The Libs: here’s what isn’t happening
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There’s a lot going on in the Liberal Party at the moment, and, indeed, on the Australian right. But here’s what isn’t happening. There isn’t a burgeoning ideological split between conservatives and liberals. Climate change is not a stalking horse for social conservatism. And this isn’t the old guard rebelling against the new guard. In both camps there are conservatives and liberals, seasoned parliamentarians, time-servers and first-termers. Neither is this any sort of “Howard’s revenge”. It’s a long bow to blame a schism within a party on the one leader who kept it together for a decade. For the Liberal Party, the emissions trading scheme is a special case. After the 2007 election, there was much discussion about the future of liberalism and the Liberal Party. And the debate largely framed in British terms. Should the post-Howard party saunter down David Cameron’s path of moderate economics and moderate greenism, or talk about high tax rates and inflation? (For the questions that debate raised, read James Campbell in the IPA Review in March 2008. Anyway, it turns out that there are a few problems implementing an Antipodean interpretation of Cameronism. There appears to have been an assumption that choosing to follow the UK model was a simple as flicking a switch — just a quick rejig of the Liberal Party’s press release template and bang, the Liberals are now greener than the ALP. Hence Turnbull’s recent use of “progressive” — a word that resonates among Cameron’s strategists, but is alien to the Liberal parliamentary party and its supporters. Campbell’s piece shows that Cameron’s strategy was more than just adding a tree to the Conservatives logo. For one thing, he took his party with him, over a period of many years. And whatever success Cameron is enjoying cannot be isolated from a few pertinent facts: the Tories have been out of power for a decade, Labour has driven the UK basically into the ground, and the ideological ghost of John Howard is not as strong as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. But most importantly: It’s easy for a nominally small government party to be clean and green if all you’re talking is about bicycles. By contrast, the ETS is no small thing. The ETS Green Paper bragged that the government’s scheme would “change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy”. The scheme is arguably the largest economic change in Australian history — an emissions trading scheme is like plopping a entire second economy on top of the first one. Malcolm Turnbull’s camp wants to follow the Cameron model. Nick Minchin’s camp is more diverse. Not all of the Minchin sceptics are sceptics of the science. Weirdly, Kevin Rudd got this one right. Sceptics include those who believe the science but think the scheme is irrevocably flawed (does anyone disagree with that?). And then there are those in the Minchin camp who even believe the world should take action on climate change, but feel that Rudd’s diplomatic strategy of legislating before Copenhagen is a little bit silly. You might not agree with it, but this is an entirely defensible position. The entire economy isn’t just a bargaining chip to be handed to our diplomats to go off and play with. Most in the Minchin camp have little interest in climate science, but believe a Liberal Party cannot claim to be liberal if it supports one of the biggest government interventions ever considered by the parliament. And with its extraordinary concessions, the ETS doesn’t even have the redeeming quality of being able to achieve its purported goal: substantially reducing emissions. It doesn’t even work as an insurance policy. It has negligible coverage and a massive premium. The ETS is, simply, a massive tax/corporate-welfare churn. Its economic cost will inevitably be substantial — doubly so in the absence of a global deal — and the Minchinites are betting that cost will be a significant political issue in future elections. So before a global deal, for many in the parliamentary Liberal Party, opposing the ETS seems like a no-brainer. Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affair s and editor of the IPA Review. |
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51 Comments
“There isn’t a burgeoning ideological split between conservatives and liberals.” Chris Berg does not talk to any Libs and certainly none in the Parliament. Or maybe he’s just got his tenses too tightly wound.
Yeah, yeah and we’ll be out of Afghanistan quickly and Iraq won’t be another Vietnam and global warming’s not happening and the polls are wrong and John Howard will definitely be re-elected….
C’mon, stop wasting our time with this intellectual baby food.
Chris Berg puts forward the view that the ETS is inimicable to liberalism as it defines itself in this country. The problem with this thesis is that the anti ETS/CPRS argument that is supposedly at the core of the Libs current difficulties was not put at the time the major elements of the ETS were know. In fact, dissent started well before then and was soundly based on a general scepticims that the problem was real or imminent. By the time a draft proposal was circulated the Libs had already decided to oppose it but they had not decided why.
Julie Bishop sought to provide some rationale by saying we should wait to see what other countries were doing. As it turned out most other major western nations were moving more certainly and deliberately to address global warming and Australia is now the definitive lagard. As an aside the wait and see approach is at odds with the Libs position of the previous eleven years where outsiders like other governments and the UN were told their views were unwelcome. At any rate what a disgraceful position. Let’s wait cause we don’t have the wit to deal with the problem ourselves, lets leave it to others to fix the problem of our own making and even though we were elected to run the country, lets abrogate that responsibility and do nothing.
As we’ve gone along weve seen the objections change to the terrible cost to Australian Industry, the threat of lost jobs, risibly casting the work choices parties as defenders of working people, and lastly and most coherently as a new tax. This is the effort of a party where the debate and narrative about what the stand for has been lost. The ALP also suffers from this malaise but as they govern it’s yet to be so obvious as was the case when the coalition governed.
In opposition the Libs have found they no longer know what they stand for or why. The lack of a set of policies or ideology or direction means that there is nothing to mitigate the thirst for power so rather than put aside personal victory for a greater purpose power becomes all important and its getting all that matters.
Don’t you just love the weighty titles these guys bestow on themselves. Chris is “Research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs” and his South African mate Sinclair Davidson is “Senior Fellow.” I’m really impressed. With titles like that who can doubt that they know what they’re talking about.
Yes Fowls, the IPA have a real credibility problem. I found the logical contortions of this piece to be excruciating. They really need to have a look at the quality or their research and their fellows.
And what about all the lobbyists behind the Minchin camp? As of Abbot’s press conference it all smells of entryist politics to me. The aim was to do NOTHING, and Abbot’s election is vindication of those who have an interest in the status quo continuing indefinitely.
There are other examples of entryist politics going on in the Liberal party. It’s about time for a good investigative piece by a reputable journalist tracing the origins of the blowflies in the party room.
Delusional
Gosh, wow, wot a turn up. Fancy me, a humble eedjit … a filthy denizen of the rubble that used to be proudly called “The Left” … agreeing with a Chris Berg from the IPA.
The ETS is a Trojan Horse. It has the evil covert purpose of taxing the general public, in order to preserve the vested interests of the members of the CFMEU, and the Business Council (et al), and funnel the proceeds back to them. This is so obvious, it is shameful the government does not seem to notice it. It will have little to no affect on carbon emissions, ever.
Tony Abbott, please persuade the Liberals to kill it before Copenhagen. Please make sure Australia does not turn up looking like a prat.
Can we stop trying to prop up the coal industry? They were told 30 years ago, they should have come up with a better plan than Whining To The Government for Compo. They are supposed to be clever?
do some history on the Libs and there has always been tension between the wets and drys, conservatives and small “L” liberals.
nothing to see here?
I think was interesting to know is many Liberal leaders begin as social conservatives but end up governing middle of the road.
For the party of good policy, the ETS has been a cock up. they should have opposed it on policy grounds. Its bad policy, its expensive, its rent-seeking, it does little to curb emissions…on many levels it fails.
its not a good start, its not a good beggining, its bad, bad bad bad.
take the time to do the work, the Liberals should not have opposed it on environmental grounds, but on policy.
Cap and Tax the only option.
I’ve been saying it for weeks on Crikey- the ETS is a Trojan Horse…or to change the metaphor- Turnbull’s Cameroons horsewhispered the Right into Rudd’s stockyard…Turnbull the bellwether had to go; the Right is dumb, so it took them a long time to wake up to what Rudd was planning; Big capital was and is divided- they smell a mountain of climate pork, but they also know Dr Death wants to hobble them- hence the Lib’s incoherence- the contradictions suddenly exposed.
The electorate has little idea of the scope or cost of the ETS…nor the bureaucracy which will be created to run it. The ETS will do zero for global warming (as everyone admits, incredibly)…then along came the East Bumcrack emails. Contrary to Rundle’s myopic view, this has had a devastating effect on the public, Millenarian cultists and sceptics alike. The sanctity of “science” has been the chief weapon of AGW proponents. Abruptly, the credibility of “climate science” is undermined. AGW is a hypothesis under siege- hence the rising tide of insult and absolutism- a sure sign of a scientific paradigm in trouble.
I couldn’t give a flying fuck if Berg is a Right-wing ideologue. The ETS is an absurdly expensive, useless gesture. By promoting it the Left has inadvertently killed off Lib progressives (for the time being), elevated a piratical crew of thin-lipped Extractives led by a frockless reactionary priest, and is in danger of a public backlash as AGW hysteria recedes worldwide…
I was only half a doz lines into the slab of verbiage above when I thought there was something wrong, apart from the leaden prose & rapidly accumulating non seuqitors. Crikey editor, I’ve asked this before - are our subs. used to pay for this rabid drivel?
AR: deal with the arguments. Save the slagging.
This is idealogical IPA drivel. All the moderate Liberal MPs I talked to today are in shock and ,in my view, were contemplating buying the Weekend paper for the job ads. Perhaps they could have Chris Bergs job at IPA.
The IPA doesn’t do research, it writes PR for its financial backers and their conservative politician friends.
But most importantly, Chris, if “the Liberal Party cannot claim to be liberal if it supports one of the biggest government interventions ever considered by the parliament” then it is not a party to deal with big problems. So we have done he right thing to vote them out for a party that may be able be able to intervene on a large scale to deal with a large problem. Certainly if we leave it to the market then nothing will happen till all the coal is burnt.
There was a time when smart Liberal politicians knew that, after losing an election, they had better take the position that it is not the Opposition’s role to govern from the upper house, that the elected government had a right to enact - and, most important, was liable to be judged on - policies it took to the election and that the next election was what their manoeuvrings should be about.
An even more earthily practical matter they should bear in mind is that new Opposition’s are usually impecunious and in no position to fight a well-funded governing party aided by public funds and the unions.
So what that the CPRS bills (that a large part of the Australian business world wanted passed - which, if for no other reason is important when working out how to finance elections) are poorly designed? They are not to take effect for more than 18 months and will almost certainly need the Senate to consider government amendments well before then as well as offering the opportunity for the Opposition to campaign legitimately on a promise, if elected, to correct the flaws in the legislation having regard to Copenhagen amongst other relevant factors.
As it is, and as it always appeared, the Liberals voting to make sure the ETS is rejected has such an unclear relationship with what is likely to happen after an election - which could be held very soon - that it is quite possible that a much worse scheme will be enacted.
In short, there is no rational basis for any of the contortions the Liberal Party has engaged in so destructively to itself. Negotiating in good faith with the government made good sense politically and in terms of conventional morality whereby MPs are expected to take big issues seriously. Passing the legislation with or without amendments and then setting about the attack on the Rudd government, on the ETS and everything else, was the way to go.
It is a shame Turnbull didn’t have the touch and the feeling for the Liberal Party in and outside the parliamentary party that might have enabled him to carry his colleagues to a sensible outcome.
Hello Julius. Yes, to all that. But why should we support flawed legislation, just because it looks like we are doing something? It is posturing with plumage, for no real outcome … worse still, it rewards a shortsighted business culture - instead of the one SUPPOSED to take these things into account in its planning, just as you suggest it should be.
Can I point out that it is a rare CEO, or PM for that matter, who is able to peer long rangedly into the distance and say things like (a) better have a diversity plan in case of the greenhouse theory gaining legs; (b) better put some dosh aside in case asbestosis/tobacco proves deadly; (c) better not let Telstra keep all the copper wiring. (I know you can think of more examples.)
No one ever said it was sensible or rational. Teapot impressions all, I would diagnose. If it gets the ETS killed, as it currently stands, and helps Australia look like it might be serious to the eyes of the rest of the world? I don’t care how it gets deaded. Plenty of PMs have resisted the urge to doubly dissolve the Parliament before now, haven’t they? And it’s always one of the joys of the Liberal Party, watching it sort out its dirty linen publicly.
Have to give Julie Bishop points, for surviving the stoush with a nairy a hair out of place.
Hello again Robbi64. You ask “But why should we support flawed legislation, just because it looks like we are doing something? ” My short answer is that I am only making a case for the Liberal Party not voting to reject the ETS - an essentially political calculation - and it has nothing to do with wanting to look like “we” [any we] are doing something.
Until I looked at some of the more detailed analyses and calculations I thought the principal political danger for the Liberal Party was a double dissolution but I am now inclined to think that, subject to Abbott’s performance making a difference one way or the other, Rudd will go to election in late May after the budget has been presented. I don’t think he would if the CPRS bills were passed.
The idea of “Australia look[ing] serious to the eyes of the rest of the world” has been too much talked of and is, in my opinion, both misleading and misguided. Australia’s influence on the governments of billions of people (China + India + USA) was always going to be negligible and seeking to look serious, or good, or conscientious is just a distraction from Australia looking after the only interests it can reasonably hope to understand and look after, namely Australia’s.
As it happens I don’t think the CPRS/ETS is as defective as Green commentary would have it. The fact that Australian CO2 emissions may not be reduced until 2033 is immaterial if sound economics achieves the desired result in a more cost effective way by way of trade in carbon credits ensuring that Indonesian and PNG forests were no longer wantonly devastated. Also, the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning in Australia are less than those from the burning of Australian coal in other countries. That fact points to some of the important deficiencies of design of any ETS to date. I have long advocated a carbon tax which would tax imports according to the CO2 emitted in the chain of events leading up to their production and importation as well as taxing Australian goods and services on the same principle.
Roger, re Chris’ “the Liberal Party cannot claim to be liberal if it supports one of the biggest government interventions ever considered by the parliament”
It’s certainly out of the liberal comfort zone to do big reforms. That’s why I think a liberal party should be the one to do it. I’ve always found it interesting that it was Keating who modernised the economy, and Whitlam — Whitlam! — who gave us the original Trade Practices Act, one of the most inspired pieces of liberal free market regulation ever passed in this country (even if it no longer works and has been filled with special-case provisions since then).
Sometimes it’s parties acting outside their ideological comfort zone that take the most care — or do the most listening to experts — and get it right.
James McDonald. Memory tells me you are right that the Trade Practices Act was passed under the Whitlam regime - with major exclusions for unions - but memory also tells me that there was earlier anti-restraint of trade, pro-competition legislation introduced by Barwick when Attorney-General in the early 60s after a small hiatus because some legislation of about 1909 had a bit of constitutional trouble in the High Court.
Strictly speaking, James, making big reforms is what being “liberal” is all about. You are unfortunately falling into that grey zone that occurs when words are misused. We are talking about some conservatives who pretend to be “liberal”!
Whitlam changed our society so profoundly … to remember him only for the Trade Practices Act is selling him short.
Julius, have you got many young friends in other countries? They think of Australia as a progressive, hip, up-to-the-minute sort of country. So you will have to imagine their astonishment … when they find out this sunny sunny country doesn’t have a solar array of any meaningful size. They want to know “why”, and when it is explained “men dig coal, burn it … and don’t like learning new technology when there is football to be played, so we don’t have as many engineers as we should” … they think we must have been drinking too much.
This is why they are so focused on us. We may be a little country, but we are a fortunate and well educated country. So there is an irrational and stupid hope that we might come up with an innovative and clever idea, Julius.
And I see that Tony thought this bill needed drowning at birth too. Goodo. I don’t care how it gets deaded. Now, Penny … back to the drawing board, try again, and do it BETTER next time.
Oh … and Penny. Blaming the other side, when your bill doesn’t get up, is poor self regulation. I understand you feel Bad about it, but Feeling Bad is a reason to learn, not to get up some poor unfortunate’s nose about how awful you feel. Use the Bad Feeling to help you work out how to improve your performance.
Robbi, if we start with Maggie Thatcher, she once interrupted a meeting on ideology and the so-called “middle way” by slapping down a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” on the table and declaring, “This is what we believe in.” Her reforms were big, but the principle behind them was to strip back government control of economy and society to the bare minimum, so that the forces of growth in society, already existing outside government but strangled by years of excessive control, could flourish once again. This is liberalism in its pure form. I argue that it is hard-line conservatives who lay false claim to the liberal flag, because refraining from reform and actively resisting reform can often look very similar. They are not.
Socialism is the process of designing a better society from some central inspired think tank. Socialists believe they know the road to Utopia and can guide us there. Hard-line conservatives believe Utopia is behind us and promise to lead us back before we become lost.
True Liberals reject both views. All roads marked “this way to Utopia” lead ultimately to the same place, and that’s a place where locking the door at night won’t save you if the government decides you are not with us and must therefore be against us. To be liberal is to admit that we don’t know where we are going, only that we are an inventive species and we will achieve something worthwhile when we get there, given half a chance.
James: that’s what Thatcher thought she was doing. What she actually did was screw the unions, impoverish and demoralise the remnant industrial class, expand the welfare rolls, empower feral capital in the 80s Gordon Gekko greed binge. But her real triumph was to set the stage for Blair to entrench “New Labour”, i.e. the corporatisation and expansion of the state to an unprecedented levels. Blair then allowed London to become the global centre of both criminal capital and GFC capital- an orgy of debt expansion, while simultaneously making Britain the most micro-governed country in the world. Thatcher and Blair are the parents of the Nanny State. The worst of both worlds.
Thatcher was the whore of unintended consequences. The moral probably is that ideology distracts, and absolute ideology distracts absolutely.
Hmm. I’ve raved on elsewhere about the damage done to individuals by the imposition of belief systems, backed by extreme violence. So I won’t repeat myself. I could also have a rave about how people with “good intentions” frequently bollocks everything they touch, thank you Frank, for the description of Marg as a “whore of unintended consequences”. ROFL.
Thank you James, for that singular story about Her Thatcherness. Did she really? I made my children watch “Darwin” recently, with similar motives. “This is the bollocks we want you kids to believe in”, I said. They bought it.
I had been labouring, though, in the understanding that “socialism” is actually not supposed to be an imposed belief system. You speak of centralised think tanks designing better societies … oh dear, most of them seem to be funded by capitalists, so I don’t think they are going to come up with anything remotely “socialist” - simply because that belief system has no room for any other belief system possibly improving on that performance.
My understanding was that Kant (who was a real pissant) believed humanity is evolving, and he suggested we could evolve, without really trying, into a socialist system, because it seemed right, just and humane. As Marx said, we didn’t design capitalism, it didn’t leap fully formed from someone’s forehead. It evolved, and seemed like a good idea at the time.
Perhaps “socialism” could evolve similarly, if it were ever allowed to take a breathe for itself?
Thatcher didn’t execute it perfectly. She seemed to enjoy the cold war a bit too much and the Falklands response was arguably excessive. She went too far at times in suppression of trade unions, using the ends to justify the means when violent politics were excused. Unions have an important role to play within liberal society, but not on top of it as they were in ‘79. She also misused the army as sales reps for British military hardware to overseas dictators, turning the special forces into practically HM mercenaries. That’s anti-liberal.
But another liberal belief is that the best should not be allowed to stand in the way of the good (Voltaire). Her reforms were good enough for UK to avoid becoming a banana republic, instead allowing it to return to a strong economy, making other things possible. For a metaphor, doctors don’t cure sickness, they give the patient’s body what it needs to cure itself. Maggie’s not responsible for what Blair did with her legacy.
There was some favouritism towards the Gordon Gekkos and far too much cosiness with tycoons and the cold war industry, including her own son. That’s inexcusable. As Julius points out, the job of a liberal government is not to turn a blind eye to corporate behaviour but to protect the weak from predatorial behaviour by the strong. This requires rigorous and careful regulation of business competition, which wan’t her strong suit.
James: But my point is that Blair couldn’t have morphed Britain into the miserable state it’s in now without Thatcher’s groundwork. A poll a few years ago had 54% of Britons wishing they could emigrate to Australia. Can’t recall where the other 46% wanted to go. Probably not NZ.
The interesting question is “strong economy”. It’s natural for pollies and indeed everyone else to assume that social or economic change is a result of rational political action…so it’s inevitable that Heath, for example, is blamed by all for some of Britain’s degeneration and Thatcher is credited with dragging UK out of stagnation…(incidentally, I was living in London in Heath/Callaghan times, the 3-day week etc). But I think this overemphasises the influence of politics. Capitalism has its own dynamic. Social and technological evolution often occurs regardless of conscious action. Most predictions turn out to be hilarious, even those only 20 years ahead. I still have an Oz union booklet circa 1978 which spelled out Australia in the year 2000 (I think it was)…what a scream- we’re all working 20 hrs a week, job-sharing etc etc. In fact Oz workers work longer hours than any on the OECD.
There’s much to be learned from the gap between even short-term predictions and reality. As a fellow-traveller of the hard Left sects in London (and here) , I was ridiculed (and occasionally punched) by Trots when I doubted the imminence of revolution. (The Trots and other sects were very beneficial though, in many ways- they alone had the guts to drive neo-nazis off the streets, fought apartheid, racism, British abuses in Ireland, etc head-on. Most of the leaders became capitalists or right-wing propagandists not long after all this)
So there’s been no triumph of the will.
The ordinary people of the UK have no respect for Thatcher. I lived there for a while, so can say that they didn’t like her at all. Few of them even want to talk about her. That’s the ordinary people, James, not the people in the newspapers or blogosphere. The ones who don’t have much of a voice, but do vote when they are cross enough.
James, will grant you that her peculiarities allowed the UK to avoid economic destruction, but to say she has no responsibility for the society that she helped create, and bequeathed to Blair, is inaccurate. She does. We all do, to a certain extent, but the people who make decisions for us, are particularly responsible. You can’t excuse her on the grounds that she didn’t plan it - as Frank points out, she could not predict the consequences of her actions.
That did not prevent her sallying forth in total confidence that she knew what she was doing. I suggest she didn’t know, she was deluded into thinking that she did. It isn’t her fault. She is a product of her environment. What was her fault? A failure to reflect on those consequences, and a total failure to accept responsibility for them. She blamed everyone else for that.
I refer back now to my advice to Penny Wong. When you feel Bad because things don’t go your way, it is unhealthy to blame others for your feelings. Use your Bad Feelings to inform you on how to do better next time. Don’t blame others for your upset. This is basic CBT, and it is one of the principles we psych people use to teach people how to manage themselves better in relationships, James.
Liberalism in theory sounds wonderful, and I would be all for it … if I could find it in action.
Frank, “ideology distracts, and absolute ideology distracts absolutely”
and Robbi, “Perhaps ‘socialism’ could evolve similarly, if it were ever allowed to take a breathe for itself?”
Both true. Let’s be clear, I don’t want to exclude socialists from society, from business, or from government. I don’t even want to ignore their best ideas, some of which are brilliant, such as education available for all. I just want to curb their power. If their power is unlimited then, as you say Robbi, they start off imposing fairness and justice and affirmative action, but then big business and religion gets its hooks into them. We are already seeing this with Rudd.
I don’t want another leader who’s just as powerful as Rudd but who happens to agree with me on everything. I want a limited government which knows its place and lets society make its own decisions, within limits such that the strong can’t trample the weak. I know that some of those decisions will be poor ones, such as poker machines and drugs and McMansion architecture and listening to Guy Sebastian. I accept it as the price of freedom.
All of my ideology boils to this: any laws that limit behaviour should be aimed at either
(1) preventing anyone from taking away anyone else’s freedom (Hobbes’ principle of limited liberty)
(2) giving people the minimimum that they need in order to help themselves
For example I benefitted from publicly funded education. But government didn’t only fund that education, it dictated the curriculum. The high school I went to gave us Marxist indoctrination under cover of humanities, and trendy cognitive theories of the three Rs which banned times-tables and left many students illiterate. Too much power. Government should limit itself to providing education vouchers for those who need it, and privatise all the schools. Then if parents want to send their kids to a Marxist school, they can, but they should have a choice.
Hey James … I have been wondering about Maslow’s hierarchy. The three basic foundations of this pyramid of needs can be summarised as “biological existence, security and belonging”.
Our society does not guarantee these basics. Instead, we’ve made a society that puts the emphasis on gaining esteem and self actualisation. These concepts are what we strive for and put all our energy into. In the meantime, the foundations are something we are expected to compete for, and are not guaranteed to us all. There are always losers in the basics in our society, and it’s quite easy to become one.
An Indonesian friend of mine and I were recently discussing how our different cultures treat our mentally disordered. Her culture, still quite agricultural, take the Bad Things away from the upset person, and keep them well looked after until they calm down. We make our upset people beg for help, and then keep them waiting while we decide if they are “worthy” of that help. Then frequently, we are unable to provide that help anyway, because we “don’t have the resources”, so we put them in a chemical straitjacket instead.
Should we really be expecting our citizens to compete for basics, but INSIST they must educate and self actualise … irrespective of whether they are coping with competing for survival? Is this choice? I would say: No, it isn’t. It’s an imposed belief system, James.
Robbi, refer to my point (2) above. Biological existence and security should be guaranteed available for all — but they should not be forced to accept it, and there should be no strings attached obliging recipients to “belong” if they don’t want to. Feed the hungry and house the poor, but don’t hold it up at arms length so they have to get down on their knees first.
James … I like your two principles very much.
May I use them with an attribution to you? I am considering writing further, and I prefer to cite people who have already done some thinking for me.
My Indonesian friend and I then discussed that to solve the full problem for both our peoples, we would need to design a “middle way” between both these aspects. She admitted her upset people were “infantilised”, while I admitted that our way is sheer brutality. In transactional analysis terms (Berne 1964), her people do Fairy Child, while ours does Authoritarian Parent. Both are too extreme to create good outcomes for those suffering.
We need to get Adult about it. And we might have to be very creative in how we decide Adult might be performed. To date, we have never had an example of an Adult Society that is truly healthy. But we do have a few people around who demonstrate individual adult psychological health. Unfortunately, most are too wise to run for parliament.
Robbi, principle (1) is pure libertarian theory and should be attributed to the man who invented it, Thomas Hobbes, one of the great political philosophers of all time. Locke developed it further and Mill wrote it the most clearly of all (“On Liberty”).
Principle (2) is and a reflection of our current community values. Socialists can take the credit for it although Jefferson expressed something similar. I’ve set it strictly below principle (1) in priority. If it goes first, then as I say, welfare has a tendency to acquire strings attached which go higher up the Maslow hierarchy than it has any right to.
Indonesia has a national ideology which at first glance looks libertarian, apart from the monotheistic insistence, which at least isn’t exclusively Islamic. The fly in the ointment is principle 3, the unity of the Indonesian nation. Like article 6 of the otherwise libertarian USSR constitution (the leading and guiding force of the Soviet society is the Party) it looks almost innocuous but eventually makes a joke of all the rest.
Ah, thanking you very much again, James. Good to get those citations exact, if possible.
Your point about Principle (3), that of “nationalism”, and why you can’t include it, reminds me of the EU, and its push to be a Clayton’s Unified Europe. Then there is the old Aussie concept of “multiculturalism” to throw into the slurry.
Multiculturalism was a concept of sociology, commissioned by Hawke, in order to create an environment of inclusiveness to allow our disparate citizens to merge into a cosmopolitan society. Howard abolished it, by removing the word “multiculturalism”, and replacing it with a concept he called “One Australia”. My sociology lecturer contends this abolition is what led to the Cronulla riots. It wasn’t okay anymore to identify yourself by both your Australian-ness and your country-of-origin - you had to be Aussie and behave (and look) like one. This created an environment of “exclusivity” … which led to violence.
Oh dear. I do think that might be called an imposed belief system. Multiculturalism worked better because it allowed a person to entertain both nations in their personal identities - and did not insist that an Aussie had to be A Certain Type of Person.
O, be some other ism!
What’s in an ism? That which we call multiculturalism
By any other name would reek as paternalistic
I don’t actually remember the “One Country” slogan from Howard. I remember the Midnight Oil song. Yes, multiculturalism is a lot more inclusive, and it’s heard more often in the language than other alternatives. But it’s still an imposed ideology and it opens the door for a successor government to pervert it into something different. Better just to leave isms alone, I think.
If Hawke wanted a catchword, why not just promote “tolerance” or “live and let live”. A bit harder to pervert those.
ROFL. I never said it wasn’t paternalistic, or didn’t have “ism” tacked on the end! MEN made it, James, so yeah, it was always gunna be paternalistic.
It was just a cute little artificial concept that DID leap fully formed from a (male) sociologist’s forehead. And it worked rather well. It wasn’t perfect, but it did allow us to melt into the wonderful country we almost are. Sometimes, we have to have Something Slightly Imperfect, in order to slide past some intractable obstacle … like someone else’s dearly held delusory belief system. Transportation was a dreadful idea, but it got us here.
It was “One Australia” (White, ANU, 2009), not “One Country”. It was How-Hard’s sleight of hand to get rid of multiculturalism, a Labor initiative deeply loathed by the denizens of the Libs as it stood in 1984. I suspect you might not have been too well acquainted with the Doug Anthony era, mate, so you would have missed the horrified looks they had on about it. Like they were trying to pick up a turd from the clean end … ooh, it was bottable … and all in a time where the Mardi Gras got going and ferals started appearing. Good time to be young … ah.
Hawkie was Right Into Language, and he gifted us with weasel words. Ironic beyond belief that Don Watson is then the person Outing weasel words, twenty years down the track.
Yeah I remember the All Stars. I wish we could have them back instead of the Chaser which is about as funny as a middle ear infection. But that’s free speech for you.
Er … I was referring to the One the Only and the Entirely Original Doug Anthony MP Nat Party.
The Allstars named themselves in his honour. I knew some of their friends pre DAAS. Yes, they had real triadic synergy, and it is tragic that they cannot re-form. However, triads can be destabilised with just one unco-operative leg … and if all three are combative, it goes splat real quick. Dynamic theory, in action, the performance of those three gents.
There have been a lot of unstable triadic performance in politics just recently. Turnbull, Hockey and Abbott are just another one. Dragging us back on topic, after a long ramble through the woods there.
These things happen beneath ideologies. They happen beneath most people’s awareness. Not mine. I sit back, watch, and howl with alternative laughter/grief, most days.
Oh, him. Yes a bit before my time. You confused me with “trying to pick up a turd from the clean end”, I was just thinking I missed that episode but it sounds like them.
Sadly, I must attribute that quote to The Email Forward Fairy. It is getting around as a definition of “political correctness”. No author, so it’s up for grabs …
The era of Doug Anthony, is often best brought to mind by the mention of only one organisation: The Country Womens’ Association. Scones. Jam. Blue rinse sets of steel. Cups of tea by regimented order.
As a Gen Xer brought up in Tasmania, these women were my aunts. Ow. You didn’t muck with them. They were good Christian women … and I was a little brat. So I adored watching their discombombulation when gays came out and greenies got going and multiculturalism was in and Naughty Books were allowed.
Pity the Left got demolished in all that amazing consumer culture Hawkie and Keating made us start gobbling up. Things were looking up there for a bit!
Nixon
Nixon? Any reason you wrote that, James? Did you want to see what I wrote in response?
That would be TELLING.
Have a great day, and thanks for the good meaty talk, mate.
You were talking about the social revolution which got sidetracked into consumerism before it had quite run its course. Happened across the whole Anglosphere. Nixon and his wedging.
Well spotted, James. I will reply to your latest post in that other thread we’ve both throwing a bit of biff about in, because I don’t want to be Seen Feeding Trolls.
The thread over there is demonstrating my point only too adequately. This is the human behaviour of maladaptive coping strategies. They’ve moved on to rationalising, and at least MPM is using nouse now, instead of being provocative and bitchy.
However, rationalisation is a well known maladaptive coping strategy in psychodynamic theory.
I deal with people like MPM quite often, and will say that they are too much like Hard Work On A Bed of Nails in a therapy business. They take so much out of me, they are not worth the money. I nail them quickly, and if they can’t cope, we end it after one session. They are going to be dragged into feeling their emotions only by extreme effort, and I quite often double my fee in the first five minutes.
Unless their lives are total custard, and they already know that much, it’s not economic.
Rationalising with deluded people, however, actually prevents you from moving forward in the finding of creative solutions. I see you already know that, so will write this here innocently … so that other people who are following my argument can see why I’ve left it to the rest of you to demolish the argument of climate change deniers.
“Rationalising with deluded people, however, actually prevents you from moving forward in the finding of creative solutions. I see you already know that, so will write this here innocently … so that other people who are following my argument can see why I’ve left it to the rest of you to demolish the argument of climate change deniers. “
A truly wonderful sentence.
They really should be in an asylum for their own good, shouldn’t they? Nurse Rundle would sort them out. Picture of Uncle Joe on the wall. The one with the moustache…
Hi Frank … blush … purr … thank you.
A Bex and a good lie down, we used to say in the sixties. Then the Bastards Banned Bex!
Frank, you mean Nurse Ratched?
James: you’re alert. One of Rundle’s many putdowns is indeed Nurse Ratchet. Guy Glassjaw always gets personal when his often gaseous arguments are questioned.
What’s going to happen when the younger generations (usually a generation behind the US in Australia) applying their vaguely Freudian (including epigones) ideas such as “rationalisation” and “in denial” to beat up their elders themselves become the older generations? Will they be nimble enough to say “ah, gotcha, don’t think you can rope us in with such over-simplifications”? They, you Robbi64, will be able to do that if you don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking you can diagnose a problem because someone is rationalising (in the ordinary sense) or denying something.
Such diagnostic terms only work if you are correct in presuming there is some serious mental problem which the subject really wants to and needs to talk to you about honestly. Otherwise you have no reason to suppose that someone “rationalising” is not perfectly capable of recognising the truth or your version of the truth but is defending himself to others. As for the person “in denial” why not accept that that mature person may simply be unwilling to admit to you, or to some others anyway, what he doesn’t actually deny at all inside. (He may of course want to take time to examine the question forwards, backwards, sideways and up and down before expressing a view. Expressed views, after all, cannot be unexpressed, and, unless you see no disadvantage in making a confession, you might not want to do it).
Psychodynamic theory, as applied by Berne and Masterson, isn’t Freudian as such. They are pretty uninterested in psychoanalysis. Nah, we’re talking “game theory” here, Julius. It’s not so much therapy, as it is strategy.
People obviously do want to talk about what they THINK. You’re doing it again right now. They do not, however, want to talk about what they FEEL. They THINK their feelings are irrelevant, and they have not been educated sufficiently to understand why their FEELINGS motivate everything they THINK.
Beyond that, what they THINK and what they FEEL is not my business. Unless it is made my business … when my own thoughts and feelings about Ishoos are given short shrift … because someone else has a better idea and happens to be louder, ruder and more unpleasant than I am prepared to be at any given moment.
Robbi64, when I sort out a reply to what I wrote in your post I am moved to acknowledge that my argument was prompted by feeling but not affected in rational substance. The feeling was my irritation with certain people too close to me at times who use jargon from the psych areas very glibly and the one I choose to pick on is “in denial”. The reason I pick on it is because I am very satisfied with the counter to it, namely my put-down that maybe the person said to be in denial simply didn’t want to disclose something to the person who thinks him “in denial”.
The same point can be extended to accusations of “rationalisation”. For example, a person may choose to resist another’s criticisms or accusations by sheer advocacy, putting the best face on what his being expressly or implicitly criticised. One kind of example would be a partnership or family argument about money.
A. says “that’s absolutely typical of you to insist on investing in X company which has now lost 80 per cent of its market value. You get excited and over-optimistic, believe what people say, don’t do your homework properly and we end up with a lemon”. B, who doesn’t want to tackle the specific accusations - for perfectly sensible reasons - then launches on a detailed summary of the case that could be made at the time of the investmen for considering it a good thing - and is accused of rationalisation.
What may have been overlooked is that the alternative of mere silence would very likely be inappropriate and that there could be problems too about saying “I am not denying that I am an imperfect investor but there were what appeared, after careful consideration at the time, to be good reasons for that investment”. The problem there is that, by not giving careful conscientious, even plodding, attention to the matter raised with a detailed answer there will, most likely, be just a fresh round of “I see you don’t deny your incompetence. If you are not going to hand over decison making about these matters to others I would be interested to know just what “careful consideration” you gave at the time.