With the problems of indigenous Australia at the forefront of national attention, it’s time to look again at the Howard government’s Intervention policy, and try to assess what has worked or is likely to and what has not. Already the Rudd government has reinstated the permit system – whatever the merits of the system its abolition was an ideologically-motivated piece of mischief in a package that was supposed to be about protecting children. Another difficult issue is the extent to which individual and community benefits should be conditional on requirements that might be imposed by the government or negotiated with community leaders. One particular aspect of this is the policy of quarantining some portion of welfare benefits in a manner similar to the US policy of giving aid through food stamp. I’ve attached a piece by Bree Blakeman and Nanni Concu, who are currently living in an Aboriginal homeland in East Arnhem Land, which raises a number of problems with this policy. I found it very thought-provoking and I hope that it will help to inform the debate.
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The culture wars must really be over when I’m getting my ideas favorably cited by Janet Albrechtsen. Admittedly it’s prefaced by “even leftwing academics like John Quiggin …”, but her opening para follows my analysis almost exactly, and I agree with her on the point of principle.

Albrechtsen is quoting this Online Opinion piece on mandates, in which I argue that the idea that a government with a majority in the House of Representatives has a mandate obliging the Senate to pass legislation implementing its election policies is misconceived. Since both houses are elected, and since no party in recent decades has received a majority of first-preference votes for the Lower House, there’s no general reason why the views of a majority of Senators should be regarded as less legitimate than those of a majority in the Lower House.

Albrechtsen applies this argument to defend the decision of the Senate to delay, or maybe block altogether, the government’s legislation repealing WorkChoices. While she’s right in rejecting the mandate idea, there are still some good reasons why the Senate should not block this legislation.

The first relates to the lame-duck nature of the current Senate, half of which will be replaced in July with the senators we elected in November. If we had fixed terms for both houses, this kind of nonsense would be avoided, but as it is, I think there’s a case that the outgoing Senate would be wise to take some account of the results of the election, in which the Coalition lost its Senate majority in an election where WorkChoices was a key issue. It doesn’t make much sense to hold up transitional legislation preparing for changes that can be shown to have majority support in the new Senate.

The more relevant point though is political. You don’t need to count seats in the House of Representatives, or parse the text of Labor’s policy statement, to know that the Australian electorate rejected WorkChoices at the last election, and that they haven’t changed their minds since then. If the Coalition parties choose to ignore that fact, they’ll pay a steep political price, as they should, in future elections for both House and Senate. That’s how the mandate of the people is delivered in modern Australian democracy.

Following up on the silly idea being floated in the Murdoch press that John Howard might be made a Knight of the Garter (surely Alexander Downer would be a more appropriate choice!), I discovered the interesting fact that Ninian Stephen is a knight five times over (KG, AK, GCMG, GCVO, KBE)[1].

Fine judge and Governor-General as Ninian Stephen was, I find this a bit excessive, and something of a reductio ad absurdam on the whole business of knighthoods.

fn1 For those who don’t recall, AK was Malcolm Fraser’s shortlived notion of adding knighthoods to the Order of Australia, and the rest are British honours – he got the KBE in 1970, three more on becoming GG and the Garter in 1994. My guess is that, if he hadn’t had already had the handle “Sir Ninian”, the other awards would have been more controversial, and might not have happened.

fn2 I should note that academics like myself are not exactly innocent here, and some even string together multiple titles, particularly in Europe.

Brendan Nelson’s career as Leader of the Opposition looks to be over before he has even faced the Rudd government in Parliament, thanks to his equivocation over the issue of an apology to the Stolen Generation. If Nelson was fair dinkum about supporting an apology, given the appropriate words, he could have made a positive virtue of it, saying something like “This apology needs to come from the Parliament, not just the government. I’m willing to work with Mr Rudd in preparing a statement that will have unanimous support”.

As it is, he will end up being forced through every possible position from outright opposition to conditional support to the final stage when he’ll be forced to deal with the hardline rejectionists in his own ranks.
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Coming back from a very lazy Christmas, I find the comments threads full of hyperventilation about “jackboots” and “communist roots”. While this was a bit OTT, this SMH story about a message from the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research requiring that all press releases from CSIRO and other organizations be vetted at ministerial (or maybe Prime Ministerial) level certainly suggested that the new government was already up to the tricks of old governments.

I had hoped we would have had a bit more of the reformist phase before this kind of thing started and indeed it appears that there has been at least a partial backdown. With any luck, this misbegotten idea will be buried as a product of the silly season.

But the central point is clear. If we are going to get any moves towards open government and transparent processes out of the Rudd government, we need to demand them now, while the criticisms they made of the last government are still fresh. All longstanding governments seek to centralise power, which is one of the reasons why changing government every now and then is a good idea.

Both before and since the election, commentators of the centre-left, including me, have pronounced the end of the culture wars that have dominated a large stream of Australian political commentary for the past fifteen years or so (for a further sample, here’s Polemica and LP). These pronouncements have not been well received. Rather, in the manner of this (according to family legend) distant relation of mine, those on the losing side have taken the view that news of their defeat is a deceitful ruse de guerre.

In a tactical sense, this is all to the good. With no share of political power anywhere in the country, the culture warriors can’t do any actual harm, except to the conservative side of politics. So, there’s an argument that they should be encouraged, rather than persuaded to give up the struggle. But it doesn’t seem like a good idea to encourage vitriolic debate about side issues, while letting the big questions be settled by default. In relation to climate change, for example, as long as the delusionist and do-nothingist culture warriors dominate one side of the debate, serious discussion about questions like how best to combine adaption and mitigation will be drowned out.

So, it seems like a good idea to survey the culture war and consider what can be done about it.

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In response to my observation that “… the Labor government in NSW is cementing its reputation as the country’s worst fiscal manager.�

Ken Lovell ups the ante, pointing out

I don’t think you need be so narrow in your description of its incompetence. ‘Country’s worst government’ is fine.

Let me see him and raise him. It seems to me that, looking back as far as I can remember (to the late 60s), NSW has had consistently worse political leadership than any other state.

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In the aftermath of the election, it’s striking how much the dullness of the campaign reflected the fact that a lot of issues weren’t even debated. Labor’s proposal for a Charter of Rights provides one example. From Labor’s viewpoint, those who liked the idea were probably already aware of it, so there was no payoff from pushing it hard. And while the culture warriors would have liked nothing better than to try and make a big deal of it, even Howard could see that running against human rights would be a risky tactic, especially in view of the government’s record.

Having tried and failed to wedge Labor on rights issues (notably gay marriage), the Liberals were quiet on the topic during the campaign. Now they face the risk of being wedged themselves. The rightwing fanatics who delivered the leadership to Nelson will find it hard to back down quietly, but I can’t see Nelson himself wanting a fight on this.

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Without a great deal of fanfare, the new government has ended the shameful ‘Pacific solution’ under which refugees were held in offshore camps, located on the territory of neighbouring countries which the Australian government bullied and bribed into hosting them. Most of the refugees held at the Nauru camp have been allowed to settle in Australia.

Defenders of the Howard government can make whatever claims they like about this evil system, whether to say that it was justified by results or to claim that Labor’s policy isn’t really all that different. The fact remains that this was a cruel and brutal response to community panic; panic the government itself did a great deal to stir up, and even more to exploit politically. Those responsible, most notably Howard himself and Phillip Ruddock, will carry the stain of the Pacific solution to their graves and beyond.