Category: AUSTRALIAN POLITICS

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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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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…

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Lost for words

Words, not ideas, have got in the way of our latest political train wreck.  The Australian heartland, I would suggest, has the same generous idea about our nation’s future. Semantics, however, have gotten us into a terrible mess.

It was John Howard who first made the distinction between the words “multi-cultural” and “multi-ethnic”. His point was that a people are one, but their countries of origin are many. People as different as Cory Bernardi and Chris Bowen would agree with that statement. But it was a clumsy distinction. Chris Bowen’s speech this week was a deliberate attempt to revive this semantic ghost for political effect. It worked. Scott Morison has been tripping all over the place ever since.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to leave language to poets. Qantas has made famous the words of two of our great song-writers, Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton. It’s aired every time we step onto a Qantas aircraft because it expresses perfectly and beautifully what we all think.

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian

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When a bishop trumps an abbott

Rumour has it that there was a rather nasty stoush between a bishop and an abbott last week. Julie Bishop was cagey about what it was over. It is clear what it should have been over. Abbott’s decision to reallocate foreign aid funding to pay for the floods is an error of judgment.

In Battle Lines, Abbott acknowledged that the Liberal party has traditionally struggled with an image problem. The problem is that swing voters see the Liberals as cold-hearted. I say it’s an image problem because this doesn’t need to be the case. No party can claim a monopoly on a good heart. Political parties, you may be surprised to know, rarely disagree with purposes: better health care, better education, helping the down-and-out. What they disagree on is how to achieve these purposes.

Both sides want to help Queensland. But Abbott made himself the news story by axing foreign aid to pay for the floods. Instead he should have tried to cut bottom line spending deployed in unproductive projects under the $42 billion stimulus package. The message here is fiscal responsibility.

I have commented elsewhere why Gillard’s levies are fiscally imprudent. The flood bill should be paid for out of the national budget. It is a very serious problem if the Treasurer is running the economy on such a fine margin that it cannot pay for natural disasters. It’s like the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to see how far he can drive his car in the red zone of the fuel tank. Missing this point and being close to a policy suggested by Qld One Nation is a mistake.

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Changing the flag…

This week I have found myself driving around Burwood, Ashfield, Marickville, Strathfield, and Camperdown in Sydney’s western suburbs doing errands. These places are heartland Labor seats, held on margins upwards of 15% in most places. Seeing the campaign posters of incumbent members, though, you wouldn’t know it.

Take Strathfield for example. Virginia Judge has been a stable face amidst the NSW government’s storm. She has held Strathfield for Labor since 2003 and has a margin of 15.1%. But I didn’t know this about her until I looked it up. Her campaign posters suggest the opposite. They are swashed in green, don’t say the word ‘Labor’ or ‘ALP’ anywhere, the letters MP after her name are printed very small, and she even looks different!

Then there’s Five Dock. Angelo Tsirekas has been a great Mayor of Canada Bay and has excellent local clout. He has replaced Angela D’Amore after she was accused of inventing a fictitious staffer to charge expenses to. Angelo was pipped at pre-selection several years ago by the Labor heavies but now they can do with his local credentials. And Angelo knows it. His poster is yellow, the Labor logo is minuscule in the bottom left corner, and his tag line is ‘One of Us’.

When Simon McKeon’s was awarded Australian of the Year this year, one of his first announcements was that Australia should change its flag. I can’t see that ever happening. People fought under that flag and will defend it to the hilt. The Australian Labor Party flag, however, is another story. Is that what they mean when they say Labor needs to be re-branded?