Author: ericknight

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Quadrant Essay: Party without the people

John Keane, a historian at the University of Sydney, has attempted an ambitious history of democracy called The Life and Death of Democracy. As Keane notes in the book, few have attempted this feat before him. His is a veritable attempt.

One of the most interesting points he makes in the book is that representative democracy is not a static institution. Like the events in Egypt and Libya have demonstrated, the story of democracy around the world is still unfolding.

Near the conclusion, Keane makes an observation which might be read as a critique of modern democracy. The representative model fashioned during the Enlightenment is gradually shifting to what he calls monitory democracy. Monitory democracy is government by interest groups, lobby groups, expert panels, citizens’ assemblies… Anything, in other words, but the delegated authority of MPs.

I have written some thoughts on this in the April edition of Quadrant. It is a dark reflection on what is happening in some corners of Australian politics. To read my essay click here.

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Barry’s battlers

The Liberal Party’s success in western Sydney is significant. This has not been a victory of marginal seats. Electorates like Drummoyne in the inner west have not had a Liberal member in almost 50 years. The federal seat of Drummoyne used to have a Liberal Prime Minister. It was lost in the mood for change following the Menzies government. Saturday may mark a swing back in the other direction. 

Liberals should not take this swing for granted. The challenge for Barry O’Farrell is finding a way to speak to people who are voting Liberal for the first time in their life. They will be understandably apprehensive. How will the Coalition improve their access to healthcare, education for their kids, and the provision of social services?

O’Farrell faces a challenge, but he also has an opportunity. Incumbency has a strong pull in politics. If O’Farrell can persuade voters that the Coalition has a heart as well as a head on service delivery then he may change the electoral landscape of New South Wales for a generation.

Experts have more useful things than I to say about the NSW election result. One of the best pieces so far is Paul Kelly’s in The Australian. He quotes Paul Keating: “where goes NSW, so goes federal Labor”.

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ABC The Drum Opinion: The recipe for brain food

Sit at a kid’s birthday party and it doesn’t take long to work out what parents worry about. Leaving aside good looks and charm, all parents want their kids to be smart. That’s easy to work out. What’s harder is working out how to get there.
 
Statistics on schooling hardly make weekend reading. But the My School website has drawn a wide readership. The website should be applauded for trying to give power back to parents and principals in how their schools are managed. But it doesn’t necessarily provide the information we all need. Knowing how much money is going into public schools is one thing. Far more important is finding out whether teachers in our public schools are any good.
 
There’s no easy answer to this question. To start unwrapping the hidden dimensions I have written a piece for ABC Unleashed. We all want better education for our kids. I want to know how we achieve it. If you’ve got the answers, then please comment away. It’s over to you…

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The Age Opinion: An atomic problem

Shortly after the devastating earthquake in Japan, a friend sent me the following text. “Does Japan change your view on nuclear?” The answer is contained in an opinion piece I have written in The Age today. Click here to read it.

I am not an engineer or a scientist. I have no special insight into technologies. Whenever I’m at a conference on clean energy I invariably end up chatting to someone eager to tell me about some amazing widget they have discovered in the South-western corner of Nowhere – a technology which has the capacity to supply the world’s energy. My response is always the same. ‘Fantastic! Go and start up a company to commercialize it.’

The point of my piece is not to promote or defend a particular technology (like nuclear). It is simply to help us think clearly about how we approach a complex dilemma. What is the best way to address an emotive, controversial topic like nuclear energy?

Interestingly, the events in Japan also seem to have changed George Monbiot’s view of nuclear. Read it here. The irony of the Japan disaster is that it may actually lift nuclear energy out of the political quagmire.

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ABC The Drum Opinion: What’s in a green job?

While in England I worked for  a little while in a venture capital firm. It was an enlightening experience. Not only did I learn how to read the minutiae of balance sheets, I also got a glimpse of companies on the edge of capitalism. Venture capitalists put money into companies which sit somewhere between tin pot ideas and the next big thing.

I mention this because, in my own small way, I helped create a few jobs. There were a some health care jobs, the odd IT job, and then a few green jobs. What’s a green job you ask? Good question. Politicians throw the term around like confetti. I can assure you they are very hard to create.

That’s why I wrote a piece in today’s ABC Unleashed. For my take on the real story behind green jobs, green business, and the industrial base of the Australian economy click here.

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When you’re simply the best

Americans can be a baffling bunch sometimes. Australians and Brits tend to understate a case when they make it. Americans, on the other hand, sometimes get hot under the collar if a point is not made forcefully enough. Like, for example, when a President understates just how ‘exceptional’ a nation you are.

That is apparently the problem with Barack Obama. Obama got in trouble from the Tea Party last year for saying something that sounds reasonable to an Australian ear. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he said.

One has to wonder what this attack on Obama is really about. One view is that it is an oblique attack by the ‘Birthers’ on Obama’s legitimacy as an American-born President. Another is that it rides negative sentiment about whether Obama is really deciding in his country’s best interests.

Both might be true, but beneath the surface there may be some disquiet of Obama’s new approach to foreign policy. In a speech he gave late last year, Obama made a statement advocating for “a new era of engagement”. He went on to say:

“I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone.”

It is a bold and intriguing decision. I’m no expert on US foreign policy or American history, but I’m fascinated by where this superpower finds itself on history’s timeline. If you have any reactions please comment away!

For an interesting podcast on the subject click here.

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Making kids smarter

Standing on a street corner last Saturday I was approached by a distressed middle-aged lady. Her distress, she revealed, came from the state of public education in NSW. The Sydney Morning Herald carried a story of data released by the My Schools Website. Public funding was flowing in droves to the cloistered courtyards of private schools. At heart, her concern was an honest one: how would the state of public education be revived if there were a change of government in New South Wales?

I can hardly pretend to have the answer to this question. But my thinking was significantly influenced by my friend, Prashan, who has just set up his own website called the Australian Education Report.

One of the most intriguing and counter-intuitive things I have come to appreciate is that good education is not all about money. Getting sufficient money into public schools is vitally important. But after a certain point, what becomes more important than how much money you get is how you choose to spend it.

The OECD has recently done a study to show that cutting the data to examine teacher retention rates, quality of teachers, and the socio-economic background of students is meaningful. Improving these drivers in our public education system may do more to produce smarter students than pushing up bottom line spending. This is an emotive area of policy for good reason. We all want better-educated children. How we get there deserves some careful thinking.

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SMH Opinion: And the magic word is …

In the racy world of agents and publishers where I have been trying to sell my book, I’ve been told that the words ‘climate’ and ‘change’ send even the most resilient of punters to sleep.

You may be an exception to this theory of human nature. If this is the case, have a read of today’s SMH opinion page. I’ve made a contribution which aspires to be both light-hearted and serious. It’s two cents on one of our nation’s most vexing political issues.

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The bigger elephant

Gillard’s decision to introduce a carbon tax deserves credit. It is a brave move and it is the right idea, poorly executed. I say this as someone partial to a carbon tax over emissions trading. A carbon tax is a more direct economic strategy in the early stages of energy market transformation. To explain why, I need to give a bit of background. Forgive me if I put you to sleep.

Carbon trading works by putting environmental standards front and centre and letting the carbon price bob like a volley ball around it. This is potentially dangerous as it can create an enormous amount of instability in investment decisions. (When things are unstable, people tend to do nothing.) It only works when you have a flurry of commercially viable low carbon energy technologies at hand. In these cases, it only takes a slim carbon price to change energy behavior at the margins.

A carbon tax, by contrast, is geared directly at investment decisions. You can slowly and steadily increase the tax until the floodgates for technology are unleashed.

So what? Gillard would have been better off sticking to a carbon tax instead of locking in an ETS in 3-5 years time. Nonetheless there is a bigger elephant in the room: nuclear technology. Labour’s decision to embargo nuclear is like trying to solve a problem while hiding the answer. Technologies take decades to mature and nuclear is far more technically and commercially mature as a technology than wind or solar.

In my opinion, it is no longer credible in the modern age to be serious about de-risking climate change and be against nuclear energy in this country or anywhere else.

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The Spectator Australia essay: The agony and the ecstasy

For those in the market for some light entertainment, I recommend this week’s Spectator Australia.

$9 will buy you some very witty writing with the usual average diminished by my own contribution. Apparently it’s the top selling publication in the news agency in Chifley Tower, bang smack in the middle Sydney’s CBD.

I’m not quite sure what that says about the core readership…