Australian morons, a history of hysteria

Embed from Getty Images

1850s: the Chinese are invading, before long they will take over!

1920s: the New Caledonians are invading, before long they will take over!

1930s: bog Irish are invading, before long they will take over!

1940s: the Japanese are invading, before long they will take over!

1950s: Italians and Greeks are invading, before long they will take over!

1960s: the Koreans are invading, before long they will take over!

1970s: the Vietnamese are invading, before long they will take over!

1980s: the Lebanese are invading, before long they will take over!

1990s: Serbs and Croats are invading, before long they will take over!

2000s: Iraqis and Afghanis are invading, before long they will take over!

2010s: Sudanese and Sri Lankans are invading, before long they will take over!

2020s: Indians and Syrians are invading, before long they will take over!

One Nation doesn't exist

Embed from Getty Images

Recent polls for federal politics have seen One Nation rise in the polls to become the default Opposition, displacing the Liberal/National coalition. Discouragement with the ability of the Coalition to deliver on anything that the public wants have led the public to deliver a protest vote to One Nation of such a proportion as to make them the prospective alternative government.

The theory that Pauline Hanson could be our next Prime Minister has a number of problems, not least of which is the fact that she would have to shift from the Senate to the House in a specific seat. One of the other main problems is the requirement of an alternative government to provide options for a full shadow cabinet. Perhaps it is forgiveable in the short term, given ON's current Parliamentary members are so sparse compared to their poll numbers. Structurally, though, the problem came to a head this week in the wake of Hanson's "monoculture" rant during her National Press Club address. Three polls this week showed Labor clawing back three points from both ON and the Libs, and Hanson's personal ratings dropping by a lot more. That's enough evidence to judge that there's a real shift in electoral judgement.

(Sorry for the throat-clearing prose telling you what you already know... it's painfully habitual, from my journalism training. I haven't yet learned how to just dive in with spicy takes like a true blogger, even after all these years. I will put it in italics in future, so you can skip it.)

There is no such thing in Australia as a "monoculture". When pressed, Pauline Hanson threw up the names of Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston as examples of the culture she likes. Paul Hogan, to his eternal credit, answered by calling Pauline Hanson a "pelican". This peculiarly Australian insult is not particularly well-defined, but I see it as being this: a weird white bird with a big mouth, stinking of fish.

Right-wingers can't identify any part of Australian culture they like. They may mention Dave Hughes, but they don't like his comedy, just when he gobs off about taxes on socials. They can't even bring themselves to cite Barry Humphries, who was a similar late convert to scrofulous right-wing whinging but wore womens' clothing so that's right out. A similar thing is happening in America right now, where even Milli Vanilli rejected Donald Trump.

The next argument I get on this point is that Australian culture is actually our freedoms and laws. Bullshit! If Pelican meant democracy, she would have said democracy, not culture. What these idiots actually hate is Muslims, so they pretend Sharia law is going to crawl from under their beds and enslave their children.

One Nation's polling numbers were the softest yet seen in Australian politics. It is a protest vote, not serious. At the first moment when Hanson's silliness endured a skerrick of critical scrutiny, it was shown to be contentless.

Does that mean ON can't win an election? Clearly not. Trump got elected twice. The party may get into a power-sharing arrangement with the Libs in Victoria later this year, if current poll trends hold up in November.

It does mean, nevertheless, that ON can't govern. Its fervent cultists think that is a feature, not a bug. I have faith that a significant majority of voters don't want to burn everything down DOGE-style, but would prefer to see leaders who can solve problems instead of creating them.

There is no deal

Embed from Getty Images

Welcome back to Loaded Dogma, an Australian political blog. I have not posted for ten years. I will try not to leave ten years until the next entry.

I have been moved to blog again because I wanted to get out in full my theory as to why the Iran war is not going to end any time soon. In the spirit of Hemingway, I will try to use brief and spare language.

Donald Trump believes in bilateralism. This is at the heart of his Art Of The Deal manifesto, albeit mostly ghostwritten and not made explicit in the text. This is why his people continue to fail at the Middle East peace process in general, and ending this war in particular.

The Iran war is a three-cornered contest: Israel, Iran and America. Trump's preferred negotiating technique is not to get all three parties in a room. It is not even two combatants in a room. His people talk to Pakistan, the Iranians talk to Pakistan, and they come to separate agreements with different text, with Israel not part of the process.

That is great for creating instant headlines and generating short-term media hits, as Trump is enjoying right now. A deal has been agreed upon, shout the headlines and newscasters. Except... there is no "deal".

There is a list of demands and concessions that the US agreed to. There is a similar but different list Iran agreed to. There is no "deal" that merges the two. Newspapers and TV are lying on Trump's behalf. They are mugs.

Baudrillard (pictured) would recognise this terrain. The peace deal is a simulacrum, existing in media coverage but not actually on paper anywhere, let alone agreed to by warring parties. Trump wants it to be hyperreal in the Baudrillardian sense, but over time the glimmer fades and we realise its ephemerality.

We as witnesses are not searching for truth here; we yearn for solidity. None presents itself.

Leslie Nassar 1973-2016

No one has a bad word to say about Leslie Nassar, now that he is dead. (See Helen Razer at Crikey for a more traditional obituary.) He is a man made famous for saying bad words about other people, so this is unusual. Those who were lucky enough to know him, work with him or follow him on social media through his long and storied career know that when he cut you, it's because you deserved to be cut. For everyone else, the word I'm seeing most often to describe him and how he acted towards others is "lovely", which brings to mind the way Paul McDermott calls someone a "lovely feller" in a soft voice, like he's reciting The Sentimental Bloke. That is perfect.

I got to know him in the year 2001, when I joined the community of an epochal computer games forum called PlanetCrap. He went by the nickname of szcx back then, IIRC because he preferred those keys to the usual wasd configuration when playing shooter games with a keyboard. Most of the denizens of that forum were European or American, with szcx and I just about the only regular Aussies. I first met him in 2002, which is where I took the above picture. In that community, he was always an intelligent and nice influence, but could take the fight up to trolls and villains as much as anyone when the need arose.

Even back then Leslie was liable to get into trouble. He went to Portland, Oregon for work on a visa sponsored by his employer, but went over the border to Canada to try to renew it after his employer lied to him about his status... only for the Canadian authorities to dob him in to the US Department of Homeland Security for overstaying his visa, and get him shipped to a detention centre in Seattle. After three weeks of incarceration and what amounted to torture, he was deported to Sydney. Hopes that he might emigrate to the US to join his American partner were dashed for a long time.

As a man to meet and talk to, you wouldn't meet a more agreeable conversationalist. He was always interested in what you were doing, empathetic to your life's trials and tribulations, and obviously had a mind as quick as the latest computer chip, and sharp as the blades he shaved his head with. He was very well connected, though of course later he burned some of those bridges with the @fakeStephenConroy controversy that saw him gain his first taste of instant public notoriety but then get blackballed nearly out of the digital industry when certain Telstra executives held a grudge against him. Thankfully, he landed on his feet with a contract with Victoria Police, which meant he had to move down to Melbourne where he lived a stone's throw from my place in Brunswick.

We hung out more in those times. By that stage his first daughter had arrived, who turned out to have a one-in-a-million syndrome similar in some ways to Downs, meaning his family needed lots of quality medical help which at the time would have been outrageously expensive in America in the pre-Obamacare era. Even if he could get a visa and/or citizenship, the cost of supporting his child made the thought of moving to America out of reach.

America's loss was Australia's gain. Many other people know more about his work at the ABC setting up podcasting, at Q&A with TweeVee TV and the viral sensation that was @DeptOfAustralia and I'm sure that history will be well documented elsewhere. I knew him by that point as a friend and business mentor, at a time when I really needed both. As such, he was a constant source of positivity and a perfect foil for radical ideas, even when his own family was under threat from external forces and the danger of his professional radicalism was so present in his personal life. His fearlessness was not false bravado. He could speak with authority on how to construct a life as an anti-Telstra tech terrorist, something I shared with him in my business.

Leslie's death hits me particularly hard because he was a fellow traveller in life. He is the same age as me, and we both built young families later in life after long periods as lone wolves. I only wish I was nearly as talented has he was, in both a technological and comedic sense. I am only pretending to be an ubergeek, really, and when I try to run some of the same sort of funny material as he does, I tend to come off as a nasty smartarse whereas he could always make it sound like it was from the heart (because it was). He may have been a boy from the working class suburbs of Adelaide, but he always had more class than most of the rest of us put together.

It sounds like Leslie's latest project, Wrangling Cats, was more of a lifestyle business. He had finally got to move back to America, in Idaho where his in-laws lived, and it seemed like he had figured out his life and what made him happy and secure. That is what makes it all the more tragic, that his life was taken away so senselessly by a 20-year-old kid driving home drunk on a Saturday morning (whose life has also been ruined now, BTW). There were more than 30,000 road deaths in America last year, about 10 deaths per 100,000 of population. The equivalent figure for Victoria, where we have spent so much energy minimising deaths like these, is around 3.5 per 100,000. Leslie had so much more to give, primarily as a father and husband. What a waste of human potential.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters of eight, three and one years. If you would like to donate to a fund for his family, his most recent business partner set up a GoFundMe page. It's the least any of us can do.

Til Sleep Do Us Part: the exhausted election

Embed from Getty Images

I have been completely disconnected with this federal election campaign. The policy platforms of both sides are indeed different as Quiggin says, but the Senate is going to block the objectionable parts of the Turnbull agenda, so functionally there wouldn't be much difference in practice, as there wasn't in the previous Turnbull era.

Both Turnbull and Shorten would be running the Rudd-Gillard agenda (NDIS, NBN, Gonski etc), along with the remaining irresponsibly deficit-ballooning Tory nudge policies left over from the failed Abbott experiment. Turnbull will continue the slow white-anting of Rudd's agenda but he can't change it, nor can he implement the worst of the dries' wrecking ball project.

Turnbull called a DD ostensibly to free himself up from the inertia of being prevented from doing anything by those on both sides. He'll probably get returned with a reduced majority, the godbothering faction in his party still intact and empowered by Brexit/Trump, and a Senate that is controlled by Xenophon and the Greens. The ultimate joke is likely to be on him because nothing will change. All he will have succeeded in doing is exhausting his previously stellar leadership ratings, which were the only thing going for him.

In the unlikely event of a Shorten win, he would govern from the centre leaning right, as opposed to Turnbull from the right leaning to the centre. Negative gearing changes would be positive, but would take many years to work properly. That is the same for most of Labor's good policy areas, like education and the environment: they are the Right Thing To Do but the additive effects to GDP and happiness will take years or decades to roll through the system. The legacy of Keating is that low-hanging fruits of reform and liberalisation have already been secured long ago, and all that is left is the unsexy stuff of benefits for future generations.

So, does that mean there is nothing at stake in this election? Ask a beneficiary of the NDIS, or someone lacking decent broadband options, or a refugee, or someone on the dole, or a uni student, or the chronically ill, or a working parent of young children. I'm just glad we have compulsory voting in this country, as otherwise we might suffer the same fate as the UK or US where too many young people don't bother to contribute to democratic outcomes. Both major parties might be smooshed up against each other in the centre which makes elections boring, but I'd much prefer that to the Idiocracy sequel in America, or the Til Death Do Us Part sequel in Brexit, I mean Britain.

Stronger than the foundations of the Earth!

Right then, so about those American politics they've got down there.

As with the recent boringness of Australian politics, there hasn't actually been much change from the situation I posited more than two years ago whereby Hillary Clinton has the presidency in the palm of her hand. The rise of Donald Trump was unforeseen by anyone, pretty much, even though early polls from the moment he started running indicated he should have always been considered the massive favourite. Not even Nate Silver trusted those polls. The resultant slow and delectable implosion of the Republican Party in the Battle of the Seventeen Armies hasn't changed the fact that abided from before that orange swan event: that Hillary is destined to become the queen of the world.

Or, at least, that's the narrative being pushed by much of the left at the moment. There are many examples, but here's one from Lawyers, Guns & Money:

And don’t kid yourself: Trump is a terrible general election candidate. I’m not basing that on the head-to-head polls, which show Clinton thumping Trump; they generally aren’t very predictive this far out, and while they might mean more than usual this year because of how well-known both candidates have been for so long, there’s no way of knowing that ex ante. Rather, it’s that 1)the Democrats have a structural advantage in the electoral college all things being equal; 2)his unfavorable ratings are insanely high, putting him in a major hole and negating Hillary Clinton’s own high unfavorables, which should have been a major opportunity for the GOP; 3)Trump is almost certain to mobilize a high minority turnout; and 4)giving sexist boors enough rope is one thing that Clinton does really well. I would never say that it’s impossible for a major party candidate to win an election under the current partisan configuration, but Clinton is a yooooooooge favorite.

I don't disagree with the logic, I suppose, but surely the left can't get that lucky? There must be some event or reason out there in the near future which will bob up to prove that we Can't Have Nice Things, especially after eight years of the best president I am likely to see in my lifetime. The fundamentals are all pointing towards Hillary in this cycle, but then they all pointed away from Trump in the GOP primary and the fundamentals were shown to be fundamentally weak, as Silver found out to his discredit. And we have the signal example of the most recent UK election to show us that polls are not infallible either.

We have over twenty weeks to wait until the first presidential debate. I think the thing that most instils faith in me that the rout is on is that so little has changed in the polls for so long with these two. Both Clinton and Trump are completely known quantities at this late stage of their public careers. There's not much at all that is going to change anyone's opinion of them that they haven't already heard, so all the shouting in the interim is likely to mean precisely nothing. It's been a bit of a trend in politics in what I have called the Great Interregnum, this resolute obstinacy in the public domain. Clinton is the immovable object, and Trump is an eminently resistible force. It will be fun watching him and his supporters headbutt brick walls from now through to November.

Leftism as institutionalism

Embed from Getty Images

Prof Quiggin sings a sweet song of leftism as institutionalism:

The (presumably) forthcoming double dissolution will raise many issues. But most of them can be summed up as the defence of Australian institutions that have been under attack by radical extremists. I’m referring to such institutions as the ABC, CSIRO, the weekend, public education, the union movement, the fair go and our natural environment.

If I had had the time, I would have been banging on about my conceptualisation of the new institutionalism for months at my own blog. Labor are the new conservatives - and for leftists, that's a good thing. You can call it the Long March or whatever, but many if not most societal institutions these days reinforces progressive values.

Apart from anything else, it means Labor is the natural party of government, as no matter whether the Libs are led by a dry or a wet, they can't get anything done due to institutional inertia. Wingnuts would specifically blame the Senate for that, but the Liberals have long since forgotten how to develop policy or develop competent politicians to successfully argue the case for "reform", and have transitioned fully into reactionary grumps.

And now the boy's crying, so I have to get back to him.

The banality of small-time government

Embed from Getty Images

Apologies for another long break between blog entries. My business and my family have taken priority, and every time I thought to blog, I felt guilty. Things are turning around with the business, so here I am.

The other reason I haven't rushed to the authorial controls is that exactly nothing new has happened since I last blogged. As I said back then, Malcolm Turnbull has pretty much no room to move, constrained as he is by the right's Faustian bargains to not move to the centre, and the Senate's unwillingness to let him go further right. Thus all that remains, in the absence of vision, is the banality of small-time evils, as detailed by Josh Bornstein. The media is reduced to publicising Turnbull's thought balloons and reporting dutifully as this or that interest group shoots them down in screaming balls of flame. And, as Henry Blofeld has been wont to say, nothing is done.

This has led to the slow but inexorable frittering away of Turnbull's poll numbers, not only 2PP but his personal satisfaction ratings.

Turnbull's popularity plunge in Newspoll grows ever more spectacular.  A new worst -10 (38:48) rating this past week means he has now lost 48 netsat points in four and a half months.  Paul Keating alone is still ahead of him on that timescale (with 55 points lost in that time) but 55 points is the most Keating ever lost.  If Turnbull loses another eight points soon he will set an all-time record for the most netsat points lost in less than eight months, if not longer.

Like Rudd, he failed to take advantage of polls when they favoured him to go to a quick double dissolution, because the government carried a significant number of marginal seat holders who didn't want to be sacrificed for the good of the party. His netsats were the only reason he was installed in the first place, to sell the same old policies with a fresh set of teeth. Without them, he has nothing.

So, this leaves us with the underwhelming prospect of Bill Shorten playing Palaszczuk to Turnbull's Newman later this year. This fills me with ennui. However, I realise I'm not the sort of person at the moment to whom the difference between governments is personally discernable but I do empathise with those for whom it is, so I will still vote for him on behalf of those disadvantaged, disabled and disenfranchised who will benefit from a change of government. And, as always, Scott Morrison lurks.

Turnbull in a phonebox

View image | gettyimages.com

Two moments of non-elite partisans communicating to party elites of the right have seemed most meaningful to me since I last blogged.

First, the moment in the second US Republican debate where Jeb Bush claimed that his brother George W. "kept us safe", to which the wingnut audience at the Reagan Library burst out into unanimous applause. The idiocy of this assertion in the context of 9/11 and dozens of Benghazi-level embassy and consulate attacks is lost on these ideologues in their media bubble of epistemic closure, and the message to GOP elites is to ramp up the crazy because that's what gets the base excited. Thus we will probably get another government shutdown this year, with Congress in chaos and no competent candidate willing to grasp the poisoned gavel of the Speakership to replace the failed John Boehner.

Second, the moment in the most recent Australian Liberal Party conference when Malcolm Turnbull rolled out a canned line that every Liberal leader runs with at such times, to the effect that the Liberal Party is superior to the other side because it doesn't have factions. The attending LNP hoi polloi - some of whom were the factional elites who installed him as Prime Minister in the party room, but most of whom were rank-and-file members aligned with one of the factions - laughed him down with a scornful tone. This gut reaction not only put a lie to Turnbull's bald statement, but signalled that we don't go for that sort of bullshit in this country, not even in right-wing politics.

The upshot of this is that the Republican Party is descending into the murky territory of actually being unfit to govern and an electoral majority of the public realising this truth, whereas the Liberal Party still has a hope of running the public sector without completely buggering it up. We tried the Third Way of Rudd-ism and it was found wanting in terms of implementation, allowing the Utopia-style APS bureaucracy to rise to the level of its incompetence in the absence of firm hands being on the departmental levers. Now we will give Turnbull the wheel and see if his brand of cheerful waffle managerialism masquerading as techno-wonkery can do any better.

Prior to the decisive spill, I had been building a case over the previous year or so about how Scott Morrison would be the next Liberal leader. The Libs decided to go with Turnbull, with Morrison's faction delivering the key swing votes in the party room, which led to the heated Ray Hadley 2GB interview in the days afterwards. It is blindingly obvious that Morrison could have put his hand up to be the champion of the Abetz/Andrews religious nudge faction but demurred, trusting that he will be the next Liberal leader to win an election when Turnbull fails. I won't go so far as to guarantee it, Andrew Elder style, but I agree with Morrison's calculations.

Meanwhile, the Turnbull government is now ensconced, albeit he has been mostly busy launching policies put in place by Abbott and hasn't had time to do much off his own bat. Honeymoon polls have been mostly underwhelming, going as low as 50:50 already without the leader having actually made a contentious decision yet.

I am not sure how Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy figures that Turnbull will shift the party to the right. Colour me skeptical about Turnbull delivering on the promises Abbott abandoned. Turnbull has promised a more consultative PMship with participation from Cabinet - but he stacked Cabinet with younger wets and purged it of Abetz and Andrews. Turnbull may not have a mandate to shift the party to the left either, though, given promises he has made to Morrison's faction and the Nats to uphold key Abbott policies.

I have not seen anything to dissuade me from the notion that Turnbull is as hamstrung on policy as Abbott was. This government has been a lameduck administration from the start, we've just exchanged caretakers. Turnbull doesn't even have any culture wars to wage to distract the Liberal luvvies. If and when he actually starts making any decisions, one of two things will happen. If he moves to the right, watch his polls plummet immediately. If he moves to the left, watch the party room destabilise (and then the polls plummet later).

Turnbull's onion-flavoured bowls of shit

Newly sworn in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull now faces an even bigger bowl of shit for him to eat than that given to Tony Abbott. His reaction so far does not give one confidence that he has the wherewithal to grab the spoon firmly and tuck in, as a strong leader must.

His first mistake was to agree to the demands of the Liberal right to maintain most of the Abbott policy agenda. This is what brought down Abbott, in that he made a bargain with the electorate in the last days before the last election to carry Julia Gillard's policies through, with the exception of the carbon tax (and yes, that includes Gillard's asylum seeker policy). Arguably, this is also what brought down Gillard in that she carried on the Kevin Rudd agenda. Rudd, for all his faults with implementation and governance, is the only politician in the post-Howard era to develop an original policy platform, and one which was so wildly popular that all other politicians of both sides have had no choice but to complete their introduction (albeit the Coalition deliberately sabotaged the NBN and NDIS).

Turnbull now has to trudge on defending the legacy of a deeply unpopular ex-PM and his deeply unpopular policy slate, with everyone knowing he strongly disagrees with much of it. There has been some talk about Turnbull as a different kind of a politician, but this will prove that he's just as capable of anyone else of lying and being unfaithful to his own views to serve the interests of factional power.

His other glaring mistake so far has been giving in to demands from the Nationals, principally to cede Barnaby Joyce the water portfolio, but also to lock in Abbott timeframes for the same sex marriage plebiscite (post-election) and tackling climate change (never). This is not a good start to his negotiations with the Senate, as Joyce will be a constant irritation to the Greens. If he can't even avoid selling his arse to Warren Truss, how can he expect to gain respect from the cross-benches?

Turnbull's major problem leading up to the next scheduled election in late 2016 is the state of the economy, which is teetering on recession at a most recent quarterly rate of 0.2% growth. I am sure that those 54 Liberal members did not think they were voting for an early election when they cast their ballots the other day. Nevertheless, an early election to capitalise on his honeymoon and avoid the seemingly inevitable economic slide over the next year might also give Turnbull a fresh mandate to stand up to the LNP factions. The longer he waits, the more shit he has to eat.

UPDATE: Lenore Taylor pours cold water on aspects of the Nationals bowl of shit. Which means it's diluted, I suppose, but still tastes nasty. The lock-in of the SSM and AGW policies is of most importance electorally.

The ultimate demise of Tony Abbott

After getting knocked off 54-44 by Malcolm Turnbull in a spill this evening, Tony Abbott ends his career as the shortest serving Prime Minister since Harold Holt. Andrew Elder leads the celebration.

As a Prime Minister, he was a victim of the malaise affecting both parties: that neither right nor left can claim any connection with their respective bases any more. Labor can't claim it's the voice of workers since the Hawke/Keating era of neoliberalism which put a lock on real wage increases; the Liberals can't claim they're the voice of business because their anti-Keynesian stewardship implements anti-economic policies which are ultimately poor results for demand which underpins growth for business.

Coming mere days after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of Labour in Britain, it is tempting to draw the conclusion when considering the concurrent rise of Syriza and Podemos - not to mention Bernie Sanders who is tipping Hillary Clinton to the left in the US Democratic primaries - that there is a resurgence of populist anti-inequality thinking among centre-left elites. This would most likely be too pollyannaish, as there's still a lot of power residing in the Blairite, Ruddeqsue, Clintonian centrist elites.

There is an argument that America was the first Western electorate to show the polarisation of the electorate with the centre unoccupied by anyone electable, which Europe has followed and the UK is only the last example. There are very few Blue Dog Democrats left, or centrist Republicans. Similarly, Blairites hold very little power in the current Labour Party.

From an domestic Australian perspective, nevertheless, I still have the capability to be cynical about this "victory" on behalf of the left. I still think the most likely scenario in the medium term is that Turnbull loses the next election, hopefully to Albanese or Plibersek. I shudder to think that NSW Right machine man Shorten will lead the ALP to the next meaningful clash. As an example, consider my old mate Paul J who has finally left the ALP after many years of service as a branch member, due ostensibly to asylum seeker policy but more broadly due to machine-based lack of democratic accountability.

Both sides of politics in Western countries should be facing their ultimate mortality because they have lost touch with their bases. When one or the other side is forced through electoral reality to face that weakness, democracy is the winner. I hope Labor is similarly shocked out of its ennui before the next election.

The coming Australian recession...?

I buried my prediction of the first Australian recession in decades in a post back in May, because I wasn't quite sure it would come to pass. Today, in the light of the most recent quarter having growth of a measly 0.2%, Fairfax runs an Ian Porter piece laying out the reasons for believing that the recession will come in the next year or two, which boils down to the delayed effect of the Abbott decision to cut off assistance for the car industry and its subsequent withdrawal from the Australian economy.

The timing is interesting electorally, because the process of up to 200,000 automotive workers losing their jobs is due to be completed in 2016/17, with a full Abbott term due to finish in November 2016. We are already in some hinky territory with the Chinese slowdown, albeit currency devaluation has solved a lot of problems for our exporters and there's probably more room to drop below the current ~70c.

The last budget was a cash splash so large that it caused many pundits to think it was priming the Keynesian pumps for an early election, yet the economy is barely escaping contraction as it is. Far from a budget emergency, now we have a growth emergency, which will be followed by an employment emergency. Hockey hasn't really got any more gears to shift up fiscally, so when the automotive fecal matter hits the Centrelink air circulation equipment, the job of stimulating the economy is going to fall to the RBA, which has only 200 base points to play with and would only be forced to burn them under great duress given the housing market is already hubba-bubba-double-trouble. Then we hit the zero lower bound, and we're cactus in a Mad Max Fury Road scenario.

This is playing out a bit like George W. Bush's last days, where all of his dud decisions culminated in a massive economic and political collapse. Just as Dubbya is now seen as a contender for the worst US President in history, Tony Abbott is shaping up to be the worst Australian Prime Minister in history if these doomsday detentes come to pass. All we could do was sit back and enjoy the hot licks from the Doof Warrior.

Reform, and other lies told by rent seekers

An excellent if highly cynical piece on yesterday's Reform Summit by Liam Hogan in the Guardian:

The one thing I would not have expected out of our democratic, parliamentary, capitalist system in 2015 is how much a lot of its managerial politics would resemble 1970s Soviet “actually existing” socialism.

As a hearkening back to the glory days of the Hawke summits which led to the Accord, it was history repeated as farce: special interest groups and other rent seekers reciting their laundry lists of demands, talking past each other and agreeing only to a meaningless and non-binding communique which was rightly pilloried by Catallaxy Files as being largely pre-arranged. Hogan's cynicism doesn't go far enough.

The appearance of many of the usual suspects from the stable of right-wingers employed by The Australian at an event organised by Labor's Craig Emerson was not all that surprising in view of Nick Cater's summary of the day's festivities, which consisted of listing all the wonderful ways that the Summit would enable Labor to give in to the Right's policy agenda of lowering Australian worker living standards to match those of Asia in the name of "productivity", "flexibility" and "competitiveness" - i.e. to line the pockets of the capitalists in ye olde Reaganite fashion.

If there is to be an actual bipartisan reform platform in this country, it has to be built with a view to the effects of the 1980s reform and how its effects have played out in the intervening decades. Primary among these is how workers were stiffed by the decision of Labor to put a dampener on real wages, because workers have not enjoyed the benefits of their own productivity gains since the 1980s. Meanwhile, capital productivity has lagged considerably even as executive pay has skyrocketed and share dividends have fattened. Multifactor productivity has been dropping over the past decade, by almost a full percentage point, despite labour productivity rising by 1.5% p.a., because capital investment has proved to be wasteful, particularly in mining.

Hogan makes some compelling arguments for the Soviet metaphor, but I also detected some Chinese influence in what is these days an outpost of the Chinese mixed economy. Kevin Rudd may not have been present to speak Mandarin to the assembled mandarins, but there were parallels to the five-year plans by faceless man in the central committees of those other modern faces of the jerry-rigged communist/capitalist hybrid experiment. There was no Xi, or Che for that matter, but one hopes the feng shui of the room was tickety-boo.

Now that the AUD is back within more regular historic parameters, the bleating about international competitiveness should stop. We should not lower our wages and workplace standards to match those of Asian countries, as that is short-term thinking. The next major growth source for Australia is the burgeoning Chinese middle class - and that of India to a lesser extent - and if we are to ride that wave for another boost to prevent recession post the mining boom, we have to work towards an economy which can sell to it.

"Reform" in this country is too often conceived as a zero-sum game where workers and employers fight over the scraps of the world economy in a race to the bottom to serve the lowest common denominator. That is not Australia's natural role in the Asian century. We can't be the Singapore or Hong Kong of the region because those trade hub positions are already filled, and we can't be Taiwan or Bangladesh either with their focus on manufacturing. We can supply the Chinese bourgeoisie with small amounts of high-quality shipped goods and large amounts of low-cost digitally-delivered services. Whatever policies are attuned towards building that scenario are the ones that will underpin our future growth. I doubt anything will come out of the Reform Summit that would come anywhere near towards that.

A deleted comment from Club Troppo

View image | gettyimages.com

I don't want to make a habit of antagonising the Troppodillians, but the following comment was just deleted from a Club Troppo post by statistics academic Chris Lloyd on gay marriage (quoted text from one of Lloyd's comments in italics).

On the contrary, showing an argument may be flawed by showing it leads to untenable positions is quite mainstream.

You did not show this at all, Chris. No one has showed how gay marriage leads inevitably to polygamy or bestiality. There is no logical argument that can show this. It is like saying allowing marriage between two people will lead inevitably to polygamy because once you allow two people to become one, there's nothing preventing three people becoming one. It's just silliness, literally 1 + 1 = 3.

Anyway, I am open to arguments that marriage contracts are more substantial than I realised, and some commenters have claimed that it is (though I have not had time to check the claims). 

"Time to check the claims"? Do you not realise what marriage means beyond the bare contract? Have you been living in a hole? Well, I guess MBS is a bit of a hole. I hope you are not one of those ivory tower intellectuals like Peter Singer who could argue themselves into foolish positions because they don't keep touch with the real world.

If de facto’s are at a disadvantage then there is another discussion to have about whether this is acceptable. 

Not really, Chris. It is discrimination, plain and simple. You're trying to bargain to preserve your privilege. It is unbecoming of an educated man such as yourself to cling to such antiquated thinking.

Finally Paul, I do not accept that my tone is any more arrogant or condescending than yours. And linking it to gender is not OK so I will ask you to not use the word mansplaining again.

Playing the victim is also beneath you, Chris. If you jump into such a fraught issue with weak arguments like these, expect to get pushback.

Not exactly sure what the problem with that comment was; most likely the admittedly gratuitous crack at Lloyd's employer. His post is another in an increasingly frequent series of High Broderist scolding from the right on that blog, which continues to cause me dismay.

Identity politics and Adam Goodes

View image | gettyimages.com

The Piping Shrike, who posts about as infrequently as I do these days (must be a father also), has pronounced on the Adam Goodes situation. It's a long, meandering essay, as all of his are, with a number of juicy nuggets of wisdom, but is typically hard to sum up. I would take issue with a couple of his points, nonetheless.

Primary among these is the repeated phrase of "the anti-racism campaign against the public", his criticism of which forms the main part of his screed. I suspect the Shrike does not live among or talk to a lot of football-immersed people, thus he would not understand how much racism there was around this issue among the public, and how lonely it was fighting the good fight against people convinced that their racist attitudes weren't racist. The Shrike calls the loose collection of individuals battling white privilege in bars, backyards, dining rooms and social media across the nation a "campaign", as if it was conducted against a united public solely by an elite. No, there are people out here in the public who argued at the grass roots along with the anti-racists in the media.

Anti-racism campaigns are not meaningless, as the Shrike asserts. You only have to look at the wins that anti-racism campaigners are having in the US over removing state support for the Confederate flag and are now starting to have over state-authorised statues of Confederate heroes. In itself, those things won't change living standards for African-Americans but it is an early and vital manifestation of anti-racist strength that will eventually get other things achieved, most notably through the #BlackLivesMatter movement which will shift the Democratic policy platform and thus affect policy of the forthcoming Clinton administration. Symbols matter, culture matters, otherwise we wouldn't be having culture wars over it.

The Shrike asks why the inevitably non-zero cadre of racist Swan fans didn't boo Goodes. In this, he shows he doesn't understand sporting tribalism. If you're among a bunch of supporters of your own team and you start booing one of your own because he's black, you will swiftly discover the rest of the supporter base will turn on you and eject you from the tribe. Fans who go to the game are primarily there as part of their sporting team tribe, not their racial tribe, and the former trumps the latter when there is a clash at a home game filled with team members. Racist Swan fans simply shut up while opposition fans booed Goodes, in solidarity with their dominant tribe.

Much is made by the Shrike of the lack of convictions under anti-racism legislation, but again, that ignores the very real effects that such legislation has in discouraging anyone from engaging in conduct that would come close to meriting a conviction. The threat of incarceration can change attitudes almost as much as incarceration itself. Of course, this effect is hard to quantify, but I don't think anyone who denies it exists has much of a leg to stand on.

Finally, the Shrike asks why the media has moved on, asking if the crowd has stopped booing, why there hasn't been an outpouring of joy at Australia suddenly finding a solution to a seemingly intractable problem. The crowd has stopped booing, but unfortunately there were no miracles to be verified by the Vatican. AFL industry elites effectively made a bargain with the public: let's agree not to keep calling you racists if you agree to stop booing. It was a ceasefire, not a victory. Goodes' withdrawal for a week took the heat out of it, with the home Sydney crowd's voluble support for him in absentia that weekend further turning the tide.

Overall, I was disappointed with the tone of the Shrike's piece, but then that's nothing new on this issue because it seems to cut across political boundaries and many of those on the left or centre have been on what I consider the wrong side of this one. It's the sort of identity politics that we could do without in this country. I'd like it if we didn't turn into America, thanks.

#Gamergate, #cuckservative and racism against Adam Goodes

View image | gettyimages.com

There is a line that can be drawn, a lineage that can be traced, between a number of recent primal screams emanating originally from shadowy ranks of white male recidivism.

• The #gamergate movement, which is a reaction by openly misogynist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male gamers, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like Reddit, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-sexist criticisms of game industry and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not sexist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The #cuckservative movement, which is a reaction by openly white supremacist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male American conservatives, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like 8chan, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of conservative political and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The mass booing of Adam Goodes, which is a reaction by openly racist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male Australians, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos at AFL games, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of sporting and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.

In all three cases, there is a core of horrible people who perform anti-social acts with stated justifications that any reasonable person would find abhorrent, but the majority of participants in this anti-social behaviour use the argument that they don't share the horrible beliefs of the fringe members of the group, thus they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush.

In any large political grouping, there are going to be fringe elements inside the "big tent". Nationalist skinheads vote Liberal, feral communists vote Labor, and these actions are perfectly acceptable and do not invalidate the party's platform as long as the minority doesn't dictate policy. In the case of these extra-institutional movements, however, the actions that the majority take are the same as the hardcore. How are we to tell the difference between those with criminally anti-social motivations and those who have "normal" reasons for acting like morons?

Unfortunately, this dilemma doesn't seem to worry many of those in the majority who are acting as useful idiots providing cover for the extremists. I have been involved in some very heated discussions trying to argue such people around in the case of the Goodes crisis, and I am sure the same kinds of conversations have been happening all over, both on and off the Internet, in the past week. It's a smorgasbord of bad arguments defending the indefensible, as Russell Jackson only skimmed the surface of the other day.

One of the many ways we are lucky to have been born in the Lucky Country is that despite all the talk of multiculturalism, we are largely still a very monoculturally Anglo-Celtic society, and aren't forced very often to confront our own prejudices like this. You only have to look at America where hatred towards Hispanic immigrants and black urban youth is dominating mainstream political discussion, or in England where UKIP only grows in popularity, or Europe where a member country like Hungary can fall under the grip of an openly fascist regime and barely an eyelid is blinked. In comparison, we lost our minds for weeks on end when a man asked a question on a TV program. Our privilege as Australians, let alone white Australians, is almost too massive to comprehend.

The glue binding all these movements together is identity politics. The extremists are white, male and western, and the people they are trying to recruit to their thinly veiled anti-social reactionary causes share much of their identity - this demographic has been labelled in various countries as "frat", "bro", "lad", "chav" and "bogan". While the majority may not profess to share the extremists' politics, the functional differences between them and the fringe are blurred if they take part of the same activities.

In this context, it is supremely difficult to educate a certain type of young white man about the nature of his privilege, because so much of his self image is bound up in believing he is right about everything, even those things he actually knows very little about. Hopefully it's not going to take a tragedy for these otherwise intelligent, empathetic and compassionate citizens to see the light.

The zero lower bound government

Another budget has been and gone. Instead of the steaming turd that was the last budget, which was largely blocked by the Senate, this time we have zero. The Abbott government has spent the intervening period announcing bad policies, extracting the maximum amount of negative reaction as the public gradually and painfully rejects them, and then quietly dropping them. What they are proceeding with are much the same settings as were left by Swan, but adding a bunch of conservative nudge items which blow the deficit out. Hockey is deliberately doing nothing in the hope that revenues will rebound naturally from historic lows under Swan.

For me, the most astounding stat from this year's budget is that despite a projected deficit of over $35B, it will actually create an annual lag on the economy of as much as 0.5% of GDP (read it somewhere yesterday, now can't find the link, grr), and will do nothing to help slowly creeping unemployment. From a Keynesian macro perspective, it is the worst outcome possible. Most worryingly, it is based on assumptions that are rosy at best.

I have been feeling for a while that it is only a matter of time before Australia joins the rest of the Western world in hitting the zero lower bound of interest rates. All it is going to take with the current budget settings is one big assumption to be wrong - China hiccuping, the iron price plummeting below $35 as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton squeeze out competitors, opportunistic currency markets persisting in inflating the $A - for the RBA to be faced with the prospect, given that fiscal policy is so pissweak, of having to further cut rates down close to zero where it is in America, Japan and Europe. And once you reach the zero lower bound and bring on all of the weirdness that happens in an economy as a consequence, it's very hard to raise them again, as Japan showed us from the 1990s on.

Australia under zeroed interest rates would be a scary place, given how our economy is structured so strongly around housing as a speculatory tax haven. If, as some pundits are saying, this budget is a precursor to an early election, that may be the last chance to avoid the unhappy fate of the ZLB. The Liberals don't have any ideas.

Barmy Harmy and the long walk

Katherine Murphy runs with a nice little analogy:

We can see right now that the Abbott government is doing that long walk that fast bowlers do before rounding on their heel and coming back full tilt at the crease.

Only problem is, this was Tony Abbott's first ball:

Club Troppo, Parishioners and High Broderism

When I first started taking interest in Australian poliblogs a few years ago, my first thought was that the Club Troppo web site sounded interesting, based as it was on the self-professed "political centrism" of Ken Parish and Nicholas Gruen. Back then, you had Larvatus Prodeo on the left (now deceased) and Catallaxy Files on the right, and Troppo nominally in the centre as the major group blogs in the Australian political scene. To me, group blogs are the most interesting variation of the form as they encourage dissemination of a range of ideas and viewpoints, producing a variegated editorial line instead of a blaring one-note foghorn. I wish I was part of one of these collectives, and indeed I did contribute a piece on the NBN to Club Troppo in my early time as a poliblog watcher.

As you may glean if you read the comments to that piece, my encounter with the resident Troppodillians was less than successful. Nicholas ended up calling me a mercantilist, which in the modern context is an implacable insult by a liberal Western wonk - never mind that Chinese mercantilism has been kicking the West's butt in the 21st century (that's for another post).

Anyway, one of the Troppo's latest is by Parish, and he engages in some classic "both sides do it" high Broderism to attempt to lay blame for mindless federal obstructionism at the feet of Labor:

... the cycle of retaliatory fiscal mischief goes back decades. I would date the phenomenon back at least to Paul Keating’s cynical and unprincipled demolition of John Hewson’s Fightback policy in the lead-up to the 1993 election, a tactic that Keating pursued relentlessly notwithstanding that he himself had advocated a GST only a few years previously and that John Howard by contrast had had the guts and integrity (not words that most on the Left would associate with him) to support most of the Hawke/Keating government’s necessary deregulatory, market-based reforms over the previous decade.  The gloves were off on fiscal policy from that moment on.

There were many valid and principled reasons for a centre-left leader to oppose Fightback!: slashing of welfare, abandonment of awards, cutting Medicare to ribbons, tax cuts for the rich and widespread privatisations. Yes, the GST was the issue on which the election was won and lost, but it would be disingenuous to concentrate solely on the media frenzy over it and ignore all the other Reaganomics elements which should be anathema to a centrist wonk, as Ken is. Wonks look at the whole policy picture, not just the media sideshow. Fightback! would have kickstarted the pure Reagan/Thatcher model of gutting the social safety net and widening the inequality gap between rich and poor, which Hawke and Keating had implemented while preserving many elements of the Australian social contract that were hardfought over many decades by unions and the rest of the left.

The rest of the article attacks Labor for insufficient adherence to its own ideals, especially around privatisation in the context of Paul Keating's defence of privatisation in the lead up to the NSW election, and then puts the hard word on Labor to establish a Troppodillian idée fixe, the Independent Fiscal Authority. Little to no mention is made of the Liberals in all of this. There is no responsibility for reform laid at the feet of Tony Abbott or any other Coalition leader. The implicit assumption is that the right's position is not even worth discussing.

High Broderism is a term related to Washington Post columnist David Broder, who is the premier exponent of the Beltway village theorem of a controlling group in the centre defining what is and is not acceptable policy according to the conventional wisdom set by an elite of influencers and policy professionals, with anything outside this window labelled as "extremism" and denounced across the press and "respectable" broadcast media. In America, this elite is an unelected and unaccountable set of media commentators and political operatives effectively working as a team, with tenured columnists at the WaPo, NYT and WSJ spruiking for those insiders whose policies they agree with and shunning those with other ideas, with little reference to their popularity with the actual public.

In Australia, we don't really have a "Beltway" as such. Power is more concentrated around Collins St and Sussex St, and Capital Circle just doesn't have a ring to it. Nevertheless, we do have an unelected "controlling group in the centre" in this country which traditionally has sat above political cycles, but it's not made up of pundits and apparatchiks: it's the public service. As befits a country more built along Westminster lines, public servants are the rocks around which the political tides rise and fall, guiding the country with Appleby-esque aplomb past this or that faddish though bubble. As academic advisers to and occasional employees of various governments over the years, Gruen and Parish are part of the wider cadre of public sector policy wonks, which gives their position in the Australian poliblogosphere some quantum of extra weight.

There is a good reason why the likes of Parish address their criticisms solely to Labor: it would be useless to ask the right to pay him any attention, because the local yokels are following the trend in the rest of the West of abandoning all pretence of scientific method in favour of hokum, humbug and junk economic theory. More to the point, Parish and his wonkmates are not only not going to get a gig advising any Coalition mob, the Liberal razor gang has been conducting a quiet pogrom to purge the public service of those not deemed sufficiently discipular to wingnut orthodoxy, from the head of the Treasury on down. His natural role, and that of the reality-based community within the public service - the Parishioners? - is to advise Labor because advising the Liberals on policies backed by traditional Keynesian theory is a fool's errand. This leads to a tendency for he and his posse to lecture Labor and let the Coalition off the hook.

That is not to say Parish et al do not criticise the Liberals. High Broderism denotes opprobrium directed at all sides. The responsibility for fixing the mess thus described, however, is left to the Left to get right to the right-thinking job of giving in to the Right.

Short Kicks: Whoa-oh, onion skin

Still snowed under with work, so no time for longer pieces.

- I presume no domain expertise on Aboriginal matters so I can only sit back in my chair while reading pieces like this from the Oz or this from Piping Shrike, One aside from the Shrike stood out for me, though:

By the Martin Place siege, Abbott was toning down the cultural warrior rhetoric, which he could while his main threat was Turnbull. Now in attempting to cling on to right support against a more serious rising threat from Morrison, he has speeded up again.

Yep, that appears to me to be a pretty cutting summation of Federal politics at the moment, as the Christian/Tory wing of Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews is suddenly the only constituency that Tony Abbott cares about, as it's the factional key to a Scott Morrison succession.

- The Clive 4 Eva bandwagon has its wheels on fire, rolling down the road. He only has himself to blame. If I was an American lefist blogger here I might start railing about the double standard in the media, in that Abetz and Hockey don't get nearly enough scrutiny for their near complete lack of negotiating skills to get the 2014 budget through the Senate. Journos seem to be giving them somewhat of a pass as an indirect commentary on the quality of the independents. How Abbott must yearn for the prudent competence of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.

- Abbott ate a raw onion in front of TV cameras, brown skin and all. Who does that? Has that ever been a thing? Is he actually clinically insane by this point? What is the procedure for having the Prime Minister taken away by the men in white coats?