Blue Labor: rightwing identity politics

John Quiggin52 Comments

I’ve started writing a regular column for Independent Australia (every two weeks), and my first column has just gone up. It’s a response to Nick Dyrenfurth and David Furse-Roberts, Australian advocates of Maurice’s Glasman’s Blue Labour ideas in the UK (apparently Glasman visited here for a few months. The central point is that, far from offering a policy alternative to the political right, Blue Labor is all about a specific kind of identity politics, focused on stereotypical male manual workers. These workers assumed to be socially conservative and economically aspirational, but to vote for Labor because they don;t like the silvertails on the other side, despite sharing all of their views.

It took me a while to write this, and several other people came out with very similar analyses in the meantime, notably including Jeff Sparrow. Dyrenfurth responded, complaining “I doubt Jeff Sparrow has read my book instead of relying upon selective media reports and a book extract comprising less than 3% of the book’s contents”

I have (almost) zero sympathy for this. If you can’t summarize your book in 700 words without giving readers a radically wrong impression of your central idea, you shouldn’t publish a summary at all. The only criticism of an extract I would regard as unfair is of the type “Quiggin doesn’t mention topic X or qualify the argument with reference to Y”. In this case, it’s perfectly legitimate to point to the fact that these topics are in fact covered in the book, but not in the extract/summary.

Almost invariably, this rhetorical move involves backing away from the core message presented sharply in the extract/summary, and pointing to the more nuanced presentation in the full length version. On this score, I can only appeal to my Crooked Timber co-blogger Kieran Healy (NSFW title)

The new normal: put up with it

John Quiggin9 Comments

Anthony Albanese has finally responded to the bushfire disaster. On the positive side, and by contrast with Morrison, he has at least acknowledged the role of climate change in turning our historical pattern of episodic bushfires into a new normal in which fires burn for weeks on end in places that have never seen them before. As of today, with the worst of the crisis behind us for now, NSW Fire and Rescue Service reports

At 8.30am there are 129 fires burning, 66 are uncontained. One fire is at Watch and Act level. More than 1,800 personnel are working to contain these fires. Severe and High Fire Danger Ratings continue over much of the state today.

Albo’s response is to call for an emergency COAG which will discuss how to deal with climate related disasters, but not, it seems, look at doing anything about our contribution to climate change. That would, it seems, be unnecessarily divisive.

We now have a choice between two exciting climate policies

LNP: Don’t believe your lying eyes, let alone lying scientists. It isn’t happening

ALP: It’s happening, and we’re not going to do anything unpopular to stop it. Get used to it.

China going wrong

John Quiggin28 Comments

Despite the opacity of Chinese politics, it is clear that things are going badly wrong there. In just the last week, we’ve seen

  • The rejection of the officially backed candidates in Hong Kong’s local election
  • Leaks exposing the massive repression of the Uighur population
  • The defection of an alleged Chinese spy, with allegations of interference in Australia’s domestic politics
  • Clear evidence that the energy transformation towards renewables has been abandoned or downplayed in favor of the revival of suspended coal projects

We can add to that longer term problems such as the failure to resolve the trade war with the US, and the slow-motion trainwreck of the Belt and Road Initiative.

At the core of much of this is the central government’s incapacity to control what goes in the provinces. I wrote about this a while ago in relation to coal, and it’s clearly evident both in the failure to control events in Hong Kong and in the resort to state terror in Xinjiang. It’s also true in relation to the Belt and Road, which has turned from a geopolitical grand strategy to a slush fund for provincial politicians and SOEs seeking easy money in corrupt overseas investment deals.

This is unlikely to work well for China, and failure in China bodes ill for the rest of us. Most obviously, if China’s coal projects follow their current trajectory, there is no chance of stabilizing the global climate.

But more generally, it seems hard to see how the current integrated global economy, with China playing a central role, can be sustained. Trump’s trade war was largely motivated by a pre-modern mercantilist analysis, but now that has started, it seems unlikely to stop, even if Trump loses in 2020.

I’ve been sceptical both of the idea that Chinese activity in the South China Sea is a major problem and of attacks on Chinese influence in Australia. While I still think these claims are overblown, it is hard to see the current Chinese state as anything other than a bad actor, one of many we have to confront today.

Unmitigated failure

John Quiggin21 Comments

That’s been the response of Australia’s political class, politicians, pundits and journalists alike to the arrival of catastrophic climate change in the form of ubiquitous and semi-permanent bushfires. The failure has been so comprehensive, encompassing nearly everyone in Labor and the LNP, and most of the commentariat, that there is not much point in naming names.

I can’t motivate myself to write a proper analysis of this, so I’ve been reduced to writing a series of snarky tweets.

Update: Sean Kelly spells out the same point in the SMH.

Read More »

Predictions and projections

John Quiggin8 Comments

I have a piece in The Conversation arguing against the common practice of publishing projections, based on holding constant parameters that are unlikely to remain so in practice. I suggest modellers need to bite the bullet, make predictions and stand by them.

A slight clarification, arising from discussion. To the extent that we are concerned with policy, it’s fine to make conditional predictions about the consequences of alternative policy packages.

Woke

John Quiggin14 Comments

The use of “woke” as a term of abuse by rightwingers has expanded rapidly in the recent past. A typical example is Deputy PM McCormack’s claim (rapidly refuted by fire chiefs) that the supposed relationship between climate change and the bushfire disaster arose from “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies.”

This is striking for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve never seen anyone in Australia describe themselves as “woke”. That’s not surprising: the term comes from the US and refers to changed consciousness of the structures of racial oppression there, and specifically to the position of black Americans. Being “woke” refers to things like the gaining of a new understanding the way blacks are portrayed in the media.

While Australia has plenty of problems with racism, particularly in relation to indigenous Australians, there hasn’t been any real transformation of consciousness here, or at least, anything sufficient to be announced as an awakening. So, the pejorative use of “woke” is yet another example of the dependence of the Australian right on culture war tropes imported from the US.

The same is true, by the way, of “political correctness”. The term was initially used ironically within the US left of people who were more concerned with taking the “correct line” than with effective action. It was then appropriated by the right to become the catchphrase we all know. In the Australian context, the term “ideologically sound” was used within the left, in just the same way as “politically correct”, but our local rightwingers never picked it up.

A second striking observation is that, having no real referent in Australia, “woke” is being used as an all purpose pejorative for anything the right doesn’t like. There’s nothing “woke” about being worried about climate change – the entire scientific community has been shouting about it for decades.

The extreme case, so far, is Janet Albrechtsen in the Oz (no link), using the term to describe veteran corporate gadfly Stephen Mayne, also notable as the founder of Crikey and previously an advisor to Jeff Kennett. Mayne certainly makes trouble for the cosy network of the Australian corporate elite, but describing shareholder activism* as “woke” stretches the term beyond any possible limit. In the current case, he is campaigning for more independent directors, while Albrechtsen (in a very confused piece) plays the gender card against him,

  • To be clear, I’m not referring to the kind of activism done by groups like Market Forces, pushing for divestment from fossil fuels. Mayne’s typically complaint is that boards aren’t capitalist enough preferring a comfortable life to their fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value.