At a time when the Howard government’s increasingly brazen dishonesty (in all senses of the term) might just be starting to sink in with the electorate, and with the Hanson business raising all sorts of memories, what does Labor go and do but appoint Mike Kaiser assistant national secretary. For those who don’t recall, Kaiser was the leading operative of the AWU machine in Queensland and was forced to resign his Parliamentary seat after admitting involvement in branch-stacking.

Stacking is not the gravest of offences, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that Kaiser should never return to public life, but appointing him as a national official in a party that is supposedly trying to stamp out things like branch stacking is just plain stupid.

While I’m no fan of Pauline Hanson, I’m concerned about the processes that have led to her being imprisoned for three years.

As I understand it, her offence was to create a political structure under which she and her immediate circle constituted and controlled the One Nation Party, while the ordinary members belonged to a ‘supporters group’ with no power to do anything. Since the Party proper did not have 500 members, its registration was an offence, as was the receipt of electoral funds.

The fact is that, with the exception of the Australian Democrats (and maybe the Greens, I don’t know how they work) all the major Australian political parties have structures under which the leadership is a self-perpetuating elite and the ordinary members belong, for all practical purposes, to a supporters group. Particularly in the Labor Party, the exclusion of the members from any real power has been a slow and painful process, which has taken decades. Hanson’s crime was to cut corners in an effort to achieve the same outcome quickly.

More importantly, I don’t think the requirements of the Electoral Act for 500 members were meant to ensure party democracy, but merely to avoid the registration of bogus parties as a political device. Whatever its faults, One Nation was (and I suppose, still is) a real political party.

Peter Saunders (the CIS one) has a piece in today’s Age about people’s responses to public question on taxation and public spending. He correctly observes that it all depends on what question you ask but gets the main issues wrong. Saunders makes a big deal about status quo bias, arguing that the big difference is between questions that ask “tax cuts vs improved services” and those that ask about “higher taxes for improved services”. The ACTU gets 76 per cent in favor of improved services vs tax cuts, whereas the CIS found only 12 per cent in favor of higher taxes.

The status quo effect is real, but Saunders ignores the big difference between the questions. The ACTU asked about health and education services, whereas the CIS asked about welfare. An ANU question asking about “social services” came in halfway between the two. This is consistent with a string of findings going back to EPAC surveys in the early 90s which show that people are much keener on health and education spending than on higher welfare payments.

Reading the data, most people are happy to keep welfare payments where they are, though more would prefer a cut to an increase. On the other hand, most people would support higher taxes for better education and health, though of course they’d prefer other people to pay the higher taxes.

Even given his relatively recent arrival on our shores, Saunders ought to be aware of all this. It may be that he’s papering over the gaps in his argument, or it may be that he’s simply not up to speed with the issues.

Ken Parish links to my post on the ethanal business (it ought to be a scandal, but it clearly isn’t) and says

I regard the Howard government as possibly the worst Australia has ever seen, certainly since the Second World War.

on account of its corruption and continuous reliance on divisive wedge politics. I’ll leave wedge politics for later and focus on corruption.

On this score, my fear is that the Howard government will turn out to be “average: worse than the last one and better than the next one”.

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Margo Kingston has collected all the facts on the snap decision to impose excise on ethanol imports to the benefit of Australian ethanol producer Manildra.

Howard will undoubtedly get away with this, but until a few years ago, misleading Parliament over a decision involving more than a hundred million dollars, to the benefit of a party crony, would have been exceptionally politically damaging. As late as the 1980s, ministerial careers were ruined over far smaller sins.

Many factors have contributed to this, and standards declined markedly in the later part of the Hawke-Keating government, but undoubtedly public acquiescence in the ‘children overboard’ lies has been a big factor. Once it’s clear that you can lie about a policy issue, be caught, and still get away with it, the temptation to lie about money becomes overwhelming. It’s a safe bet that at least some of those involved in this process will end up with cushy post-political jobs as a result (see Reith, Wooldridge etc).

Update I am obviously hopelessly behind the times. Manildra has already hired Howard’s former chief of staff.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read articles on the theme of Howard’s victory in the culture wars in the last three years. I’d say it must be about as many times as I read similar articles about Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s, and Keating and Kennett in the 1990s. In each case, almost as soon as they lost office, their supposed cultural dominance evaporated.

The assumption underlying all these articles is something that might be called ‘cultural monarchism’, since it works on the assumption that any elected leader whose political dominance is currently unchallenged must enjoy some sort of occult connection with mass culture, similar to that typically attributed to monarchs.

Bjelke-Petersen’s was perhaps the most substantial example of unchallenged dominance. He was in office for decades, and his government was ruthless in crushing opposition on all fronts, so he did manage to keep Queensland significantly different from the rest of Australia. But after one term of Labor, Bjelke-Petersen’s influence had faded, and by now it’s almost undetectable.

Keating’s supposed dominance was never anything more than a Press Gallery illusion. He was never popular, and won the 1993 election only by default. Far from Keating establishing a dominant orthodoxy issues like multiculturalism and the Republic, support for these causes was damaged by their association with him.

Howard’s supposed dominance is I think equally illusory – in fact, it consists in large measure of the fact that Keating’s illusory dominance has been dispelled. He has had a string of narrow election wins over unimpressive opponents, but his government has never been as popular as the Labor governments at state level.

As regards cultural dominance, the republic issue provides a good test, since its an issue where Howard clearly had a majority against him when he took office. He managed the issue adroitly to ensure the defeat of the referendum, but he’s made essentially no progress in rebuilding support for the status quo – at most he’s held the line. And I’d argue that monarchism has lost more ground in cultural terms under Howard than it did under Labor. Support for the British monarchy has virtually disappeared (although the Queen remains personally popular). The idea that the Governor-General should be an apolitical figurehead, answerable to the PM except in 1975-style emergencies, and exempt from political criticism has also lost ground.

Howard’s current poll majority would disappear if, for example, interest rates rose by a couple of percentage points and house prices fell correspondingly. And if that happens, in all probability, we’ll be reading similar stuff about Crean in a couple of years’ time.

In keeping with the idea of slow blogging I mentioned a while ago, I’m going to respond to this two-week old speech by Costello, although other bloggers have already covered at length (From this large set, I’ll link, more or less randomly, to Steve Edwards).

Anyway, Costello is talking about social policy and volunteering and I just wanted to emphasise the point that the application of New Public Management/neoliberalism to the voluntary sector, exemplified by competitive tendering programs like the Jobs Network, makes volunteering utterly pointless. The only effect is to save money for the government while delivering a predefined set of services. In most cases, volunteers would be better off working overtime and sending a cheque to the Treasury.

I developed this point at length last time Costello had a progressive spell and I think the intervening period has only strengthened my case. Here’s the conclusion:

The core of the social contract was that those willing to make contributions of time and money were able, to some extent, to influence the aims and outcomes of public policy, and the way in which public services were delivered. Broadly speaking, government took responsibility for the delivery of basic services, and the efforts of the voluntary sector played a major role in determining what additional services were provided.

As far as monetary contributions to charitable causes are concerned, this is still the case. Although there are plenty of issues regarding the specific design of tax expenditures to promote charitable contributions (why, for example, a deduction rather than a rebate), the basic point that such expenditures are desirable has been accepted even by the dry economists of the Productivity Commission. Moreover it is clear enough that, if governments seek excessively tight control over the direction of subsidies for charitable contributions, the result will be to reduce the amount people are willing to give.

Unfortunately, the same logic has not been applied to voluntary contributions of time and effort. Governments have withdrawn from their role as a provider of core services and have cut back the provision of grants to voluntary groups and non-government organisations. Instead, they have instituted a regime of competitive tendering. In this system, voluntary groups are invited to bid to provide core public services at a lower cost than competitors which may be either for-profit private businesses or commercialised government businesses.

In this competitive environment, the main advantage possessed by non-profit organisation is the availability of volunteers willing to work unpaid, and of idealistic employees willing to accept less-than-market wages. By harnessing this source of unpaid or underpaid labour, governments can reduce the cost of service delivery.

In the long run, however, this is killing the goose that lays the golden egg. As competitive pressures are tightened, the original goals of voluntary organisations are subordinated to the need to meet tender specifications at the lowest possible cost. In the end, it does not really matter whether the tender is won by a voluntary organisation or a profit-oriented firm – the services delivered are those specified in the contract.

All of this is fine from the viewpoint of governments reaping cost savings, but what about the volunteers? Their unpaid labour is being used, not to provide additional services to the community, but to enable the government to provide existing (or, more often, reduced) services more cheaply. The ultimate outcome is to finance tax cuts for those who have chosen, in line with the government’s real beliefs, to maximise their own market incomes.

From the viewpoint of volunteers, this makes no sense. Even supposing they felt impelled to improve the government’s bottom line, they would be better off working overtime in regular jobs and sending the extra pay straight to the Treasury.

In practice, people are not so rational, and the tradition of voluntary effort will be eroded only gradually, but the growth of self-seeking over the past decade or so is plain for all to see. Governments of both political persuasions have promoted self-interest as the engine of progress, and leading political figures on both sides have embodied it in their personal behavior. At this point, calling for volunteers is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

A piece in today’s Oz opens with a slab that looks as if it’s been cut and pasted from a dozen previous outings

WHOM does the ALP represent and what is its core constituency?

Historically, the answer was the working class represented by the so-called Howard battlers in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Since the Whitlam ascendancy, this is no longer the case. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, the ALP, in Kim Beazley Sr’s colourful phrase, turned its back on the cream of the working class in its rush to embrace the dregs of the middle class.

What’s striking about this set of boilerplate is that it’s often, as in the present case, used in a piece advocating neoliberal policies that the pre-Whitlam Labor party would have rejected instinctively. I reviewed another example here.

In this case, Kevin Donnelly is advocating voucher-based support for private schools and up-front university fees. He says that these policies would benefit the working class and that it’s the middle-class nature of Labor’s current leadership that makes them oppose it.

It is a matter of historical record that the pre-Whitlam Labor party was bitterly opposed to any form of aid to private schools. More generally, it’s worth reading Donnelly (and other articles taking the same line) then trying to imagine the reaction of say, Ben Chifley or Arthur Calwell.

Donnelly may have some good arguments in favor of the policies he proposes, though they are not evident in this article. But he is either ignorant or dishonest in claiming that they represent traditional Labor policy.

Of the many commentators in both print and blog media who’ve written their views, I think the most accurate were, Margo Kingston and Ross Gittins. My main views:

First, the poll-driven choice of Beazley as the anti-Crean candidate turned the ballot into a referendum on the ‘small target strategy’ run by Beazley (advised by Swan and Smith) in 2001. My waning hopes for the Federal ALP have been strengthened slightly by the fact that Beazley was so thoroughly beaten.

Second, having positioned himself as the ‘policy’ candidate, Crean now has to actually deliver on this. In particular, , he has to decide whether he’s for lower taxes or higher services. At present, as Ross Gittins points out, Labor is the ‘denial of opportunity cost’ party. Of course, this is true to some extent of all opposition parties.
Given the absence of any serious policy initiatives from Labor for the past seven years, and the sporadic attention of the government to anything more than triumphalism and wedge politics, a serious policy program could make a big impact.

Third, and assuming he meets the policy test, Crean’s position has been strengthened by this episode. He called Beazley’s bluff, faced him down and beat him decisively, and, in the process, acquired some sort of identity. I don’t know whether this will be reflected in the polls, but it should be.

Another Fin article is up on the site Voters favour better services from 22 May. Here’san excerpt.

If tax scales were indexed, the community would face a clear choice between private consumption and public services financed by taxation. As the opinion polls following the budget show, responses to such choices depend on the way in which they are framed, as well as the way in which they are reported
Newspoll found that 15 per cent of voters thought the budget would make them better off 38 per cent thought it would make no difference, and 32 per cent though it would make them worse off. This mildly negative result (fairly typical of responses over the 15 years Newspoll has asked this question) was spun by The Australian into a ringing endorsement ’53 per cent of voters thought the Budget would make them better off or no worse off (emphasis added)’.

The AC Nielsen Poll asked a clearer question and got a clearer answer. Asked whether they would prefer the tax cuts announced in the budget or improvements in health and education, 20 per cent opted for the tax cuts and 77 per cent for improvements in services.