It’s striking that we have to declare a special National go Home on Time Day, and also striking (to me anyway) that I have only just found time to blog about it. My own chronic state of overcommitment is more of a personal choice than an imposition from above, but I have to take constant care not to expect a similar overcommitment from the members of my research team. On the whole, Australian bosses and managers are failing in that obligation, or don’t even recognise it. Anyway, knock-off time is coming up soon, so everyone, head for home, beach or pub as the fancy takes you.
Category: Oz Politics
Fruit loops
It is I think, comparatively rare for a senior political figure to describe equally senior members of their own party as “fruit loops” and “f…wits”, going on to observe that “They don’t know how crazy they look, because crazy people never do”.
But that was exactly the reaction to last Monday’s Four Corner’s program in which Liberal Party Senate Leader Nick Minchin and others went on camera to spout delusionist conspiracy theories of the type Kevin Rudd had pre-emptively denounced only two days previously (i guess he had an idea what was going to be on Four Corners). Minchin described the scientific consensus view that human activity is driving climate change as the result of a communist plot, saying
For the extreme Left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of deindustrialise the Western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the Left, and … they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.
This is, of course, standard stuff on the political right – I had a string of people pointing me to the latest silly talking point in which a British unfair dismissal case was supposed to prove that global warming is a religion – but it was a big mistake to say it on Four Corners.
Buying the Grand Final
A few days ago, I suggested, a little tongue-in-cheek that the money wasted on Gold Coast car races would be better spent buying a major football grand final. It turns out, that’s precisely what the Bligh government is trying to do, and offering much less than the cost of the car race. Nathan Rees is not happy.
What is it with governments and car races?
Just about every Australian city has had a disastrous experience with a publicly-subsidised motor race. In most cases, the governments concerned have been advocates of market liberalism, who somehow find it possible to make an exception for motorsport.
Adelaide spent a fortune to buy the Grand Prix, only to see Jeff Kennett spend even more to entice it to Melbourne (at the same time as he was closing schools and sacking hospital staff). Economically unsound from the outset, the Grand Prix has experienced steadily declining attendance and interest, and is unlikely to last beyond 2015.
Kate Carnell in Canberra wasted a fortune on the V8 Supercars before admitting defeat. Before that, there was the Greiner government’s Eastern Creek fiasco. Now, we have another fiasco on the Gold Coast.
I’ll pass over the easy pointscoring about a government, claiming to be reduced to such straits that it has to sell off the family silver, blowing over $10 million on a sporting event. Even supposing we had to spend this money on sport, surely we could do better than this low-grade exercise. I have a few suggestions over the fold, and would welcome more.
Options after a double dissolution election
I’ve been thinking a bit about the possibility of a double dissolution. Given the complete incoherence of the Opposition, anything could happen, but it’s hard to see them agreeing on amendments that would be workable in any way. And equally it’s hard to imagine any outcome from a DD election other than a crushing victory for the government. Even so, a Senate majority looks out of reach.
That leaves them with two options after the election. They could use the joint sitting mechanism to pass the ETS bill rejected twice by the Senate. Alternatively (or subsequently), they could sign on to an agreement at Copenhagen and introduce new legislation implementing that agreement, relying on support from the Greens (or, in the event of a post-thrashing change of heart, the Opposition). The latter option looks a lot more appealing in many ways.
Some interesting quotes
Any other outcome than the endorsement of Dutton by the Gold Coast Liberals would render the party not worthy of a vote across the country.
(Dutton lost).
The argument [on climate change] is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us. Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.”
I am very committed to my service to the people of Wentworth and I’ve got no plans to leave,
(on this, see JK Galbraith)
the fact is that you can articulate a position on climate change that does not dispute man’s contribution without buying into a complicated ETS,
Three Cheers for Judith Troeth
In my last post, I was thinking about the fact that one Liberal willing to cross the floor and combine with Labor, the Greens and Nick Xenophon, would be enough to pass an improved emissions trading scheme. Now, this pattern of votes has combined to repeal the Howard government’s hateful practice, inherited from the Keating Labor government, of charging immigration detainees for their own imprisonment. The sole Liberal was Judith Troeth, and she deserves our heartfelt congratulation.
Alleged Christian Steve Fielding voted, not merely to pass by the other side like the priest and the Levite, but to join the thieves who beat and rob the needy stranger. I incorrectly stated that Steve Fielding voted against the bill. He spoke against, but voted for.
Brendan Nelson leaves politics
As the recipient of two Federation Fellowships, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for their originator, Brendan Nelson. So, I thought I’d do a quick post marking his departure from political life. It was his misfortune to be thrust into the job of Opposition Leader, thanks to Peter Costello’s refusal and the unwillingness of his colleagues to accept Malcolm Turnbull. This was just too tough a job for Nelson. Maybe if he’d had a few more years as a minister or frontbencher he would have been ready for this challenge, but as it was, he wasn’t ready and it showed. He’s done the right thing by leaving.
Reading Terry McCrann
Terry McCrann has responded to the call for a new inquiry into the financial system with a snark-filled piece which is of sociological, if not intellectual, interest. Let’s jump to his last para.
What next then? Setting up a government-owned home-buying service at the Post Office? Presumably two others among the ‘six-pac’, Nicholas Gruen and John Quiggin, would love that, provided it directed the trusting unsophisticated only into carbon neutral homes.
The most charitable interpretation of McCrann’s reference to carbon-neutral homes is that he is indicating a tribal affiliation. He knows that the typical reader of the Herald-Sun business pages has delusional beliefs about climate change, and is assuring his readers that he shares these beliefs. This alone would be enough reason to dismiss the rest of the column. If McCrann is prepared to dismiss a vast amount of scientific evidence on a topic on which he has no particular expertise, simply because members of his social group don’t like the conclusions, his judgements are worthless. In the absence of any new factual evidence (and, all the facts mentioned in his column are well-known), his arguments have no evidentiary weight. In essence, they amount to the statement “if you’re on my team, you shouldn’t agree with these guys, because they are on the other team”
Worst generation game piece ever?
Writing in today’s Oz, Greg Melleuish starts out with the observation
It is not common for the political leadership of the country to be discussed in generational terms
Having read the piece that follows, I’m not surprised. Silly as the usual generation game stuff is, the attempt to classify individual political leaders by their birth year is even sillier (which isn’t to say it hasn’t been done, particularly in the US). The burden of the piece is to attack Kevin Rudd for the heinous sin of having been born in 19571
It’s hard to know what’s silliest in this piece: there is, for example, the claim that boomers like Kevin Rudd were products of the “education revolution of the 1960s” – in reality, the schools of the 1960s and early 1970s were dominated by rote learning of tables and dates. As for the university radicalism of the era, it was confined to a minority of a minority, since few kids got past year 12 in the 1960s. And by the time Kevin Rudd went to ANU in the mid-1970s 2, the days of radical activism were well and truly over.
Or perhaps there is the idea that, as a baby boomer, Rudd is tarred with the brush of postmodernism. As anyone who has followed these intellectual games knows, postmodernism came to the fore in the late 1980s, and was much more associated with Gen X academics, who used it to undermine the “grand narratives” (Marxism, functionalism and so on) which had appealed to the boomers who were now blocking their career progress.
But I think, the clearest silliness is the pairings it produces. It is a commonplace of Australian political discussion that the great adversaries Whitlam and Fraser share more similarities than differences, but Melleuish absurdly pairs Whitlam with Holt and Fraser with Hawke. More recently, and fatally to Melleuish’s silly attack on Rudd, lots of people have observed that Rudd is, in many respects, a younger version of John Howard. But, in Melleuish’s theatre of the absurd, Howard is paired with Paul Keating (in many ways the ultimate embodiment of cliches about baby boomers) on the basis that both were born during World War II. He might want to check the bios of, say, John Lennon and Mick Jagger.
1For aficianados, this makes him a member of Generation Jones, but Melleuish appears to have got his knowledge of the subject at the pub, or by watching game shows on TV
2 I just found this out on Wikipedia. We were contemporaries, it seems, but I never met him
John Quiggin 