Trevor Cook

You get bread crumbs, they live a merry circus - The Drum Opinion

This wedding takes place in a Britain gripped by unprecedented austerity, a country facing massive cuts to all its social services. You’d think that, in the face of the real misery being meted out to ordinary people, the lavish knees-up the royals are throwing for themselves might stick in the public craw.

That, however, would be to miss the point.

In fact, the best thing the royals have going for them is their very excess, since the palaces, the costumes, the ridiculous titles and the silly ceremonies generate a libidinal energy that feeds a celebrity culture, along the lines that these people must be special precisely because they’re so insanely privileged.

To put it another way, the royal wedding appeals precisely because the pageantry is so explicitly elitist, so dramatically different from the humdrum circumstances of our everyday lives. "The great appear great because we are on our knees," the Irish socialist Jim Larkin said once. He added, "Let us rise" – but in a political conjunction where we have not risen, where, in fact, the Left remains marginal and powerless, it’s all too easy to take a kind of consolation in the lives of those who self-confidently proclaim their own greatness.

via www.abc.net.au

An excellent article

Paul Howes, unions, ALP and the carbon tax

The Conversation has published this morning my latest piece on the subject of the relationship between unions and the ALP under the heading: "Howes' carbon tax ultimatum all in a day's work for union boss":

Public conflict between unions and the ALP is nothing new. But with the besieged Gillard government clinging to office, and unions desperately needing to prove their value to members, the current conflict brings Australia’s oldest relationship closer and closer to the precipice of separation.

(Previous stuff - I wrote a piece on this subject for ABC Unleashed, published last thursday. The text is available here. I also wrote a paper for last year's Australian Political Science Association on the unions-ALP relationship using some of the research for my phd (due for submission in August). That paper is available here. You can also read my review of Rodney Cavalier's Power Politics here.)

Radio interview with Declan Kiberd and Derek Hand

This week Miriam O'Callaghan interviews Declan Kiberd, Professor and Anglo Irish Literature and Drama in UCD and his former student Dr Derek Hand who now teaches English in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra

via www.rte.ie

Both men have written about John McGahern

Should we be afraid of big budget lobbying campaigns?

Katharine Murphy (fairfax journalist) has rung alarm bells about the amount of money some interest groups are willing to spend to influence government policy outcomes. She suggests that big budget campaigns pose a real threat to our political system, including by setting agendas, and that we should consider full funding of elections (to leave politics to the politicians) and truth in political advertising. She bases her case on three recent campaigns: the ACTU's against Workchoices; the miners against the mining tax, and the clubs against the proposed regulation of poker machines. All involved, or in the clubs example will involve, the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars.

There are some initial points to make.

• First, obviously 'leaving politics to the politicians' is neither desirable nor feasible in a democracy. Among other things, it would require restrictions on freedom of speech, including in the media.
• Second, none of these campaigns were agenda-setting. They were responses to government proposals, which they believed would adversely affect their members. They did try to frame the debate in ways favourable to their arguments, but that is not agenda-setting.
• Third, most campaigns of this sort are only partially successful, or not successful at all. Murphy's analysis would have been more interesting if she had given some sense of the success rate, as it stands she suggests that any campaign with a big enough budget will succeed. Unsurprisingly, successful campaigns are long remember while unsuccessful campaigns are quickly forgotten. 
• Fourth, no matter how big the budgets of the interest groups involved, they are easily surpassed by government. Leaving their capacity to buy advertising to one side, politicians have far greater access to media platforms than any interest group, and far greater resources for generating evidence-based content to fuel their side of the debate.
• Fifth, these big campaigns work by 'representing' the interests of many ordinary people be they the ACTU's 1.9 million unionists; or the mining industries investors, suppliers and employees. If you limit the capacity of these organisations to campaign, you are also limiting the right of these Australians to put their views.

We need to look at why some lobbying campaigns succeed more than others. We don't yet know whether the clubs campaign will ultimately succeed. But there are similarities between the other two. The success of the ACTU and mining campaigns owed a lot to policy and communication failures by government. In both cases, governments failed to establish a clear rationale for reform before announcing it. No-one knew why we needed more labour market reform or why the mining industry royalties needed to be replaced by a much larger tax. The Howard Government did not have a prior consultation process. The Rudd Government sat on the Henry report for months and then released it at the same time it announced the mining tax. Both policies were very complex, and that meant that weaknesses could be found and exploited. The governments that announced these policies were weakened by internal ructions over the leaderships of Howard and Rudd. In both cases, the government ministers charged with selling the policy reforms proved to be ineffective. Kevin Andrews, Andrew Robb, Joe Hockey, Wayne Swan and Martin Ferguson are not going to make it on to lists of great Australian political communicators.

My view is that big budget political campaigns are most likely to work off the back of bad policies, poorly communicated. There's a lot more to it than deep pockets. Short-term advertsing doesn't change underlying political attitudes and values. Framing helps, but there still has to be something there to exploit. Framing can also be seen as spin. Governments spin their policies the way that suits them, and an important function of public lobbying campaigns is to challenge that government spin.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem and that we shouldn't do something about it. It just means we need to be cautious before we advocate restrictions on freedom of speech, or further expenditures of taxpayer funds on election campaigns. Nor is it feasible to achieve some equality in access to lobbying resources. We would have to put undesirable restrictions on the freedom of speech of some people, and / or use taxpayer funds to support the lobbying efforts of others. Truth in political advertising is another idea that falls away a lot when you think about implementation. After all, who decides the 'truth' of a claim in a political ad. There may be some sensible measures to rein in excessive lobbying. It's just hard to think of something that would work and not impinge unduly on the freedoms of ordinary citizens. 

All lobbying is intended to influence policy-making. That after all is the point. And in a democracy, everyone has the right to try and influence policy-making. And a lot of people do. From writing letters, ringing radio stations, writing blogs, marching in protests to donating money to GetUp for a TV ad or two, or conducting academic research. Its always been there and always will be. We all get upset about the lobbying of our opponents, while many of us regularly engage in it. 

The real problem here is weak government, not strong lobbying campaigns. We've had some weak, ineffective governments over the last decade and that has both provoked and rewarded a few high profile campaigns.

Unions and the ALP: dysfunctional or recoverable?

I wrote a piece on this subject for ABC Unleashed, published on thursday. The text is available here. I also wrote a paper for last year's Australian Political Science Association on the unions-ALP relationship using some of the research for my phd (due for submission in August). That paper is available here. You can also read my review of Rodney Cavalier's Power Politics here.

More recently I have done two pieces for the conversation looking at Paul Howes in the context of a changing unions-ALP relationship - here and here. 

Modern life and our reliance on computers

I was on a bus home tonight which seemed to stall at the Railway Square stop. The bus driver stood up and told us that there would be a short delay because he had to "re-boot the computer". The woman next to me said "who knew?", most of the passengers seemed taken by surprise. Several minutes elapsed, the driver addressed us again. Sadly, the computer had not been successfully re-booted and we had to alight and catch the next bus. 

Genuine welfare reform: 3 essential steps

That old chestnut the welfare cheat has returned to distract the gullible. Welfare is an area where big structural changes are needed not mickey mouse, tough love measures.

1. Benefit structure. Two problems. First, differences in payment levels encourage people to opt for disability and aged pensions. Everyone knows it. But the only way of dealing with the problem is to increase the level of unemployment benefits - expensive and it doesn't fit the tough on welfare cheats narrative that pollies love. Second, the rate of benefit withdrawal (what you lose when you start to earn) results in ludicrously high, and inequitous, Effective Marginal Tax Rates: "High income families receive a greater percentage of an extra dollar earned than low income families, with middle income families suffering very high EMTRs."

2. Job Network. Like its predecessor, the Commonwealth Employment Service, it is biased towards finding jobs for people who would probably find them on their own even if it took a little longer. The hard to place clients get by-passed. It looks good on the performance stats and its more profitable. But it doesn't help get people into jobs who really need help.

3. Public transport. Welfare dependency, for want of a better term, is concentrated in places like south-west Sydney that lack effective, cheap transport. It is a tragedy that the former NSW Government did so little during its 16 years in office. But if Gillard or Abbott want to get people into jobs they need to deal with the very real physical and financial barriers to participation.

Put together these three problems and you can explain much of the 'why won't people get off welfare' issue that pollies and shock jocks love. But will the Federal Government's May Budget do much to address them? Not if the last decade of welfare reform is anything to go by.

Cult classic: Jesus is a friend of mine

Andrew Forrest: ripping off Aboriginal land-owners?

There seems to be a big contrast between the glitzy PR of the Generation One program, and the reality of how Forrest operates in local communities when he wants access to billions in iron ore deposits. More here.

 

A visit to the John McGahern Library, Co. Leitrim, Ireland

In this beautiful building, by the shores of Lough Rynn in County Leitrim, lies a truly beautiful room that pays tribute to my favourite writer, the late John McGahern.

via kimbofo.typepad.com

Bolt gets a program as Beck gets cancelled

Currently facing racial discrimination charges, climate-change denier and resident News Ltd wing nut, Andrew Bolt has been given a Sunday morning TV show on the same day that Fox in America has had to cancel Glen Beck's program after plummeting ratings and consumer boycotts of the show's advertisers. Beck's decision to label President Obama as a racist was a key step towards his demise.

Of course, it's just a coincidence, and Bolt is no Beck. Bolt will struggle to be entertaining and interesting every week, especially to anyone not a politics tragic. Beck made conspiracy an art-form, his faux academic lecture style would have been hilarious had its content not been so ugly. Beck's brand of manic right wing lunacy is in a category all it's own. He achieved a cult status. But Beck's demise does show that even in Tea Party America there are limits to how far you can go. I wonder whether Beck's demise indicates that this is another trend that has run its course. Perhaps, the formula of chasing audiences with ever more incendiary commentary has had its moment. Certainly, the odium that Abbott attracted for appearing in front of bitch and witch signs at the recent Canberra rally suggests that even stronger boundaries apply in Australia.

In Sydney, the commercial radio stations are trying to out do each other in being more Alan Jones than Alan Jones. They both have presenter lineups which are comprised almost entirely of white, anglo, middle class, male jocks who with very few exceptions are borderline hysterics. Like Beck, they have taken to organising and speaking at political rallies. Despite their enthusiasm for right-wing nonsense, commercial talk radio continues its slide into obscurity. Other areas of the Australian media have not yet gone full throttle on using right-wing political campaigns to try and build audiences, but News Ltd is pretty close. 

We can only hope that today's announcements suggest nothing more than that Australia has jumped on a bandwagon that has already started to stumble.

Gillard's Whitlam oration: unions, greens, opportunity and equality

What does the ALP stand for?

Gillard says she is sick of hearing this existential nonsense. 

Yet, she used her speech last night to state her view of Labor's mission.

The answer is: a nation a of social climbers.

Social climbers with a non-pretentious Aussie style, but make no mistake, the ALP worships the god of social mobility. 

Gillard's speech is redolent of Mark Latham's vision of aspirational voters. Of semi-skilled workers in Sydney's west with an eye on the stock market. Of mums working three jobs to send the young Julias of tomorrow to a good private school.

And like Marko she intones those meaningless sentiments: the Labor way, the Australian way.

Equally, she makes a point of repeating Kenneally's great piece of denial and self-delusion: They didn't leave us, we left them.

It sounds like Billy Sneddon's analysis of the 1974 election: we didn't lose, we came second. 

A real leader would just say we stuffed up, here's where ...

Nice sugar-coatings are Ok as long as you don't believe them yourself.

Gillard uses opportunity 12 times in her speech, and never mentions equality or inequality.

Concerns about inequality have been air-brushed out of the rhetoric of today's ALP.

But it's not that easy, as a recent study found:

 While it is often assumed that social problems bear little relationship to average incomes, the evidence suggests that income differentials within populations matter a great deal, and this is as true of American states as it is of countries around the world.

In the most unequal countries and states, there is more gender inequality, too, and these places are less generous. A higher proportion of people suffer from mental illness, and more use drugs.

Less egalitarian countries have six times as much obesity. Educational attainment is poorer, with higher dropout rates, shorter periods of paid maternity leave and less early childhood education. Teenage birth rates are higher, and it is young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violence.

In more unequal countries, children experience more bullying, fights and conflict, and rates of imprisonment are five times higher. Although it is possible that heath and social problems cause bigger income differentials, inequalities are the common denominator.

You can't separate equality and oppportunity in the glib way Gillard implies. Opportunity doesn't solve economic and social problems, only policies to address the worst aspects of inequality can do that. Policies that bring down the cost of housing, policies that provide cheap, reliable public transport for people in outlying suburbs. A progressive taxation system. Means-tested welfare payments. More of that please.

The Gillard government stresses about obesity but not inequality; the media highlights the bullying problem, but not inequality. We talk about the symptoms of inequality as if they were all separate problems that can be addressed with an education campaign or something similarly inexpensive.

Focusing on opportunities is simply code for abandoning the goal of keeping inequality to a minimum. Wealth and income disparaties don't matter to Gillard, just a better prospect for the next generation. Not fairness today, but fairness tomorrow (and then only for the academically bright). Labor's political ambition has been diminished.

Worse still, Gillard uses another dishonest sleight of hand to suggest that dismantling the welfare state is central to her project of creating more opportunities:

Creating opportunity and enabling social mobility has required different policies in every age. We have moved beyond the days of big government and big welfare, to opportunity through education and inclusion through participation.

What poppycock.

Government is bigger now than under Whitlam: more spending and more regulation. And it has accelerated under the Rudd / Gillard governments. For instance:

The federal government spending share of gross domestic product will increase by 2.6 percentage points this financial year, with a further increase of two percentage points forecast for next financial year, the biggest increases since the early 1970s. Government spending will reach 28.6per cent of GDP in 2009-10, a figure unprecedented in peacetime. Government spending has increased 13.5per cent this financial year, an increase unprecedented since the Whitlam era, and it will increase by a further 3.9 per cent in 2009-10. 

It's all about what the money gets spent on. And how it is distributed. And what impact that has on inequality.

Gillard, like Abbott, wants to get tough on the unemployed and the disabled, while leaving in place the whole edifice of middle-class welfare that the Howard Government did so much to increase.

Unions get one mention in Gillard's speech. Australia's 2 million union members will be doubtless pleased to know that Labor still supports the role of unions. Hardly a fulsome vision for unions in the modern Labor way.

The Greens, by comparision, get six mentions. As the ALP continues its stupid obsession with a minor party on its left.

Forget the Greens, Julia, and focus on inequality. That's the way to win back the heartland. Some warmed over version of John Howard's political ideology won't do it.