We can talk about a higher rate of GST in Australia, but it will never happen

My latest in The Conversation #auspol

My latest in The Conversation

Today, I signed up for Bluesky and Threads, taking a brief look at each of them, and announced my final departure from Twitter, to take place when Musk removes the Block feature[1]. Meanwhile I’m still using Mastodon as my main microblog along with this blog and Crooked Timber for long-form blogging. I’m trying to maintain a couple of Substack newsletters and commenting on Substack Notes. And I still post occasionally on Facebook.

This is clearly too much, but it reflects the transition from the Facebook-Twitter era of “social media” (with blogs as a holdover from a more optimistic past) to whatever comes next. I’m going to make the case for a combination of Mastodon and Substack as the way forward.

I’m pretty despairing about the prospects for the Voice referendum. The current strategy is failing badly. There is an alternative that I believe might work, but I have pitched it in a few places and had no interest. So I’m putting it for the record and on the off-chance that someone might pick it up.

On present indications, the Voice referendum is doomed to defeat. Polls show the Voice failing to win either a majority of votes or a majority of states. Past experience suggests that support for referendum proposals invariably declines over time, and that most fail. In the last fifty years, the only successes have been marginal tweaks to such items as a retirement age for High Court justices and the procedure for replacing senators. But two earlier successes offer some hope.  The 1946 referendum on Social Service and the 1928 referendum on the Loans Council succeeded because they provided a firm constitutional basis for vital policies that were already in operation. The other important , though primarily symbolic, success was the 1967 referendum recognising Indigenous Australians

So, the ideal approach to the Voice would have been to legislate it first, and constitutionally entrench it later. But there’s still a chance to do the next best thing. The Parliament, in consultation with First Nations and community in general, could legislate a model that would come into effect if, and only if, the referendum was passed. The government has insisted that the design of the Voice should be left to “the Parliament of the Day’, but as far as initial design is concerned this is a distinction without a difference – next year’s Parliament will be the same as this year’s.

In my previous post on utilitarianism, I started with two crucial observations.

First, utilitarianism is a political philosophy, dealing with the question of how the resources in a community should be distributed. It’s not a system of individual ethics

Second, (this shouldn’t be necessary to state, but it is), there is no such thing as utility. It’s a theoretical construct which can be used to compare different allocations of resources, not a number in people’s heads that can be measured and added up.

Failure to accept these points is at the heart of the kind of ‘longtermism’ advocated by William McAskill and, earlier, Parfit’s Repugnant conclusion. The claim here is that the objective of utilitarians should be to maximise total utility, including people who are brought into existence as a result of our decisions. In particular, that means that it is desirable to bring children into existence who will have a miserable life, provided that no one else is made worse off, and the life is not so bad that the children in question regret being born.

As well as being intuitively unappealing, this idea makes no sense in the two main contexts in which it is relevant: families deciding how many children to have, and polities deciding whether to promote pro-natalist policies[1]

From my Substack Newsletter