Ken Parish has a couple of interesting posts on First steps to constitutional reform. In his latest he revives the proposal of David Solomon to Elect the Governor-General!.

A lot of Ken’s discussion has to do with the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister and the ‘elephant in the corner’ everyone is ignoring, the possibility of another crisis caused by a Senate refusal of supply. I have a different perspective, perhaps a surprising one for a Whitlam fan.

A lot of concern about direct election has been the prospect that Presidential power will weaken the democratically elected government and particularly the Prime Minister. As a born-again conservative believer in checks and balances, I welcome this. The idea that the possession of a majority in the House of Representatives, typically based on 40 per cent of the vote or so, entitles the PM to act as an elective dictator is not one that appeals to me. And looking at the support for minor parties in the Senate and the increasing numbers of independents and hung parliaments it seems that the same is true of the Australian electorate as a whole.

Our democratic system is strengthened by the fact that we have a democratically elected Senate as well as a democratically elected House of Reps. Neither is perfect – the Senate because each state has equal representation and the House because a constituency system overweights big parties. On the whole the Senate is better, but the House typically provides a majority that can sustain an executive government.

There’s an obvious problem if these two disagree bitterly, and at present such problems must be resolved by an unelected Governor-General, subject to near-instant dismissal by the PM. An elected President would have the legitimacy in resolving such a problem that John Kerr so conspicuously lacked.

More generally, if the elected President used his or her mandate to cause trouble for the PM of the day, for example by critical comment in the manner of Sir William Deane, or by exercising discretion with regard to the calling of elections, so much the better as far as I am concerned.

Update As usual, there’s lots of excellent stuff in the comments thread. A question of particular interest to me is whether it is worth trying to codify the powers of the Head of State before, or as part of, a shift to an elected presidency. Another question that interests me is whether there really are a lot of ‘conservative republicans’ out there. The ARM approach was based on the premise that there were, and that they represented the crucial swinging constituency. It seems to me however, that a model with a reasonably strong elected president would attract more in monarchist support than it would lose among conservative republicans.
PS Be sure to check the comments thread over in Ken’s blog, which also has lots of good stuff

Bizarre Science lives up to its name with a post premised on the assumption that economists aren’t qualified to comment on the economics of global warming.
An added bonus for the first reader to spot the gratuitous, if marginal, violation of Godwin’s Law.

(Link via Gummo Trotsky)

After getting so much good publicity lately, a lot of Ozploggers, beginning with Gary Sauer-Thompson have been discussing whether blogging is the new forum for public intellectuals. Inevitably, mention has been made of Richard Posner’s book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline . It’s not a great book, but it has its moments, and of course it has that essential for a bestseller, a list. I reviewed it for the Fin Review a while back. Here’s a short extract:

For an Australian reader, though, the really striking feature of Posner’s list is the obscurity of so many of the names on it. and especially of the American academic public intellectuals who are the primary focus of the book. I could only recognise about half the names in this category, and my efforts were boosted by the overrepresentation of economists in the list, reflecting the fact that my academic roots and Posner’s are much the same.

Although we are allegedly living in a globalised world, it is evident that the market for public intellectuals remains nationally segmented. Each country, it seems wants to hear its own policy problems discussed in its own accent. To illustrate this point, a Google search of Australian websites gives over 900 references to Donald Horne and over 2400 to the late Manning Clark, compared to just over 100 for William F. Buckley and 33 for William Kristol. Even rank-and-file Australian public intellectuals (such as the present reviewer) are better represented on Australian websites than these giants of the US scene.

Although the Australian (political) blogworld began as an offshoot of the US warblogger scene, and people like Tim Blair remain primarily attuned to that scene, a similar pattern is now emerging as ‘Ozplogistan’ becomes a real (virtual) community, rather than a mere collective noun.

Samela Harris in The Advertiser gives nice plugs to Tim Blair, Gary Sauer-Thompson and me, managing a local angle by mentioning that I am Adelaide-born.

At the end of a long and learned post Scott Wickstein awards the palm to “John Quiggin – Ozplogistan’s best beard”.

As Scott correctly observes “The Romans were quite insistant on this issue, and they regarded facial hair, and trousers, as the mark of a barbarian. ” In fact, the word “barbarian” means “bearded”.

Update Even blind Homer nods. I was confusing Latin barba “beard” with Greek barbaroi (babble or speak like a foreigner. Thanks to Robert and Scott for correcting this error. Actually the word appears to have come into English via Latin and it may well have gained popularity in Latin because of the association with beards. A comparable case is “hype” originally from “hypodermic”, but gaining strength from the fact that it can also be regarded as a short form of “hyperbole”.

It’s back! Give your views on any topic in the comments thread for this post. I’ll try to spin out a new thread for anything that looks interesting. However, as someone once remarked about universities, trying to keep order in a comments thread is like herding cats. As before the rules are
1. Civilised discussion and no coarse language
2. There is no Rule 2

Jason Soon refers to student criticism of a public statement by Sydney academics professing their Christianity and asks:

Would it surprise anyone if the people doing this condemning would be the first ones to defend the right of the same academics to sign anti-war and anti-WTO or pro-Kyoto petitions.

As one who has signed pro-Kyoto petitions I agree strongly with this. I also agree with Jason’s observation that

By the same token, neither should religious beliefs be exempt from criticism, even strong and robust criticism. If it is perfectly alright to excorciate ‘capitalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘communism’ it should be perfectly alright to mete out the same treatment to Christianity or Islam

I’d qualify this slightly. To the extent that religious views are proclaimed publicly and used to advance political and social arguments, both the arguments and the religious position behind them should be open to criticism. On the other hand, social norms of civility discourage criticism of purely private religious beliefs. The danger is that these norms are exploited by participants in public debate to insulate their positions from justified criticism.

I’ve been slowing down with the move – I just finished Palace Walk and I’m still partway through The Eustace Diamonds. In the absence of anything else to report, I thought I’d give a plug to Frank Moorhouse and his two-volume novel sequence on the ill-fated League of Nations, Grand Days and Dark Palace. His protagonist is an idealistic young Australian, Edith Berry, who confronts both the deceptive world of 1930s diplomatic manoeuvre and her own ambiguous sexuality.
Most advances in democracy are failures the first time around, and the movement towards a peaceful world based on democracy within countries and co-operation between them has had plenty of failures. But the last decade has seen more and more successes, even if most have involved messy compromises rather than glorious victories.
In sporting news, my son and I attained the rank of yellow belt in karate today. To give an idea of the status attached, if a black belt qualifies academics to tackle crazed gunmen, a yellow belt is about enough to prevent yourself being shoved out of the queue at the refectory. But with practice, we’ll continue to improve.

Scott Wickstein broadly agrees with me on Telstra, but notes

I must admit, I normally read the writings of these worthies with a cynical and suspicious eye. John Quiggin is certainly no friend of the government, and I must admit I tend to take a lot of his statements with a pinch of salt, especially on political economy- my own observation is that he will talk down or ignore anything that makes the government look good on the economy, and highlight the reverse, with unemployment being a case in point. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you are open about it. I’m a fan of the government, and I don’t mind who knows it, and anyone that reads this blog should take it into account.)

I don’t make any pretence of political neutrality, and I’m glad that Scott doesn’t either. In debate over social and economic issues, it’s almost impossible to be a neutral expert (or a neutral non-expert) and I think a clear statement of one’s position is far preferable to a pretence of neutrality.

However, while it’s true that I’m no friend of the government, this is more or less a chronic state with me – I was no friend of the last government either. On an issue like Telstra I’m anti-government because I’m anti-privatisation, not vice versa. Similarly, I don’t attack the government’s performance on unemployment because I want to undermine its economic credentials. Rather, I’m critical of its economic credentials because it’s done so little about unemployment.

To summarise, I’m happy to identify myself as an advocate for a particular political/economic viewpoint (social democracy for short), and readers should bear that in mind. But I make every effort to avoid being partisan in a party-political sense.

A great piece from Arianna Huffington pointing out that a combination of unpredictable electoral turnout and the refusal of Americans to answer the phone to pollsters has made opinion polls almost worthless, thereby potentially restoring old-style democratic listening. This raises a couple of questions. One is why telemarketers are such a plague in the US, but remain a modest annoyance here. I have no answer to this, but perhaps there are some differences in rules or calling costs that explain it.
The second is how Arianna Stassinopoulos, darling of the right in the 1970s and later the wife of millionaire Republican senate candidate Michael Huffington reached her current position as one of the most articulate and thoughtful critics of the status quo. Her answer is here.