Menzies’ heir

John Quiggin78 Comments

Most of the press coverage of Julia Gillard’s Whitlam oration has focused on her partisan digs at the Greens, and even then only in an “inside football” way, that is, on the likely short-term political implications rather than the validity or otherwise of her criticism.

The only responses I’ve seen pay any serious attention to what is (or at least is presented as) a major restatement of Labor’s vision have come from bloggers, such as Trevor Cook, Kim at LP and Jonathan Green. It’s also worth rereading this piece by Mark Bahnisch responding to an earlier speech. I broadly agree with much of this commentary, but I thought it would be worth offering a response of my own.

Both implicitly, by omission, and explicitly, in rhetoric and substance, Gillard’s speech represents a repudiation of the Labor tradition exemplified by Gough Whitlam, and even, in many respects, of the market liberal reworking of that tradition under the Hawke-Keating government.

It is a speech that could have been given, with absolute sincerity, by John Howard on behalf of the Liberal party, and marks, in both large and small ways, Gillard’s acceptance and celebration of the values and beliefs of the Liberal party as espoused by its leaders from Menzies onwards. Indeed, with more historically apposite examples (Reid, Deakin and Lyons for example, instead of Barcaldine, Curtin and Chifley) this would have made quite a good Menzies oration.

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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin14 Comments

It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

International realism and dictatorship

John Quiggin41 Comments

As a result of the events in the Arab world[1], I’ve been thinking some more about “international realism”, which I take to have the following central premises[2]

1. States have durable, long-term interests and their actions in international affairs are driven by the rational pursuit of those interests

2. The use or threat of military power is the pre-eminent way (or at least one of the primary ways) in which states pursue their interests

It struck me in thinking about recent events that this is essentially a theory for a world of autocracies. (Apologies to those for whom this is old news, but this is a blog, after all). In such a world, international realism reduces to the claim that individuals are driven by rational self-interest. While there are problems with this claim (it’s empirically problematic if self-interest is defined tightly, and tautological if it’s defined by “revealed preference”), it seems like a sensible starting point, at least for the kind of individuals who become successful autocrats.

Moreover, the idea that war is a central part of rational policy makes sense for autocrats. Although war is a negative sum game, it seems reasonable, under a wide range of circumstances to assume that the losses are borne primarily by the autocrat’s subjects, while the gains flow to the autocrats. Even a war that ends with the status quo ante can be beneficial to the rulers on both sides by providing a Malthusian check on a population that might otherwise prove restive, providing an excuse for increased taxation and so on. That implies the failure of the standard negative-sum game argument against war, namely, that both sides would be better off calculating the outcome of war, and agreeing to accept it without a fight.

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The fruitpickers lament

John Quiggin52 Comments

Way back in the 1970s, I spent a couple of short spells as an unemployed layabout, one of which was ended when I took a job as a fruitpicker, making (IIRC) $2 a day, which even then wasn’t food money (I wasn’t very good at it). Fortunately, the job included some basic accommodation and all the blackberries you could eat. And, even then the whinging from employers who claimed to be unable to get enough pickers was an old story.

Now, I see Tony Abbott is pushing the same line, wanting to stop dole payments in any district where there are (claimed to be) vacant fruitpicking jobs. After four decades of this stuff, we ought by now to have some actual evidence. So, I have a few questions

First, has there ever been occasion when significant volumes of fruit have gone unpicked because of a shortage of pickers? [1]

Second, has there been any occasion on which demand for fruitpickers has been enough that a person with no prior experience could make substantially more than the minimum wage (currently about $15/hour). ? [2]

And if, as I strongly suspect, the answer to both questions is No, what does that tell us about the expectations of the whinging employers. (I suggest, a ready supply of below-minimum wage workers, available on demand when needed, and ready to be sacked the moment they are not)

fn1 Not a strike, or some particular farmer so objectionable that all ir workers quit

fn2 I know that experienced pickers can do a bit better than this, but that’s not the relevant issue here.

Costa’s catastrophe

John Quiggin138 Comments

A catastrophe like the one that befell the NSW Labor Party at the weekend can scarcely be attributed to a single individual, and indeed there were many contributors. But one person stands out above all others as deserving of credit or criticism – former Treasurer Michael Costa. Having risen through the trade union movement, he made his bones in Parliament as a union-busting Transport Minister. Appointed by the utterly hopeless Morris Iemma as Treasurer, he persuaded Iemma to privatise the electricity industry, in direct contradiction of the platform on which Labor had campaigned, and the previous repudiation of privatisation by NSW voters.

As the massive unpopularity of similar moves in Queensland had shown, Labor was doomed unless it repudiated Costa, Iemma and privatisation. The party managed the first two, but, not unfortunately the third.

In keeping with his entire career, Costa quit the day he became eligible for a Parliamentary pension, and immediately emerged in his true colours as an open enemy of the labour movement and the Labor Party.

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Weight loss and climate change

John Quiggin44 Comments

Like a large proportion of the world’s population[1] I’m trying to lose some weight, in my case the extra kilos added over Xmas and the associated conference season. As those who know me would expect, this entails frequent (some might say obsessive) weight measurement, and it’s a frustrating business.

After some quick early gains (or rather, losses) I’m now losing weight at a rate of a kilo a month, or so. On the one hand, that’s good. I’ll regain my target weight well before the next round of temptations. And, on a sustained basis, it’s enough to go from obese to the lean side of normal in a couple of years.

On the other hand, measurement-wise a loss of a kilo is swamped by intra-day and inter-day variations due to all manner of causes. It’s easy for my inner weight loss sceptic to say I’m going nowhere, or for my inner optimist to say that I’m so close to the target that I can relax my efforts.

Thinking about that got me to thinking about broader parallels between weight loss and climate change.

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There goes the neighborhood ?

John Quiggin19 Comments

I just got a plug for a new book by Michael Wesley of the Lowy Institute (published by UNSW, 20 per cent off offer here) for which the blurb states

The challenges that lie ahead are international, not domestic. Michael Wesley, Head of the Lowy Institute, Australia’s most respected policy think tank, argues that the benign and comfortable world that has allowed Australia to be safe and prosperous is vanishing quickly.

Wesley and Lowy have always seemed sensible to me, and I haven’t read the book or even seen a summary of the argument, so I’m shooting from the hip in response (this is a blog, after all). That said, the quoted claim seems to me to be impossible to sustain.

At the global level it’s hard to think of a time when we have been less threatened, at least within living memory. The threat or reality of global war was ever-present from 1914 to 1945, only to be succeeded by the threat of global annihilation in the Cold War. There was a brief period of premature optimism then (though wars continued in Yugoslavia and elsewhere through most of the 1990s) ended by S11 and, in our own region, the Bali terror attack. While the Global War on Terror is still dragging on, it’s become obvious over the last decade that Al Qaeda is not the existential threat that it seemed to be. Nothing new has emerged to replace it. Looking at previous work by Wesley, I suspect he’ll want to talk about the rise of China and India. But China today is far less of a threat to Australia than it was when real communists like Mao Zedong ran the show, and the rise of India seems entirely beneficial to us (among other things, ending the old fear that the starving millions of South Asia would come to fill the empty spaces on our map).

Within our immediate region, the big news is surely the spectacular success of Indonesia in making the transition from dictatorship to democracy. While Suharto kept the lid on things, his regime was scarcely a comfortable neighbour, since no-one knew when it would fall or what would happen when it did. When Suharto finally went, a decade or so ago, there were plenty of risks, with East Timor an festering source of dispute and resenment between Australia and Indonesia, Aceh in open revolt, JI a powerful force, and the military stirring up religious tensions. Now all of these things have greatly abated. And as far as I can see the same is true of problems in Malaysia, the Phillipines, Vietnam (it was only in 2002 that the Russian navy finally pulled out of Cam Ranh Bay) and most of our other neighbours.

The book is described, predictably enough as “A loud and clear wake-up call to Australians”. But unless commenters can point to something I’ve missed, I’m going back to sleep.