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.

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.
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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.

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.

Sol Lee 

1h ago

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.

Reply

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  DennisA
  

  45m ago

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

In my previous blog entry "Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance" I suggested that the future needs greater engagement and collaboration of people younger than myself (aged 71) for the political health of the nation.

An eminent person who has had a major role in encouraging public debate and sensible policy development wrote privately, with exclamation marks: "But is our generation... not able to influence how we proceed."

I warmly endorse the idea that we should seek to influence how the nation proceeds... and I note that 'our generation' includes an Argentinian pope who seems influential. Gone are the days when policemen looked young and prime ministers looked young, now the pope is a contemporary. The pope has the advantage of being still in office.

I do not see MF's arguments about Australian strategic policy having much influence. There is a lack of connect. There are problems in that parts of the electorate do not forgive him for past events, but those people are not very much younger people. There is a problem, more importantly, in my view, that younger generations do not react well to lecturing from the ancient. We need to avoid the first disease mentioned by the pope in his team pep-talk on 22 December. The public, not least many of those who thought Abbott would bring deliverance, is being shocked away from the shockers who pronounce they've got the answers. So we have to offer something other than gold-plated opinion.

Noely of Yathink shoved me into resuming this kind of writing–starting this blog–a couple of months ago. Specifically she was concerned, in her rage against the betrayers of the present, that people like me, knowing the history and depth of issues, must not remain silent.

I think the answer is in there, in the ability, if willing, of our generation to speak not only of current opinion but with introspection and self-critically about the past. I note however Harold Nicholson's alleged observation that he had never, in the archives of any foreign ministry on the planet, read a record of conversation in which the person taking the record had not won. It's not easy to be frank about the past.

I suspect that having had my career mucked by illness I have had a longer space in which to become independent minded and feel a freedom and a need to speak publicly than some of my generation, with notable wonderful exceptions. Imagine if many more of those who used to argue policy within the walls of government or political apparatus were to bring minds into the open and demonstrate policy argument. Not to demand control of debate–we do not need a gerontocracy–but to show how to throw light on complex issues.
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What is the prospective political process that we seek to influence.

This week the print edition of Guardian Weekly led its front page with editorial beginning: "In 2014, people power took on the state in a battle for minds and the streets." Despite March in March, people 'in the streets' in Australia are those on the internet. There is a readiness for ideas but haste to conclusions, anxiety for answers and results. Somehow the 24 hour news cycle and the 24 second social media cycle have to mature. And in a wider view, looking at what has happened in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, I have to say, um but... Taking to the streets is only the beginning of a process. If political stability as used to be a mantra of Australian policy towards Asia, depends, as we seldom realised, not on people staying in power but sensible regime change, we should also understand that taking to the streets–or indeed being a parliamentary opposition–is only really effective if there are good policy-making processes present or achievable.

Leonore Taylor's concluding comment in her roundup of 2014 in The Guardian is important:

... the electorate can barely remember a political leader who tried to level with them to conduct a bigger public conversation, an actual discussion of detailed policies and their consequences. The question for 2015 is, will either of the present major party leaders dare to try? 

Perhaps 'our generation' can contribute in some ways here if we bring our skills and habits of private policy out into the open. Openness has to start and influence is surely only going to be achieved via openness.

We are however, habituated in a distinctly British kind of process, in which the man on horseback commanded and told people what to do. That is still the main model of those who grab for power in our parliaments, also the historical expectation of serfly voters. That's not the future: the country has more diversity culturally and the young are declining to register to vote, see this and this. The anger of the young against older generations relates to power as well as money. For our generation to influence, why and to what should anyone listen? That's a serous question, not a rhetorical conclusion. And for the Asian, or Arab, or African, or other Australians of different background, do we show them anything to trust? Must they assimilate in coming into the tent or do they have new ways to offer?

Basil Liddell-Hart, great British military strategist at the end of his life came to the view that it's not what you say you you want or say you are doing it's what you do that has lasting effect
: that the savagery of the Spanish Civil War could be related to the savagery of the Peninsular War with Napoleon from which the word guerrilla arose; and that the terrorist violence arising in the Middle East in the end of the 1960s could be connected to the violence of Lawrence of Arabia. My view, as expressed in writing to the then Australia Foreign Minister in 2003 (no reply) was that:

...it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension. [Shortly after going to war in Iraq the government had ironically launched an expensive media campaign against domestic violence, that is, against the presumption by anyone of the right to bash up others because they think they are right and have a right.]

Whether my generation can help get us into a better ethical dimension remains to be seen.

Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance

In the January-February 2015 edition of the American journal The National Interest, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser sets out his arguments for ending the Australia-United States alliance. The introduction of the argument is below. It is a vision statement deserving attention, but at the present time it seems unlikely to draw much political support in Australia. More the pity. It is a sensible case.

My own argument has tended to be that within the alliance we can be a better ally by having a more independent-minded voice and arguing sense to the United States. This is an concern I have expressed for a long time, and which I believe is very feasible. But even that kind of mature adjustment within the alliance seems elusive in a situation where the present Australian government is lame-brained and capable at best of marching up and down whinging its own importance and shaking its fists ridiculously at too many other governments, while the alternative government seems dedicated to simpering sniffling anxiety to hide behind this Prime Minister whose capacity and judgement they should vigorously question.

The question with Malcolm Fraser's vision statement is how on earth do we get to consider it?

At the core is the seeming inability of younger generations (I am 71, it really isn't my job) to collaborate to find new Australian national political identity. There is a modicum of support for The Greens, who offer the only existing institutional base around which new perspectives might coalesce, but The Greens have a somewhat self-isolating purist approach which limits their prospects.

A great deal of the problem of the future, of the Australia of younger generations, must rest with Fraser's successor as conservative prime minister, John Howard, who so thoroughly endorsed and encouraged perspectives of self interest and led the way now being followed vigorously by Howard's successor on the conservative side, Abbott, in destruction of the infrastructure of community.

I think it's here, back in here, inside national affairs, that the change process must begin and have wider effect. And it seems to me that change has to come relatively from the conservative side of politics. Certainly Labor on the notional left has more progressive policies which benefit community, but they are shy of articulating strategy, stuck in the madness of hoping to slip into government on the basis of Abbott's hopelessness, perhaps also hamstrung because the union movement at the party's core serves not only those on modest incomes, but also those whose incomes have become massive. Things may change as more and more jobs are shed in the construction and manufacturing industries in the next several years. There will not however then arise a mass of working class passion, but a rage among displaced affluent middle class. There is a timidity in the electorate at large, a timidity born of obsession with consumption, high mortgages and working and private lifestyles that gives people a very narrow focus on self-interest and notions of economic management. (Along with a simplicity of American(Hollywood)-oriented cultural values.) Even young people seem unthinkingly to say "the Liberals are better at economic management" when there is so much evidence that they are making a muck of it.

What is needed is a coalition of younger people, if they exist, of the kind of persuasion of the old 'wet' side of the Liberal Party, the party of Baume and Chaney and McPhee and the like, to come out of hiding and start spanking the madness of the domestic policies of the present government. So long as the arguments of Fraser and Burnside and the like speak mainly to international and refugee issues, the battle is not even engaged; rather, they are placed on the outer. The main battle is over economics and the place of community. Whether we serve the economy or the economy serves community.

The next debate must also embrace other cultures in Australia, which must be encouraged to enter the mainstream. Another book there...I note that Moslem men who bring their families to my seaside town on summer holidays articulate passionate and reasoned hostility towards the United States and the Australian alliance in private conversation. These arguments need to get to them too, so they see that there are sensible thinkers in the Anglo community.

....So I don't think that the laudable arguments below will not get traction until the debate front goes domestic too.
This is the opening of Malcolm Fraser's essay in the January-February 2015 edition of The National Interest:

IT IS time for Australia to end its strategic dependence on the United States. The relationship with America, which has long been regarded as beneficial, has now become dangerous to Australia’s future. We have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war. Even if America were the most perfect and benign power, this posture would still be incompatible with the integrity of Australia as a sovereign nation. It entails not simply deference but submission to Washington, an intolerable state of affairs for a country whose power and prosperity are increasing and whose national interests dictate that it enjoy amicable, not hostile, relations with its neighbors, including China.
As painful as a reassessment of relations may be for intellectual and policy elites, there are four principal reasons why one is long overdue. First, despite much blather about a supposed unanimity of national purpose, the truth is that the United States and Australia have substantially different values systems. The idea of American exceptionalism is contrary to Australia’s sense of egalitarianism. Second, we have seen the United States act in an arbitrary, imprudent and capricious fashion. It has made a number of ill-advised and ill-informed decisions concerning Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Third, at the moment, because of U.S. military installations in Australia, if America goes to war in the Pacific, it will take us to war as well—without an independent decision by Australia. Finally, under current circumstances, in any major contest in the Pacific, our relationship with America would make us a strategic target for America’s enemies. It is not in Australia’s interest to be in that position.

meanwhile in Syria... and Sydney

This is a valuable account of life among jihadis by Theo Padnos, American would-be journalist and student of Arabic and Islam, for 20 months a prisoner of the Al Nusra front, fighting ISIS on the ground. The realities of a 'normal' brutality, of expectation of martyrdom among young men who will preach or bully and then ask about meeting single European women.

While there is evidently no oeganisational link between this world and the tragic figure who took hostages in a Sydney cafe this week (variously described straightforwardly here, by New Matilda's Chris Graham here and incisively critically by Russell Brand here), his mind would seem cut from the same cloth as the jihadis described by Padnos.

We do well to step away from our conventional perspectives if we are to understand what this whole jihadi business is. Noting that too much of our perspectives in the west are from the remoteness of satellites, drones, fighter aircraft and wishful thinking and amateur ideological assertions of political leaders seeking to simplify and prance... or just fall into line. I commend Russell Brand for his lively interpretation of the way the issues are perverted and made more difficult by much government and media action and interpretation.


(Also see Russell Brand in this video on poverty and the virtue of spending money currently used for bombing the Middle East on building better societies)

Clint Watts, writing in Eurasia Review, offers interpretation of Padnos's story, in particular that given the fluidity of loyalty among jihadis, the bombing of one or the training of one to fight another has only destructive effects, especially in the absence of any plan of dealing with the Assad regime in Damascus. We stand, by current western policies, to inherit only wider and more dangerous jihadism, more savvy in attacking the west, better armed and skilled.

Again in Eurasia Review, this article by Nicola Nasser, an Arab journalist on the Palestine West Bank, describes or asserts Israeli support and sanctuary for Al Nusra and collaboration in attacks on the Syrian government. Israel's interest being in weakening and diverting the strength of its Syrian enemy away from Israel. I am reminded that several years ago in Sydney a Lebanese Moslem man asserted to me that Israel now pursued a policy of encouraging war between Moslems. There is more news of Israeli air strikes accessible with this search,... and about Israel and al Nusra here. See Haaretz for an Israeli perspective.