Apparently cut off the Costello drip, Glenn Milne breathlessly publishes some startling news from Sydney
Bound by Honor ipod . According to his anonymous source:
* The current leader of the NSW Right is trying to secure absolute control over the faction and crush his rivals
* The current leader of the NSW Right is keen to diminish the power of the Victorian Left.
In more breaking news, the traffic in Sydney is bad, but the beaches are great.
Two big news items from Queensland in the last 24 hours. Standard & Poors has downgraded the State’s credit rating to AA+ and Anna Bligh has called an early election.
The fact that these two events happened in this order is striking. Until six months ago, a government that had been downgraded in this way would be holding off an election until the last possible day in the hope of burying the bad news, or else would have gone early, before releasing the bad budget news that triggered the downgrade. Now, the government calculates:
* Everyone knows that the state’s finances are a lot weaker than they looked six months ago, and that this has very little to do with the government
* No-one who has been watching the news could possibly place any weight on ratings issued by Standard & Poors (or Moodys – Fitch has been marginally better). If credit rating agencies were subject to election, or to any kind of proper market test, these guys would be out of business. The fact that they aren’t is yet another indication that the global financial sector is in need of reform far more drastic than has been contemplated so far
* The policies ‘demanded’ by S&P to keep the rating (drastic cuts in infrastructure spending) would have been economically disastrous
Coming to the election itself, the uncertainties created by the global financial crisis are such that I’m not going to venture a prediction. Overall, the government has done a reasonable job, but not a great one, and it remains to be seen whether the cumulative impact the ethical troubles of numerous ministers, ex-ministers and backbenchers over the years will come back to haunt them. There are also a bunch of policy decisions (including some good ones, like fluoridation, and not-so-good ones like chickening out on water recycling) that need to be taken into account. And it remains unclear how much progress has been made, and perceived, in fixing the health system. The government’s performance on indigenous issues has been lamentable, but that probably won’t cost them many seats.
On the other side, the opposition moved from being unelectable to conceivably electable with the merger that created the Liberal National Party. But they remain deeply unimpressive. This election will be won, or lost, by Labor.
John Hewson’s public denunciation of Peter Costello “‘Lazy, disloyal, no balls, unelectable'” is one of the more effective examples of the genre I’ve seen*. At least, it is for me, since it’s exactly consistent with my own judgement. Money quote
I also doubt you have the skills, experience or self-confidence to have accepted the obvious job after losing the last election, namely shadow treasurer. You’d be lost without Treasury. You may have delivered 11 budgets but ask yourself honestly how many of them were actually yours, rather than Treasury’s. I am told Treasury is now drawing a sharp contrast between your little interest and involvement and that of Wayne Swan.
And Hewson gets in a very effective jab at Howard along the way
Both sides of politics know from painful experience that disunity is death- although, like you I’m sure, I found it a bit galling to hear Howard now saying so, having been disloyal to every leader he ever worked for.
* It would have been more effective without the gratuitous reference to testosterone, which doesn’t at all suit an academic/finance type like Hewson.
As the financial crisis has developed over the past year, I’ve been struck by the near-complete absence of any comment on the economy from Peter Costello. He would seem to have all sorts of reasons for commenting, from a desire to defend the previous government’s record, to enhancing his public profile and even, perhaps, contributing to public understanding of the issues and improving policy outcomes.
But, until the last couple of days, there’s been nothing. Now, however, he seems to be talking, and inevitably, this sudden end to reticence is being interpreted in terms of leadership aspirations.
For me, though, the more interesting question is how Costello performs without the Treasury, or even the staff allocated to a shadow minister to back him up. You can make your own judgements on this Lateline interview. My take: Costello performed reasonably well, as you’d expect from a sharp lawyer and Parliamentary debater, and he made some good debating points. But he didn’t give the impression that he had, or was interested in, any deep understanding of the financial crisis or the choices facing the Australian government, and other governments in responding to it.
Amid the voluminous commentary on the Windschuttle hoax(es), the most telling, for me, was a summary of his political peregrinations from Guy Rundle at Crikey. It’s paywalled but I’ll quote the best bit:
The man who’s now editing Australia’s premier conservative magazine was advocating the revolutionary potential of LSD in the 60s, media studies as “radical pedagogy” in the early 70s, was enthusiastic for Pol Pot peasant-style revolts in the late 70s (“the oil is almost gone — soon the Aborigines and poor whites will rise up” he wrote in Nation Review in the late 70s) and re-emerged in the 90s, after the global collapse of the left, as a man who thought there was no Tasmanian genocide, that the White Australia policy was a left-wing plot, that John Steinbeck made up the Great Depression and that the British Empire could not have been cruel because its officers were Christians.
Like a mendicant Pope, he’s spent his life wandering from one state of certainty to the next, in the search for godknowswhat.
The only stage missed was his (“Killing of History”) period as a scourge of postmodernist and relativist theory and fan of the empirical approach of researchers like Henry Reynolds.
That brings to mind the more general phenomenon of migration from dogmatic left to dogmatic right, which I discussed quite a while ago here, and linked to Paul Norton.
The publication by Keith Windschuttle of a hoax article on science has been all over the papers and the blogs. I agree with Tim Lambert (who gives lots of links) that the article sounds reasonable by comparison with the nonsense commonly published on scientific topics by Quadrant.
Just before this, I was thinking about another hoax, namely the repeated promise of a Volume 2 of The Fabrication of Australian History. When Volume 1 came out back in 2002, Windschuttle promised further volumes on an annual schedule, covering Queensland and WA. Since Queensland in particular was the focus of Henry Reynolds’ main work, and since the evidence of numerous massacres seems incontrovertible, this promised volume was central to Windschuttle’s claims of fabrication. The promise was repeated year after year, but no Volume 2 ever appeared, and the “research” supposedly already undertaken has stayed out of sight.
Then in February 2008, Windschuttle published extracts from a Volume 2, promised for publication “later this year”, but now on a totally different topic, that of the Stolen Generation. His target this time was Peter Read, an eminent historian who’s done a lot of practical work reuniting Aboriginal children with their birth families. It’s 2009, the promised volume hasn’t appeared, and there hasn’t been any reference to it on Windschuttle’s site for some time.
The real hoax victims here have been those on the political right, who’ve repeatedly swallowed Windschuttle’s promises to refute well-established facts about Australian history “later this year” and who are now getting their “science” from his discredited magazine.
In the leadup to the release of the White Paper, Kevin Rudd said he’d be aiming for balance, and predicted criticism from both sides
We’ll be attacked from the far right and by various business groups I suppose and certainly the Liberal Party for doing anything at all,” he said.
“We will be attacked by extreme green groups for not taking the most radical course of action.”
This kind of reasoning is often specious. For example, we see the Bush Administration being praised for finding a middle course between the extremists one side who want unlimited torture and those on the other side who want torture banned altogether. But let’s grant Rudd his premise this time.
You have to go a long way to the right to find anyone willing to say the government has done too much. As Tim Lambert points out, the Australian Newspaper, long the main outlet for those happy to reject science and trash the environment, is entirely satisfied.
The other side of Rudd’s prediction is satisfied only if you define “extreme green groups” to mean anyone who cares about the environment.
It’s pretty clear that the government has been willing to dump its own supporters in the hope of wedging Turnbull. This kind of thing is characteristic of the cynical centrism implicit in Rudd’s statement.The Projectionist hd
I was unimpressed by this story on the ABC website, headlined Bill of rights not likely to be supported: Law Society The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad psp . The story quotes Hugh Macken from the Law Society (I think he is in fact the president) as saying
A bill of rights in terms of constitutional change is probably too far down the track to consider at this stage,” he said.
“It is likely to be quite divisive and as history has shown any divisive referendum which goes up invariably fails, so it tends to be costly failure.”
While literally correct, this remark totally obscures the point that no-one is currently talking about a constitutional change. For some years discussion has focused on the idea of a legislated bill of rights which governments could amend if they chose to wear the consequences of openly acting against human rights. This has already been introduced in Victoria and the ACT, not to mention the UK.
The legislative proposal overcomes the main objectives to a constitutional bill of rights that it would remove parliamentary sovereignty. The objections now coming from, for example, Janet Albrechtsen and other rightwingers have nothing to do, in most cases, with such issues. The problem is rather that they are opposed to the human rights that would inevitably be included in a legislated bill, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial and torture. We can thank the Bush and Howard Administrations for clarifying these issues.
My Crooked Timber co-blogger, Michael Bérubé made it to David Horowitz’ list of America’s 100 most dangerous professors. But when the Australian Liberal Students Federation outdid Horowitz by managing a Senate Inquiry into academic bias, I didn’t make the list of 30 or so. Here’s my post at CT – I’ve kept the explanations for non-Oz readers
The great David Horowitz campaign against evul academics has reached Australia, and has even occasioned a Senate inquiry. It was a load of fun. The report is good reading, as is the minority report by the Liberal (= conservative down under) Party Senators who called the inquiry in the first place, but lost control following their election defeat last year. A snippet suggests that those involved knew how to handle Horowitzism
From the committee’s perspective it appeared as
though it was to be called on to play its part in a university revue. The submissions,
the performance and the style – to say nothing of the rhetoric – presented by some
Liberal Students suggested a strong undergraduate tone. The ‘outing’ of Left and
purportedly Left academics and commentators (masquerading as academics as we
were told at one hearing) was in keeping with this tone. None of those outed objected.
Some appeared flattered to be named in the company of others more famous
The list of leftist academics is, I must admit, a sore point. I never located the full list (the links on the inquiry website were skew-whiff) but clearly I wasn’t on it. What does a leftist have to do to get noticed in this country?
Due to the pressures of real life, I haven’t reacted to the change in Liberal leadership with the lightning speed for which the blogosphere is famed. A couple of thoughts on the players and the implications.
For Nelson, this was only a matter of time. He’s a likeable guy (though of course, the job of Opposition leader typically requires some unappealing behavior) and was of fair average quality as a minister in the last government*, but he was not ready for the leadership of a major political party. Costello’s decision to reject the job (while continuing to collect a parliamentary salary for doing nothing except promote his future career plans and book sales) put him up too soon. As leader by default, he’s floundered from one contradiction to the next. On the whole, losing this job is probably a good thing for him, giving him a chance to start again.
As regards Turnbull, he’s obviously one of the more able people Australian politics has seen in my time. I must say, though, that I’ve marked down my estimate of him pretty sharply over the last couple of years. As Environment Minister, although he clearly understood the issues, he achieved nothing in his tenure of the job. In fact, water policy went a long way back thanks to Howard’s National Water Plan, introduced with Turnbull’s acquiescence. And, if he had the capacity to get things done that I expected of him, he would have made the Cabinet see the obvious sense in swallowing its pride and ratifying Kyoto.
As Shadow Treasurer, he’s been similarly unimpressive. He had a good run early while Swan struggled to come to grips with the job, and particularly its Parliamentary aspects. But he hasn’t made any attempt to mount a sustained critique of the government’s approach, let alone offer a constructive alternative. Rather he’s gone along with the generally opportunistic line taken by the Opposition as a whole.
The big question for me is whether Turnbull will bring the Opposition around to supporting legislation for an emissions trading scheme (after extracting various concessions of course). A couple of years ago, I would have been confident of his willingness and ability to do this. Now I doubt it.
* I have to declare a personal interest here. Nelson introduced the Federation Fellowship scheme under which I’m employed.
John Quiggin 