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John Quiggin 
On these pages, over the years, I have been berating the ALP for its determination to lurch ever further to the right and consequent abandonment of any remaining shreds of genuine “left” values or policies.
There is an argument that goes along the lines: we have to be even more fascist than the LNP so that we can be elected and then, only once we have been elected on that basis, we can institute policies that reflect “labor values”.
We saw this particularly in ALP treatment of refugees both in policy and politically at the last election (but it extends to things like privatization of public services, lameness over climate change, asset sales, and adoption of free-market fundamentalism generally).
I tend to agree with Malcolm Fraser’s view that “the ALP and LNP are beyond reform”, and my criticism is not designed to try to change the ALP for the better but rather to get as many people as possible to accept that reality so that we might get a better alternative.
As we saw in Scotland recently, give the people a GENUINE (“left”) alternative to the neo-liberal/fascist duopoly and they will vote for it in droves.
This post – from the “left” pro-SNP – website “Wings Over Scotland” makes the same argument and backs it up with polling from an MSM outlet (which completely misses the point of its own polling).
A “left” victory is there for the taking but the operatives of the ALP (and to some extent they are supported in this by the operatives of the LNP) are determined to leave that space uninhabited in our electoral landscape.
It seems to me that the same thing also applies to the US and Canada, and NZ to a very slightly lesser extent.
@Megan
I absolutely agree with everything you say here. The ALP and LNP are indeed beyond reform. People do want a genuine party left or even middle-of-the-road party to vote for; not these two corporatised, crypto-fascist, bully-boy parties we have now. (Yes, I know I am channeling Neil from the Young Ones.)
Our very conservative electorates are afraid of the “left” tag and to some extent of the “green” tag. This is a shame IMO but I won’t go into my reasons now. People here are familiar enough with my thinking.
I hope The Greens will eventually rise to be our premier major party. All it will take is one or two salutary catastrophes unambiguously attributable to global warming and 90% of the population will go, “WTF! The Greens were right all along! Of course I knew it, I told you I knew it!” (People will employ soothing self-deception to get over the cognitive dissonance of having been wrong for so many years.)
Mind you, as soon as this happens the ALP and LNP will try to reposition themselves and make out that they were pro-green all along. We must never allow that. We must never forget their terminal moral turpitude on the climate, on refugees and on a host of other matters.
I’m confused: did someone say Bishop jumped the shark? Or Bishop was the shark? Either way, Fanning moved pretty smartly after the initial confrontation, putting the sort of distance between him and it that PM Tony Abbott could only dream of. See here for picture of shark not hunting surfer.
Is Peter Dutton going to apologise for his intemperate remarks concerning senator Sarah Hanson-Young—he called her “an embarrassment to the country”—which he made after she revealed that she was being spied on when checking Nauru’s off-shore detention of asylum seekers? It was a mighty rude whack at HY, prematurely and without foundation, as recent evidence has made exceptionally clear. Wilson Security apologised. It is pretty rough to say that a sitting senator is “an embarrassment to the country”, especially for her saying something which was borne out as factually correct. I’d say that if I were searching for a minister who is “an embarrassment to the country”, I would find a surfeit of riches, nuggets of fools gold all.
@Megan
And with our preferential voting system we have a chance of getting a new party. You can vote for the party you want, and give your preference to the ALP as a “better than the Libs” fall back position. In countries like the UK, all a new party would so is split the left vote and ensure endless tory rule. This is what happened in South Africa, where two opposition parties could not hope to defeat the National Party during the apartheid era.
But don’t we regularly throw up new parties? Democrats, Greens? Why don’t they succeed in the lower house if Labor is failing? And wouldn’t any new left party have to get the support of organised labour?
I’m feeling like throwing my hands in the air because its all too hard.
Has anyone noticed how much Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Fraser look alike? I contend that they are the same person. If anyone has seen them together in the same room please say so.
@John Brookes
No you can’t.
The ALP is NOT “better than the Libs”, that’s the point. They are – putting it at the highest – exactly as bad as the Libs, and deliberately so.
In Scotland, the SNP represented the broad traditional ‘left’ (universal healthcare for example, against the duopoly position of free-market fundamentalism) and absolutely wiped out those parties.
The Democrats were doing very well here in Australia until they got into bed (literally in one sense) with the fascist duopoly, and the Greens are looking worrying in that regard too.
@John Brookes
Both the Dems, and the Greens, have been around for a while; of course, the Dems imploded and ended the Don Chipp experiment of “keeping the bastards honest”, and look where that has got us, sadly.
The Greens have been collecting votes from here and there, partly because of the antics of the big two parties, but also through the collapse of the policy space on dealing with Anthropogenic Global Warming, leaving a vacuum from centre-right (i.e. half of the ALP) to Genghis Khan territory (i.e. where PM Tony Abbott resides, or a bit left of that spot); further more, the ALP’s crab-like shift on material issues affecting their asylum seeker policy settings for boat arrivals reviled more than one punter, so they lost ground there as well.
The difficulty for any relatively small political party in Australia is that one particular media baron simply pours scorn on them and mocks them without recourse in his papers; the rest of the media are too frequently caught up in the meta-politics, than interviewing actual politicians we voted into power. It’s a hard slog to get cut-through on national media when there are two dogs bigger and surlier than you are.
The Greens have matured as a party, hopefully through learning the lessons of how to negotiate the Australian version of political discourse; it will be fascinating to see if they can increase the number of ministers, and to whose detriment that is.
I was reading some of John’s older posts on property rights, but comments were closed on those posts. So I’ll post a thought here.
What if we think of all resources as initially being owned by “the future”. Now future individuals, by definition, don’t actually exist… so this is something of an abstract concept, but it leads to some interesting places.
For example, there is a sense that all active claims of ownership began originally with some injustice–some theft. This model captures that very clearly in that any initial acquisition of a resource can now be considered a mild form of theft. What’s especially interesting about this is that an act of theft, I believe, brings with it an obligation–an obligation to return the stolen item along with some interest. In other words, the mere act of living–which requires the use (theft) of resources from the future–implies a moral obligation to leave the world a better place.
Also, this model does not require any odd exceptions–e.g. the lockean proviso–to justify the redistribution of property after the initial allocation. The ideal redistribution method and means might still be–and might always be–impossible to determine, but the justification is cleaner.
To finish off with a news item appropriate for the heading of the thread:
“Krugman told CNN Sunday that he may have “overestimated the competence of the Greek government.”
“(The Greek government) thought they could simply demand better terms without having any backup plan,” he told the news channel in an interview. “So, certainly this is a shock.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/greece-debt-crisis-live-nobel-prize-winning-economist-paul-krugman-admits-he-overestimated-the-competence-of-the-greek-government-10401092.html
@Donald Oats
I disagree on the point about Murdoch (and, by extension the rest of our febrile establishment ‘media’ landscape).
When a non-duopoly politician stands up to them people pay attention. Murdoch is the wizened old man behind the curtain, but the Greens have decided to play dead just as they were about to pull aside the curtain.
I’m still trying to find out why – and I don’t have an answer yet – but it seems to me that they have been infiltrated by a class of “advisors”, especially media and policy, who might kindly be labelled ALP inclined. It is precisely the type of malady the post I linked to at #1 discusses.
Australia has banned accepting any UNHCR refugees from anywhere in the whole world for the last 9 months. I have been trying to get a comment from anyone in the Greens on this issue for the last few weeks and I have been totally ignored. I can’t even get a response on “Twitter”. Nothing.
The Greens may be scared of Murdoch, but if so they have lost any standing as anything other than a lite-sub-branch of the ALP. And I suspect they have deliberately decided to take that course.
Please Greens – prove me wrong??!!
@Megan
Nah. They aren’t as bad as the Libs. Although maybe it is a Walrus/Carpenter comparison.
@Rick R
” Now future individuals, by definition, don’t actually exist… so this is something of an abstract concept, but it leads to some interesting places.”
One can only think this way if one does not live in a world in which children babies and pregnant women, grandmothers and grandfathers are ‘real’ and not abstract concepts.
@Julie Thomas
I think you misread my original post. But either way, to clarify, I would say that human fetuses, babies, children etc are part of the set of “we the living” and the rather abstract idea I was talking about — the idea of “the future” owning all property — was not referring to anyone in the set of “we the living”.
@Rick R
Yeah probably, I do that quite often, jumping to conclusions has always been my favourite exercise, they say, and it is even more likely to be the case since I don’t know the context in which you say this, having not read the old posts.
What about this then?
“For example, there is a sense that all active claims of ownership began originally with some injustice–some theft.”
Surely it is ‘true’ that all ownership begins with theft, and it is not just “a sense”.
Just to indicate how corrupt capitalist politicians are, and the sort of social catastrophe they are unleashing…
An interesting speech by young British MP – Mhairi Black.
This is Australia’s future too unless we find an alternative economic strategy.
An interesting view from a back copy of Monthly review. It is still very topical. It asks question closely related to the issues Megan canvases in her original post above: that is about the general ineffectiveness of organised labour in the current crisis. As I see it, the abandonment of labour values by Labor parties is part of this ineffectiveness.
http://monthlyreview.org/2014/01/01/european-labor/
Some quotes which lay out the problem as of 2014:
“While the deepest and most serious economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s is unfolding, criticism of capitalism has more or less fallen silent. The trade union and labor movements no longer represent a general, credible alternative to a crisis-ridden capitalism generating mass unemployment, poverty, suffering, and misery in great parts of the European continent. To the degree unions have put forward alternative proposals, they have ignored strategies and shown neither the ability nor willingness to put to use the means of struggle necessary to gain ground. Trade unions at the European level have sharpened their rhetoric, but they have hesitated when it comes to the necessary mobilization to resist the attacks.
How has this been possible in a part of the world that has hosted some of the strongest and most militant trade unions and labor movements in the world? Why have opposition and resistance not been stronger? And how did we come to the point where social-democratic governments in Greece, Spain, and Portugal have accounted for some of the most serious attacks on unions and the welfare state—until resistance from the population and frustrated voters ousted them from office and replaced them with right-wing governments even more faithful to financial capital?”
“Much now suggests that the historical era of social democracy is over. This does not mean that political parties that call themselves Social Democratic (or Socialist, as they call themselves in southern Europe) will not be able to win elections and form governments, alone or with other parties. However, the role social democracy has played historically, as a political-party structure with a certain progressive social project, now seems to be irrevocably over. The original goals of social democracy—to develop democratic socialism through gradual reforms, place the economy under political control, and meet the economic and social needs of the great majority of the population—were given up a long time ago. Instead, what will be focused on is the role it played during its golden age—the age of welfare capitalism—as an intra-capitalist political party with a social project.”
The article goes deeper into these problems and issues.
@Donald Oats
I think “punched the shark” should enter the lexicon as taking decisive action in a crisis. Eg “Abbott finally punched the shark and demanded Bronwyn Bishop’s resignation”.
@Nevil Kingston-Brown
I suspect it is more Abbott’s style to “shirtfront the shark” and end up doing nothing.
@Nevil Kingston-Brown
“I punched the shark” is right up there with “I out-wrestled a Kodiak grizzly”.
@Megan
Sadly, yes. But what else is left (left) for us to do?
Chris Hedges tells it like it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-mrwMURq9k
Note: There is a glitch at about 15 mins in this video where it just goes back and repeats itself.
@totaram
The first thing to do is to abandon the ALP (if you support them or make a formal vote that goes to them, even if it is only by putting LNP last).
Let them know that they can’t just count on sliding into power on the back of your vote just because “Abbott would be worse” or you should “number every box and put LNP last”.
I don’t think the Greens are – yet – a completely lost cause, but support should be very strongly conditional (as it should be for any political party but sadly no longer is for die-hard ALP supporters).
Adani a step closer to admiting defeat.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/adani-stands-down-major-contractors-20150721-gih7h3.html
@Megan
Megan that article you linked to in your first post was very interesting. It reminded me of ALP actions over ‘allowing members a say in choosing the parliamentary leader’. So they gave members a say and they choose Albanese – whereupon the parliamentary party said ‘oh no we can’t have him’ and chose Shorten.
Fair enough Albanese wasn’t exactly a radical alternative, but at least he was a little more left than Shorten.
@Val
That’s a say, not thesay.
The members and parliamentary party each get 50% weight in deciding the new leader. This might or might not be the right balance, but Albo wasn’t vetoed by his colleagues.
It seems like every few days we get a Fairfax, SBS or ABC story based on “…News Ltd has reported…”.
And yet over the last 48 hours The Guardian has been running an exclusive based on leaked documents showing widespread fraud and low standards regarding their highly lucrative contracts for health services for refugees – and all other establishment media is silent.
Similarly, they have all run dead on the disappearance of yet another refugee boat this week off WA.
It fits the description of “conspiracy of silence”.
@Megan
The ABC has run three stories on the asylum seeker boat off WA since Monday. The last one was from 6:47pm last night, and reported that the police had refused to confirm the whereabouts of the boat or its passengers. You’re right about the Guardian exclusive, though.
@Tim Macknay
True, but when I said “run dead” what I mean is they don’t do any deeper journalism. They just report the basics and let the government get away with “operational matters…” without demanding answers.
They’re not putting much effort into it. And now the boat has disappeared.
Labor really is disappointing – Shorten’s nearly word for word repeat of Gillard’s regrettable “no Carbon Tax” statement shows just how lacking in conviction or courage Labor has become on the climate issue. He could have engaged in a vigorous defence of policy of Labor’s last government, and probably had good grounds for such defence, perhaps with suggestions for improvement – streets ahead of Direct Action and RET diminution of Abbott’s team even if it had it’s flaws. But it’s become a pattern – Rudd backed down when Turnbull lost the LNP leadership and bipartisanship vanished, like it wasn’t that great a moral challenge that he could negotiate with The Greens, and Gillard looked like it was never her idea and negotiated with The Greens out of desperation not conviction and never really fought for it after like it was something to be worth fighting for.
Just seeing current Labor making a vigorous defence of Carbon pricing under Gillard would be newsworthy and I suspect that conviction and courage, even for a policy perceived to be unpopular, gains more respect than ducking for cover ever does. Especially so when most Australians do accept that climate is a serious issue.
@Megan
Yes, the whole thing is very disturbing.
Heavens. Pulse found in ALP. Shorten’s cyborg transplant spine seen to be working because Bill Shorten set to announce 50% clean energy target at Labor conference. But wait, wait, no, it’s going down again, all of it, because … because it is not that the ALP will be captured in the future but because it already is captive. Current party structures of the ALP are entirely occupied by neoliberals.
@Ken Fabian
I agree with you last paragraph, but unfortunately the ALP has already ducked for cover on so-called carbon tax, pledging to never bring it back: they have a knee-jerk reaction to rule things out, and they’ve fallen for doing it from opposition. In opposition, the pressure isn’t on you to rule things out, it is on the government; the opposition can duck and weave, but ruling stuff out just constrains an opposition’s future strategies, without benefit. Furthermore, by ruling out a carbon tax, the ALP has given validity to the LNP’s line that the fixed carbon price was a tax. Oops.
“Tow Backs” is about to become official ALP policy, too.
Dead-set, I’m tempted to vote LNP at the next election just to give these fascists in the ALP a kick up the bum.
Tempted…. but I won’t. But I’ll continue to ensure the ALP doesn’t get a vote from me.
A few months ago here, some die-hard ALP zombie got terribly upset when I half-sarcastically suggested that the ALP could machine-gun refugees on the high seas and ALP fans would still vote for them anyway. Now we’re getting very close to actually sending refugees to their deaths as official ALP policy – and the ALP can still count on that core vote.
I’m not looking forward to finding out just how ultra-right wing this country can become under the current duopoly.
The ALP isn’t a political party.
It’s a brand.
Suggestions for a new party that could be voted for in good conscience are ignoring the fact that a party is not created by voters but by members. The membership of political parties is falling almost as fast as union membership, which is falling almost as fast as membership of any voluntary sector organisation – see the latest ABS social survey. The commentators above are perhaps willing to do the drudgery of setting up their own parties, but they’re plainly not willing to join other people’s, in which they resemble the average Australian – which is why political parties are out of touch. Wishing that everybody else would do what I’m not willing to is not a political program. Rewriting the Four Yorkshireman skit as a lament for a lost era of political values is not a political program. What’s your logic model?
Chiris, I’ve been a party member, and your story is plain wrong. Ordinary members do NOT count in any meaningful zense, regardless of numbers.
Technically, yes, a party is created by its members. It gets to government by its voters, and that’s the difficulty here. We don’t want a situation in which every voter is a member of a political party, for as members they can’t really vote for a different party, can they? It follows then, that it is not desirably for all voters to be members of a political party, as it would stick sand in the gears of democracy.
So, we have voters, and we have party members. Most of the larger parties were created around some core principles and ideas: it isn’t likely that these principles will automatically satisfy the vast majority of voters, perhaps not even all of the party members either. Once a party starts jettisoning its principles though, voters are entitled to take stock and to decide if that is sufficient reason to switch their preference to another party. There seems little point in becoming a member of a party when it is ditching the principles you want it it to live by.
When it comes to the vexed issue of asylum seekers who arrive by boat, the key principle should be to always act in accordance with full regard and accordance of their human rights, indeed with the international obligations Australia has agreed to obey. There is still plenty of scope in the eventual design of asylum seeker policy without needing to traduce human rights. If the ALP, with all of the resources at its disposal, cannot craft a workable policy which respects human rights, then they shouldn’t expect voters to go along with that just so they can beat Tony.
Sometimes the principle really matters.
@Donald Oats
I can’t really see the sense in your first paragraph. Why would it matter if every voter was a member of a political party? It’s true that people would generally vote for the party of which they are a member (although they can’t be forced to, because the secret ballot makes party rules on this point unenforceable). But so what? People would presumably be members of a party because they agree with its values and/or policies. If the party in government had policies that were unpopular, it would shed members as well as votes. But it’s a moot point, there has never been, and never will be (at least under our present system of more-or-less liberal democracy) a time when all voters are members of a political party.
James Hansen has more worrying news.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/james-hansens-new-climate-study-is-terrifying-but-he-still-has-hope/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=socialflow
Hey guys,
HSchool econ is my limits. Can someone help me understand why a raise in GST is preferable over a carbon (dioxide equivalent) tax. If we need x amount of dollars, why not price carbon so it produces x dollars, perhaps with redistribution. Does this not solve multiple problems for the same price?
When they say GST is an efficient tax, is that simply because it is ?impossible? to avoid, rather than income tax which has loopholes, or is there more to it? I imagine income tax is largely automated so why would an increase in GST (rather than an increase in the medicare levy or income tax) be more efficient?
Thanks
“Efficiency” here is all about avoiding deadweight losses, which come about because the shift in supply and demand curves with the new higher prices and lower profitablity means that less is produced and less is consumed than it would otherwise. Net utility loss.
When you draw the graphs you can see that the deadweight loss of a tax varies:
+ linearly with the fraction of the economy it’s applied to
+ with the square of the tax rate
… which means you get less deadweight losses if you tax lots of things a little than if you tax a few things a lot. This is real economics, btw, it’s why funding your government through only taxing a single thing [historical examples: land, salt, rice] doesn’t work hugely well.
[but flipside: the difference between “taxing 90% of the economy at 1%” and “100% of the economy at 0.9%” is not huge, and other effects come into play.]
@Megan
Megan please no don’t even joke about voting for the LNP. I despair when people like you and Fran talk about voting for the LNP/not voting.
There is an automaton talking on 7.30 at present
@Val
That’s probably like how I feel when people talk about voting for the ALP.
It’s tragically sad.
@Megan
Of course we can’t vote for the ALP if we have any morality. But to talk of voting for the LNP is even worse. Surely, I have seen you write, “Don’t vote for the duopoly.”
The Greens say:
“Q: I want to vote Green, and I can’t stand either of the big parties. What should I do?
A: Vote 1 for the Green candidate, then number the like minded minor-party and independent candidates in the order of your choice, finally numbering your least preferred candidate last. If you leave any boxes blank, your vote doesn’t count.”
This implies that in Federal elections there is no optional preferential voting. This still seems to be the case so far as I can see. This system eventually forces your preference to one of the duopoly parties unless neither wins the seat in question.
This heavily predisposes the system to the current duopoly unless a great mass of people can overcome their indoctrination. As we saw in Greece, people usually overcome their indoctrination into the system of capitalist “democracy” about the time they lose their jobs and houses and start starving. As it has come for the people of Greece this time will also come for the people of Australia. It’s the inevitable end-point of the capitalist system.
There will be a few metropoles of obscene wealth surrounded by a sea of 10 billion in poverty if a transformation of our system does not happen in time. This setup will not be sustainable politically or ecologically and will collapse into anarchy and barbarism. The “Maddaddam” novels of Margaret Atwood, sans the fantasy and magical realist elements, are a good prediction of where all this is headed.
News from France
The Government there is going full steam ahead to protect the environment – including removing Nuclear Power Plants and replacing with renewables.
Also, rough translation … €10,000 for every old diesel car traded for a new e-car (cash for clunkers revisited) … ban on house sales if the house does not meet minimum energy saving standards … support for e-charging stations
Looks like Tony “coal for humanity” will be very lonely at the Paris Conference and with BS going for a climate change election – my bet is Tony has to go early for an election to be safe.
Not much media response to the revealing admission from RBA Governor Glen Stephens that economic growth levels of 3 – 3.5% as a minimum to soak up new labour market entrants seems to have gone missing. I thought it very telling that this new reality had reached Australia and the normally cautious RBA boss.
Here is a typical example of how the sectarian leftists split up progressive movements:
From John Passant’s Blog…
They substitute their megaphone rhetoric for real development of social forces. This quote could come from any one of our campus-based Trots.
Real socialists should be doing what they can to ensure that any referendum is passed with a massive majority.