Anti-militarism

John Quiggin41 Comments

100 years after the Battle of the Somme, it’s hard to see that much has been learned from the catastrophe of the Great War and the decades of slaughter that followed it. Rather than get bogged down (yet again) in specifics that invariably decline into arguments about who know more of the historical detail, I’m going to try a different approach, looking at the militarist ideology that gave us the War, and trying to articulate an anti-militarist alternative. Wikipedia offers a definition of militarism which, with the deletion of a single weasel word, seems to be entirely satisfactory and also seems to describe the dominant view of the political class, and much of the population in nearly every country in the world.

Militarism is the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively[^1] to defend or promote national interests

Wikipedia isn’t as satisfactory (to me) on anti-militarism, so I’ll essentially reverse the definition above, and offer the following provisional definition

Anti-militarism is the belief or desire that a military expenditure should held to the minimum required to protect a country against armed attack and that, with the exception of self-defense, military power should not be used to promote national interests

I’d want to qualify this a bit, but it seems like a good starting point.

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Stability

John Quiggin75 Comments

Malcolm Turnbull went to the election warning against the instability of a “hung” Parliament and a minority Labor government. It’s now clear that the most unstable outcomes within the range of possibility are those where the LNP forms a government with 76 seats (working majority of 1) 75 or 74 (presumably relying on Bob Katter and/or Nick Xenophon for confidence votes). The knives are already out for Turnbull, and there are at least three potential successors in the wings, all convinced they could do a better job than Turnbull or either of their rivals. So, any understanding Turnbull might reach with independents is liable to be overturned at any moment.

On the Labor side, the rules changes introduced by Kevin Rudd make it just about impossible to remove a sitting PM, and there is, in any case, almost no appetite for a change. So, if Labor manages 72 seats or more and forms a minority government, there’s a good chance that the government and parliament could run its full term.

Polls, pundits and punters yet again

John Quiggin36 Comments

It’s too late to influence anyone’s vote, and I doubt that many of my readers are in much doubt as to which way they will go, so I’ll return to one of my favorite topics, the relative predictive power of polls and betting markets. Most of the time, comparing the two is a tricky exercise, since the odds in betting markets and those implied by polls tend to converge as the election nears. Not this time, however. The polls have remained at or near 50-50 throughout the campaign, with the additional complication that 5-10 seats may be won by independents or minor parties. Yet, as of a couple of days ago, the LNP was paying $1.08 for a dollar bet, implying a winning probability of around 90 per cent.

In classical statistical terms, that means that, if the LNP loses (does not form a government) the null hypothesis that the betting odds are correct can be rejected with 90 per cent confidence, which is commonly considered good enough for social science work. Unfortunately, things don’t work the other way around. If we disregard markets, the chance of an LNP win is probably a bit above 50 per cent, so a win for the LNP wouldn’t prove anything one way or the other. For that, we’d need a case where the polls strongly predicted a winner, while the markets were even money or going the other way (the key concept here is the “power” of the test).

In an important sense, anything less than a clear LNP majority would constitute a rejection of the betting market hypothesis. If the majority is small, then the outcome will inevitably have been decided by a few thousand random votes reflecting unpredictable chance.

Anyway, we’ll see soon enough.

Australia opens trade talks with Britain during election campaign?

John Quiggin17 Comments

A report in the UK Sun (Murdoch, but directly quoting a government minister, presumably accurately) quotes UK saying that “senior politicians in [Australia and South Korea] had called [seeking trade deals with the UK] in the past 48 hours“. If that’s true, it seems like a spectacular breach of the caretaker conventions.

From Wikipedia, the relevant part of the conventions

The Government ordinarily seeks to defer major international negotiations, or adopts observer status until the end of the caretaker period.

A policy-based election, a policy-free campaign

John Quiggin15 Comments

The 2016 election is remarkable in two ways. First, more than at any time in the past 20 years, the two parties have presented strongly opposed policy platforms reflecting underlying ideological differences on economic policy, symbolic (bankers vs unionists) and substantive (upper income tax cuts) class issues, climate policy, equal marriage and more. On the other hand, having set out these differences, the parties have run campaigns that are (because of the eight-week duration) twice as vapid and uninspiring as usual. None of the big issues have been debated seriously.

Most notably the pretext for the double dissolution, the ABCC bill, has barely been raised. It’s obvious enough why Labor would want to avoid arguing about allegations of union corruption, whether those allegations with or without merit. On the LNP side, the $100 million handed to Dyson Heydon and his Royal Commission has so far (AFAICT) failed to produce a single conviction for any act of union corruption, while a number of prosecutions have fallen over in more or less embarrassing circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, the polls have barely moved from the deadheat position they were in at the beginning of the campaign. Perhaps more surprisingly, with a week to go, both betting markets and media pundits are uniformly convinced that the government will be returned with most predicting a narrow majority. Given the random element in any election, making a strong prediction of a narrow win is nonsensical. There are always half a dozen seats where random, unpredicted factors emerge on election night. So, if you think a narrow win is the most likely outcome, you must impute a significant probability to a narrow loss. If the government does not get a majority, this fact will suddenly be discovered with an air of profundity. If it does, the pundits and punters will congratulate themselves on their instinctive connection with the mood of (51 per cent of) the Australian people

The Schengen option?

John Quiggin21 Comments

Like most people outside Britain (and, it seems, like most British people, politicans and pundits as well as voters) I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the detailed implications of a Leave vote until it actually happened. Now that it has happened, the details matter. In particular, it seems that Boris Johnson and other leaders of the Leave campaign (though presumably not UKIP) are hoping to promote either the “Switzerland” or “Norway” options. I thought I’d check on the implications of these options for migration policy and AFAICT, both Norway and Switzerland are Schengen visa countries. So, on the face of it, those Leavers who supported continued market access on the Norway/Switerland model have voted for removal of existing controls on migration rather than the imposition of new ones.

I assume that Johnson and others have in mind a negotiation in which Britain (or England) gets the market access bits of the Norway/Switzerland options, while maintaining the existing opt-outs negotiated as an EU member. But why should the EU offer this? In particular, if Scotland becomes independent and joins the EU, the Scots will presumably want to maintain free access to England, while the rest of the EU would be unlikely to allow Scotland to remain under English border controls. In any case, the whole logic of the EU position is that Britain should not be able to pick and choose.

On the basis of an admittedly perfunctory search, I haven’t been able to find more than passing discussion of this question. Can anyone point me to more comprehensive analysis?