argue for social inclusion and insistently point out every instance where people are bing marginalised — at governance time, in the workplace or wherever it appears. You develop policies that point to an alternative world in which all can be ethical equals.
You stress the integrity of the journey as much as the goal, and whenever the parties of property win, you hold them accountable rather than apologise for them. If you achieve government you act boldly so that your base has a reason for wanting you to survive.
It’s not that hard really.
Well, we have arrived at this point because Western society is intellectually and emotionally sclerotic (meaning in this case rigid and unresponsive). The world views of our elites and of the propadandised masses have hardened into dogmatic ideology. The dogmatic ideology is that of corporate capitalism which considers itself (eternally) victorious after the fall of the Berlin Wall (a real event with mythology added) and the inaugeration of the Great Moderation (complete mythology).
A common enough characteristic of victory followed by triumphalist self-congratulation is the belief that an eternally valid and perfect formula for success has been found. Once you believe you have found the perfect formula you don’t believe further investigation and learning or changes (in essential method) are necessary. This is where Western civilization find itself. And it is now incapable of changing from within. It will take exogenous shocks to do it i.e. a shocks from other civilizations and/or shocks from the environment. I suspect a whole battery (no pun intended) of both will occur. (By “whole battery”, I mean a series of battering blows which will destabilise and critically challenge our entire system.)
@Crispin Bennett
I don’t think the politician can be blamed entirely. Something is wrong when both parties are unable to attract sufficient numbers of quality representatives. The ones they have now are the best that they can attract. I’ll have stop scratching my head, keep getting splinters.
@Fran Barlow If you really believe the average corporate-marketing-addled Aussie could be won over by such a strategy, then we must live in different worlds indeed (I do confess to being in benighted Brisbane, where any human activity not involving leaf-blowers or similar fossil fuel-powered items is considered subversive).
@crocodile Well, I think there are a reasonable number of decent and thoughtful people in politics. But many more will reject politics to work in arenas where they’re less subject to democracy.
@Fran Barlow
“Subvert the dominant paradigm”?
You assume that ordinary people are basically good-hearted, but just misguided. I don’t share your optimism and I also must say I find that view somewhat patronising, as if those people aren’t consciously and freely choosing to adopt the view that they do in fact hold.
It’s not just the suits in the CBD driving the Porsches over the bodies of refugees who are at fault.
The outer-suburbanites and others who allow the rich Libs to play on their prejudices are also at fault.
I don’t see why the government should be allowed to be put in the hands of the rich just to accommodate certain crazy people on the outer and at the bottom.
@Sad Sam
Hmm … so much to unpack …
I really don’t. I assume that almost all people including the “ordinary” (which I will read as “not especially socially privileged”) are capable of learning. They may learn (or fail to learn) of their own possibility, their connectedness with others, the extent to which they may have common legitimate interests, and where these are likely to part company.
The elite are far better at calculating where their interests lie, and they also have far more scope to take action likely to advance those interests. Inevitably, given that resources are limited, these advancements will be in substantial part at the expense of the non-privileged. The non-privileged, for their part, infer (not unreasonably) that the resources needed to advance substantially their their material prospects as a class are unlikely to exist and even if they did, that they would not be surrendered. There being nobody apparently willing and capable of leading a struggle for a better division for the class as a whole, they engage in adaptive behaviour — seeking to solve their problem at an individual level through various combinations of cognitive dissonance, a focus on their own minor privileges, manoeuvering for position with those more privileged than they are, anomie and of course misnathropy directed outwards at those less empowered than they are.
This provides fertile ground for variously atomising those who are socially excluded and co-opting the more articulate of this cohort to support the elite. Key though is the idea that social arrangements can never be just since that is critical if adaptive behaviour is to be elicited. Accordingly, our government officials from both sides sing from fundamentally similar songsheets.
That’s wrong in two ways. Firstly, if it is correct, then it scarcely matters if it is patronising or not. This temptation to avoid telling inconvenient truths merely because “it won’t play well” is one of the more persistent features of political life in western societies. We see some of it at the trivial level with the oft-repeated “cost-of-living-pressures” meme. If people are being hoodwinked or are parties to their own disempowerment, it is a duty to try to get them to understand that and if some suffer hurt pride, then so be it.
More broadly though what people choose “consciously and freely” is rather debatable. If you hold a figurative gun at people’s heads and give them two poor options, they will choose a poor option. If people come to believe that the world can never be just, if empowerment and equitable dealing simply isn’t possible they will “freely and consciously” choose the form of exclusion and inequity that serves them best, as far as they can grasp it, and repeat the ethical warrant with which they justified this choice to others. Few like to be seen as bad people after all, so they have every reason to borrow the ethical defences offered to them by those in authority. These are massively circulated, ready to hand and used, in their estimation by most others. Some may be troubled by this, but since there’s little they can do to address their doubts, it’s just easier to compartmentalise and move on.
Very much so. It’s also a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Imprisoned in the system, they begin to identify with their gaolers, picking from amongst them the most congenial to support.
It’s already in the hands of the rich. It has never been out of their hands. N_E_V_E_R … One must acknowledge also that it may never be out of their hands. The same processes that allow the privileged to become privileged allow the privileged to remain so. If that is to be undone, it will take an extraodinarily subversive effort on the part of the left to acquaint working humanity with the possibility of something fundamentally better. We will need to find ways of engaging people in activity that undoes their belief that this is as good as it gets and that it’s either this or something much worse.
If we fail to do that then this really will be as good as it gets.
as a slight aside on the discussion and the information people have at their disposal to come to an opinion.
i was chatting to a lady recently on the electoral system we have here.
she has recently arrived from Somalia.
and from somewhere had got it into her head that there were cameras above the polling booths to record every person and how they voted.
i think i managed to convince her that this is not so,but i’m not sure.
we in this country,are pretty much in the same position.
it seems that from “somewhere”we have got it into our heads that things are much worse than they really are .
The ALP really must be such profligate spenders after all. I see avuncular Joe has only managed to squeeze out 6 billion, 4.5 from foreign aid. The mind boggles.
Seeing the vast, VAST quantity of misinformed posts on forums/Facebook using the analogy of government spending to a household budget makes me want to bang my head repeatedly on the wall until the hurt goes away. Apart from tiny differences such as scale, scope, form and function, they are absolutely identical. What is a public good? What is a multiplier? What is an automatic stabilizer? One may just as well equate a car to a space shuttle, since, after all, they are both capable of motion.
That’s over 4 years!!!!
@Will
Couldn’t agree more, Will. Couldn’t agree more. And the cock-sure George W Bush certainty with which they insist that governments deficits are always bad, in complete ignorance of macroeconomics 101…