Saturday 17 January 2015

What does the Australian Labor Party stand for?



National Archives photo
forty years ago
when Secretary of the
Prime Minister's Department.
John Menadue has today reposted a very sensible clear statement of what the ALP needs to do if it is to have a future. 

Read it here. 

Please.

A sample of the clarity and sense:
"If Labor is to differentiate itself from conservative parties, it needs to express that difference in a clear set of principles which accord with the best of Australians’ values. Otherwise the political contest is reduced to satisfying short-term materialist ‘aspirations’, appeasing vested interests and managing the media cycle. In such a contest, Labor is engaged in a futile struggle, for the Coalition is adept at conveying the misleading impression that it is the ‘natural party of government’, particularly because of its supposed competence in economic management. Joe Hockey’s performance as Treasurer shows that this supposed competence is a myth but conservative commentators still persist with the myth."

That's from part 1. John has also reposted his concluding elegant part 6.  The language is clear, the arguments important.
Even conservatives acknowledge that only the public sector can provide some services such as national defence and management of the money supply. In addition, however there are economic functions where private funding or provision is possible but only at high economic cost, with distorted incentives and with serious consequences for equity. These include education, health insurance, energy and water utilities and communication and transport infrastructure. In these and other areas there are market failures for which prudent economic principles require a strong government role in funding or provision. Unless Labor articulates and defends the proper economic role of government – a pre-requisite to improving Australia’s weak taxation base – economic growth will be restrained by inadequate public spending and investment.
Of these investments, the most important is human capital to ensure that people can develop their capabilities so that they can contribute to their full potential through employment, business or unpaid work...
...[Labor] should present its human capital policies in the context of a unified set of principles in infrastructure, education, health, environmental  protection, underpinned by principles of investing in capabilities, nurturing individual freedom and autonomy and supporting social inclusion.

Charlie Hebdo, Paris 17; Baga, Nigeria 2000

My entry in this blog on 9 January about Charlie Hebdo and 9/11 may have been gloomier than necessary. OR not gloomy enough. The quality of transient passion whipped by social media was nicely summed up in the New Yorker's daily cartoon 26 December.


John Menadue, at his blog, has written and linked to some good thoughts on Charlie Hebdo.

The Independent carried this report which makes sobering reading about the way the virtual world and political pompery of the developed world has reacted to the massacre of 17  rude people in Paris, while the murder of 2000 innocents in a Nigerian village arouses scant attention, though its strategic consequences are large, much as Ebola has strategic consequences.

As to what to do about Charlie, Russell Brand again makes good sense.

Friday 9 January 2015

Charlie Hebdo and 9/11

I'm afraid that the global reaction to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity reminds me more than anything else of the mad response to 9/11.

The Guardian has offered an editorial and a commentary urging moderation and thoughtful response and quite quickly shut down commenting with bricks being hurled at the paper. It has highlighted some letters which point to the need to maintain perspective, not least the context of western military violence, including against media, this without offering room for comments.

In my view the mass outpouring of sympathy is one thing, the mass leaning towards retribution is very dangerous, especially as it seems more global and crowd-pushed than 9/11. It will be difficult for governments to be moderate, it will be easier for security perspectives to prevail if people demand hostile responses and if people use the event to tag every Muslim. And easier for far right politics to come to the fore. Along with anarchic leftish activity, the old left being as comfortable as President Hollande is popular in this swirling stream.

And some pillars of progressive editorial virtue are ready to pillory any murmur of doubt about the righteousness of Charlie.

I find myself very uncomfortable finding any measure of agreement with the disagreeable Bill Donohue, given his demeanour and his ugly outpourings generally, but there is a germ of reality in his comment on this event.

While social media and much mass entertainment depends upon and stokes extravagant rudeness and wildness there are things which work towards peace and freedom and things which reinforce intolerance and whip up hatreds. As did many of the cartoons, the wild-child nose thumbing and toilet humour of Charlie Hebdo and your everyday wave of nastiness on social media. It is of the fabric of bullying, of American exceptionalism, of the right to rush into other countries, the right to bash a spouse for disagreeing or just to vilify. Vilification is vilification.

And if we are concerned for war avoidance and enhancement of development and stability in the world, we need to be very concerned about what has happened in the reaction as much as the atrocity. Or more, because if we assert that we are better people, we should try to be better people.

The atrocity in Paris is criminal, not an act of war... of if it is found to have been directed rather than inspired by some known terrorist organisation, then we should look carefully at its effects and our responses have to be deliberate and constructive. If is is an act of war it has been immensely successful in causing political chaos in the enemy. Clausewitz discussed the tendency of war to drive out policy:

Were [war] a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation
of violence (as the pure concept would require), war would of
its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment
policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out
of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a
mine that can explode only in the manner or direction
predetermined by the setting. This, in fact, is the view that
has been taken of the matter whenever some discord between
policy and the conduct of war has stimulated theoretical
distinctions of this kind. But in reality things are different,
and this view is thoroughly mistaken.
.... As quoted by Suzanne Nielsen, POLITICAL CONTROL OVER THE USE OF FORCE: A CLAUSEWITZIAN PERSPECTIVE, May 2001, p.16
Sadly I think Clausewitz's last sentence quoted above, while relevant to war in the early 1800s, is not relevant now, in a period of absolute and pervasive war, with proliferation of tools of violence and mobility and independence of decision that he could not have imagined. He wrote in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, the great moment in which 'the state' was affirmed as the definition of international life and strategy and power. Presided over by Metternich, hero and role model of Henry Kissinger, whose metternichian approach to international affairs as national security advisor to Nixon, later Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford in the United States, 1968-1976, saw pursuit and promotion of notions of a two or three power world model in which the interests of lesser states were utterly disregarded, creating the basis for many ongoing miserable conflicts which have become more inflamed with the removal of the cold war packaging, direction and savagery. That mindset evident in the embalmed perspectives of such as Edward Luttwak. Mindset that is part of the blood stream of American exceptionalism, Clintonist we-will-be-great-again (see second last para) as well as the now dominant American right.

And now we have Charlie exceptionalism, driven as wildly as extreme Islamist exceptionalism. And shouting drowns out thinking, war drowns out policy, war in its own exceptionalism, war as a virtue for some industry, war easily made and easily armed, war increasingly unconventional.
---

See how even my local tourist office wants to exploit terrorism-mindedness for business.

I recall, in the wake of 9/11 and at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, in 2003, listening to talkback radio, driving at night, in which people in Sydney were ringing in with all sorts of apprehensions, explaining how their attitudes and behaviours had changed, how they looked at parked cars, how they did not want to stop in strange places in the dark... There is a recent shift in body language, in how people smile or seem to smile less, meet the eye less in negotiating passage through confined spaces in shopping places. I'm thinking it's not just Howard-encouraged self-centredness, it's a depth of irrational apprehension, adding now with economic insecurities with their real base and as fomented by government doomsaying.


Thursday 1 January 2015

China-Australia: Hawke, Tiananmen, cabinet papers 1989

I contributed to discussion at The Guardian of former Prime Minister Hawke's action in 1989 in deciding to grant resident rights to many Chinese in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen incident.

After the usual array of mainly drivel comments, a person with a Chinese name made an earnest comment to which I replied.

01
Most of the Chinese students here never supported the Tiananmen protest, they just used that as an excuse to get PR here. Many years later, some of those actually praise the Chinese government for the crackdown, citing the reason that the crackdown ensured the decades of prosperity to come. Many, once they got their Australian citizenship, made friends with the Chinese embassy and consulates here, actively participated in their functions and started doing business in China. They owe whatever good lives they've got here to the students massacred in Beijing, even though they never joined the protest, and they were never personally at risk of persecution.


  • 01
    I think that such developments will always be the case, Mr Lee. If you look back at the circumstances of the time, and the passionate commitment of this prime minister both to multiculturalism and to relations with China, it was an incisive step. To do nothing then? To undergo a process of examining the claims of every Chinese person here who did not want to go back, one by one? Remember that this Prime Minister, in his speech welcoming Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang to parliament house in 1985, ended with the words: "Our relations with no other country is more important than our relationship with China." I drafted the rest of that speech, he added that ending. His regard for China and for Hu was very high. You are aware, I know, as other may not know, that Hu Yaobang was subsequently removed from office by Deng Xiaoping and dinosaurs for being too open to social change and student views, and his very popular 'sankuan' campaign in 1986, advocating 'generosity, tolerance and relaxation' (good account here). As you know it was Hu's death in 1989 that led to the events in Tiananmen. You also know that Hu's successor as General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, similarly held in high regard by Hawke, met with and struggled to find accommodation with the protesting students in 1989 and you know that after the uproar and martial law, Zhao was placed under house arrest. So it's important to understand that Hawke's judgement was informed by a deep despair at the direction of events in China, but also a determinedly strategic perspective in relation to China and in relation to multiculturalism in Australia.
    Someone earlier in this discussion suggested the Hawke decision was calculated politically, another said it was just emotional. I recommend that people study the complexity instead.
    Mr Lee, Mr Hawke went on to continue dealing with China, but he had made an important stand at a critical time. It is surely in Australia's interest that China survive as an intact nation. We have such crappy political management and lousy international international strategy and a seriously declining human rights record that we can hardly preach to anyone, though we continue to do that and in our broad culture see little of Asia other than through the prism of beer glasses in Phuket and Bali.
    We cannot point fingers constructively, though present leaders, with ten fleas under ten fingers, to use a Chinese expression, have to resort to hitting with heads and chests to maintain their sense of right to bully.
    China has no foreign example to follow in finding its political way: not the US, not Russia, not India, certainly not Australia. I am conscious of strictures on life in China. At the same time, I do wish people would recognise that what has happened in China in the period since 1978 is the greatest revolution and change in human history, unprecedented in scale and in the increase in the quality of life of people.
    And all the while, in this country, people choose to be led by fools, can't see their good fortune, grow more selfish (what an example to the Chinese middle classes) and have so little knowledge of history they approach the future rudderless.

  • My comment on Tianamen in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June 1989, is crudely copied here.