Leaks tarnish Gillard’s shine
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Another night, another Laurie Oakes bombshell. Last night Nine Network stalwart Laurie Oakes revealed the allegation that Julia Gillard opposed the government’s paid parental leave and a rise to the pension during cabinet meetings when she was deputy. Gillard was crowing about the two policies during Sunday’s leaders’ debate. Currently, the government support a 18-week minimum-wage paid parental leave plan, but according to Oakes’ anonymous source Julia didn’t believe it was a vote winner. She also scorned the decision to raise the single person age pension by $30 a week, as “elderly voters did not support Labor.” When Gillard responded that if the Liberals had allegations to make, they should put their names to them, Oakes replied: ”PM, you know this information didn’t come from the Liberals. You’ll need to look a lot closer to home.” And that’s the most shattering element of Oakes’ scoop: who’s the leaker? And is this symptomatic of even deeper trouble within the Labor ranks? These are serious accusations with serious consequences. As Michelle Grattan reports it in The Age, “Bitter Labor Party divisions threaten to derail Julia Gillard’s election campaign, with pro-Rudd forces suspected of leaking damaging claims”. The West Australian was similarly critical ”Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been accused of running a chaotic government plagued by vendettas”. Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning Herald reveals the importance of the sources “…the sources of the information on Ms Gillard’s positions are not Liberal members. The Channel Nine reporter Laurie Oakes told viewers his sources were ”closer to home”. The Herald’s sources are government members.” Is Kevin Rudd leaking to Laurie Oakes again? “Senior Labor sources have pointed the finger at ousted former Labor leader Kevin Rudd, and are concerned he has moved from denial to revenge,” claims staff writers at The Courier-Mail. Kevin is going to be in trouble, says Tory Maguire in The Punch: “If it’s not Rudd rocking the boat it’s someone who’s a supporter of the deposed PM and their intervention comes at a difficult time for the Gillard campaign.” Even if the claims are lies, the damage is done, writes Michelle Grattan:
“Julia Gillard told us the Government under Kevin Rudd had lost its way. Just 10 days in and some people are saying the same about Labor’s election campaign,” says Dennis Atkins in The Courier-Mail. Apart from the Oakes bombshell, it was just another day in a campaign about the same old nothing, says Dennis Shanahan in The Oz. “A hugely over-cautious election campaign from both sides — where the two new leaders fence with each other, hoping for a mistake that will turn the tide of a meandering contest — is being stage-managed to death,” writes Shanahan. Meanwhile Glenn Milne reveals in The Drum this morning that Tony Abbott’s book tour for Battlelines was paid for by the tax-payer, but so far there has been very little news from either side about it. The balance is all askew in this campaign, warns George Megalogenis in The Oz:
It’s just a war against personalities. “As fascinating as the presidential-style personality race between Gillard and Abbott will be, as fulsomely as it will fill media sound grabs, both sides owe the voters some ideas that are fully costed, and fully thought through,” writes Lenore Taylor in The Sydney Morning Herald. Gillard continues to be harassed about her marital status and what role her partner Tim Mathieson will play in the campaign. Helen McCabe, editor-in-chief of The Women’s Weekly, writes on The Punch about wanting more of Tim: “voters expect to see more of their political leaders’ partners at election time and this is no exception. Which begs the question: are Labor Party minders hiding him and, if so, why?” The new Women’s Weekly with Gillard as covergirl is (co-incidence!) out today. Much of Gillard’s success is because she is female, claims Janet Albrechtsen in a controversial column at The Oz. “Free from the sisterhood’s political correctness, let’s admit that she has pocketed a large part of the female vote and it has plenty to do with gender,” writes Albrechsten. Former Democrats Senator Natasha Stott Despoja warns in The National Times Julia that hell hath no fury like a woman voter scorned. “…Julia Gillard had better be aware that if she fails the high expectations of women, her gender will not necessarily save her. Far from it. Women can be harshest on women who let them down”. |
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55 Comments
There seems to be an unquestioned assumption in political discussion of this subject that Laurie Oakes’ leaks are (a) authentic and genuine (b) emanate from a disgruntled source within the Labor Party.
Neither of these, it seems to me, should be automatic assumptions. There are other possibilities. As speculation is apparently rife on this topic, there can surely be no harm in throwing some of them into the mix of considerations.
It seems conceivable to me that the ‘leaks’ are agenda-driven tip-offs from within the so-called ‘intelligence agencies’.
Laurie Oakes may deny this. Then again, I seem to recall he was one of the many journalists who gave credence to the lies that got Australia militarily entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What credibility does he have - or the great majority of the Canberra Press Gallery, for that matter?
As for the accuracy of the leaks, they may perhaps be more accurate than the pre-2003 allegation that Saddam Hussein was in possession of WMDs.
But that’s a rather low standard of accuracy.
As the saying goes:
extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
Gillard herself has denied this on SkyNews, merely saying that she wanted to examine the cost fesibility of the rises, which is apt.
Before we speculate, let us establish that the substantive claim (Gillard opposed paid parental leave, opposed rises in pensions, claimed there were no votes in it) is correct.
It’s one thing to dump policies popular with leftists and quite another to dump policies popular with rightists and use arguments that would outrage rightists. That makes the claim extraordinary and until I see something more impressive than some puffed up toad wittering for the amusement of the airheads in talk radio, I am going to call bulls**t, just as one used to in those all night card games in high school.
And I say that as someone who has advocated at some length a policy of voting 1 Green and putting the ALP and Liberals equal, making the vote informal, on the basis that neitether of the major parties deserves support.
Let us deal in facts rather than apparently trolling speculation.
Well after this morning’s presser in Adelaide, I’d say Laurie Oakes has done Julia a favour. She’s a very impressive performer when she’s pissed off.
The press gallery are wetting themselves that there’s finally a bit of fire in the mogadon election.
“Just 10 days in” - exactly. The media, Crikey included, have been fulminating about how uninspiring (boring) this election has been so far. So lets beat up what little we have - Julia Gillard is a woman, Cabinet is sometimes divided and debate is robust (because it’s confidential), Kevin Rudd is unhappy, politicians often change their minds, the debate worm is inconclusive and so on ad nauseam… We have a whole month to go: hasn’t anybody told you that a week is a long time in politics?
The average punter is more interested in who won MasterChef.
Fran
Fran please don’t use terms like leftist and rightist, they do untold damage to the quality of political discourse in this country. They are absolutely devoid of any real ideological meaning and thus are worthless boltisms.
My local member Belinda Neal announces her intentions in 20 minutes, just before nominations close.
Interesting day for ALP today
Elsewhere on Crikey I have said that Fran’s proposal “of voting 1 Green and putting the ALP and Liberals equal, making the vote informal” would be beneficial to both major parties (as it would turn Green’s votes informal). I even suggested that this was the sort of idea that the major parties would try to promote to minimize the Green vote.
Now I read on the ABC breaking news a comment from Kent Bayley saying:
As Kent believes the Liberal spin I think it highly likely that he is a Liberal voter. But here is another example of someone trying to convince Green’s voters to vote informally.
Anyone who watched QandA on Monday would have seen how Richardson and Wong loathed the Greens (and in comparison seemed mates with the Liberals).
And the Age yesterday said that it is thought that the Liberals spent about $500,000 in the Higgins by-election just to ensure that they did not get beaten by The Greens (who probably spent well under $10,000).
It now seems that there is more difference within the Labor cabinet room than there is between Liberal and Labor. As the two major parties have moved to the right and become very similar, we need to watch carefully for how both parties try to minimize the Green’ vote.
Laurie Oakes works for News Ltd. Enough said really.
Oblizzard said:
On the contrary, in this much ado about nothing election, the return of a focus on actually policy frameworks is the sine qua non of quality political discourse. The fact that The Blot on the MediaScape abuses these terms is no reason to abandon them to him.
Being a leftists entail a concern for the empowerment of the disempowered and the realisation of their full humanity. Being a rightist entails the entrenchment of the privileges of (commodity) propertied elites, often under the pretence of a warrant to defend the rights and prerogatives of decontextualised individuals and the implied want of social obligations between humans.
The value of these terms in evaluating public policy persists.
MWH
If the ALP like the Liberals so much more than The Greens, (I suspect you are right), one might helpot them by giving the Liberals your effective preference, and vice versa. That would not imply voting informal.
Logic fail.
I will be working for The Greens this election.
@ SYD WALKER and PADDY…yes and yes. She certainly at long last put a couple of those smart arse jurnos in their place, great example of controlled anger. Oakes has an axe to grind, I trust his word as much as I trust Glen Milnes, zilch.
The automatic assumption by analysts seems to be to jump to the conclusion that Kevin Rudd is the source of these “supposed leaks,” what if he is not and it is perpetrated by those inside the Labor Party that wanted him gone as Leader. Perhaps those people are doing this to muddy his name as they no longer want Kevin Rudd in the Labor Party in any capacity at all, not even an overseas posting.
And yes Laurie Oakes does seem to have an axe to grind, he gave the Debate to Abbott and every chance he gets he puts the boots into the Gillard lead Labor, it is almost like the Packers are once again in charge of Channel 9 are pushing there agenda.
@ Michael
>>>>”Elsewhere on Crikey I have said that Fran’s proposal “of voting 1 Green and putting the ALP and Liberals equal, making the vote informal” would be beneficial to both major parties (as it would turn Green’s votes informal). I even suggested that this was the sort of idea that the major parties would try to promote to minimize the Green vote.”
I agree.
I don’t usually like to bandy around laws of dubious merit - and I’m ‘not a lawyer’ as the saying goes - but it’s my understading that in the Albert Langer case the courts have determined it’s illegal to promote informal voting.
I stand to be corrected if I’m wrong about that.
Fran, are you still advocating an informal vote?
if so, thats disappointing. you seem to have a strong, informed view of politics in this country, and to bandy around some useless idea of voting informally does nothing as a political statement. I would liken it to someone saying ” I was going to climb Mt Everest, but I hear the food is terrible.”
dont waste an agreed miniscule say in how this country is run, to prove that the major political parties in this country are adhereing to populism rather than good policy.
There is nothing new here …Oakes campaign is part of the very same attempted conservative media coup de tat we see at every election that is close enough for such a campaign to possibly success.
The Packers and Murdoch’s of this world can live with a Centre Left Government when they have to but their natural predilection is for the kind of supply side conservative populism that lines their pockets and leaves their businesses as free from regulation as possible. Our high priests of voodoo economics are always fairly focussed on their own bottom line.
Michael Gillies Smith wrote a great piece for The Drum a few days ago analysing the part that The Australian played in Kevin Rudd’s downfall entitled Rudd’s demise traced to front page focus. This kind of mainstream media manipulation is par for the course.
When Tony Abbott warned us this was going to be an extremely dirty campaign, he was merely trying to pre empt accusations that as usual, most of the informational sewerage would be flowing right to left.
Yes, it’s possible some of these leaks are coming from Rudd’s camp, but as Syd Walker alluded above, it’s also conceivable Oakes is conjuring this stuff up from less salubrious sources. He’s paid more than virtually any other journalist in the country so it’s hardly surprising he invariably act’s in the interest of his empower come election time.
Kevin 07 may have paid his way through university cleaning Laurie Oaks bathroom but I’m yet to be convinced he’s embittered and blinkered enough to still be serving as his sewerage attendant
FranB, as MWH says here and on other Crikey comments, even if you believe you are working for the Greens you are actually totally undermining them by advocating everywhere you can, for voters to make an informal vote. (Greens 1, rest of ballot empty). That is a counterproductive strategy which assuredly brings an ugly little smirk from Liberal Party headquarters.
We must live with the reality of our voting system (preferential, which entrenches the two-party system often to the exclusion of 20% or more of voters): the only way to support the Greens is to cast them first and fill the rest of the ballot, with the ORDER of Lib or Lab being the next important thing (position, ie. towards top or bottom of ballot is not important, only order).
The ABC’s Chris Uhlmann has been the other major recipient of a juicy ‘inner circle’ leak. I recall that ABC News 24 was launched with Uhlmann’s Great Leak.
The rules in this game are set up to empower ‘insider’ journalists to a quite ridiculous extent. If they carry enough prestige, no other journalist or politician dare question the veracity of the leak. They’d be accused of peddling ‘conspiracy theories’ (just one step up from admitting to a belief in pixies).
Targeted politicians are left to squirm while tidbits of unsourced gossip dominate the political discourse.
Incidentally, I don’t say this as someone who is pro-Labor. My thesis is that both major parties are manipulated. Both parties contain people with benign motives, however badly flawed their analysis. The key problem is the gravely distorted political environment.
It’s as though we have a political competition between chess players on a board that’s tilted to one side. Whichever side wins, they’ll be downhill on the axis that matters most to unelected and unaccountable string-pullers.
Marko Polo said:
Before you can choose one party over the other, you must be persuaded that the victory of one is clearly the lesser evil. Absent that, your vote is by definition, frivolous and useless as it says nothing. I happen to find the idea of listening to Abbott and his gang polluting the public space with their cant repulsive, and were I to be purely selfish, I should vote against them, but voting is a social act. It needs to be about which policies we should have, and the fact remains that both parties are committed to the defence of the interests of the propertied elite, and are serving these elites by making it impossible for any alternative POV to be uttered within the mainstream. They have a non-aggression pact on these matters with each other and will doubtless combine wherever necessary to protect these interests to ensure The Greens become irrelevant.
Michael R James said wrongly, again …
Do you have a reading problem? You implied that on Sunday, but I have corrected you and MWH on at least one occasion each and repeated the correction above. I am advocating Greens 1 and then ALP and Liberals equal numbers (i.e. the Langer option) Please acknowledge this time tjhat you have read this and will stop misrfepresenting my position.
I refuse to vote either for the ALP or the Liberals, and yet the system wants to coerce my assent, on pain of invalidating my vote. I say that I will not be coerced, and if the system invalidates my vote, then that is a matter for them.
Fran, i certainly hear what your arguement is, but to think you are persisting in your arguement by submitting a vote with an equal preference, thus null and voiding it is also adding to the irrelavence of the Greens and any other minor party for that matter. that is the whole idea of Preferential voting. if you dont like it, stand for your local seat as an independant for the Abolishment of Preferential Voting.
I would vote for you
FranB at 11:49 am. OK, I will admit I got your exact proposition wrong (not empty, but same number of both Lib and Lab) but only if you admit that the outcome is EXACTLY THE SAME, an informal vote and that the only visible result will be as a percentage of votes determined to be “informal”.
There is little point Rudd being the leaker (assuming this is not a figment of Oakes’ imagination).
He’s spent the last 25 years working for Labor Government’s, and while he’s likely to pissed off, there is no advantage to him in blowing up the Government, unless he hopes to be Foreign Minister in an Abbott Government.
However, the young boffins that surrounded him are a different kettle fish. They have gone from roosters to feather dusters at age 30, will have a serious case of Relevance Deficiency Syndrome, and a huge drop in earnings.
Marko Polo said:
Regrettably, that is a price that the system imposes. The system has been configured to safeguard the interests of elites by forcing people to endorse one of the elite parties, thus legitimising the political dispossession of the mass of the populace. The bargain you propose is Faustian in character. One must surrender one’s objections to iniquity, merely to appear pertinent.
I cannot without crossing the line above (at least until such time as one of the major parties were the lesser evil). I would have to advocate others not preferring the major parties, thus voiding my own vote. I would favour optional preferential as in NSW as a modest step forward.
Michael R James said:
Good. I don’t want my vote to be merely informal, and thus, if an analysis were done, simply accounted as an accident or oversight. I want it to be a permanent record of deliberate intent (which is why I will write “carbon price now” and Vote Greens 1) on the ballot to further mark the ballot out.
If all/most Greens voters did this, there would be an inquiry — certainly all of the scrutineers would notice — I have certainly paid attention to patterns of informality or odd preference flows when scrutineering.
The ALP would be devastated but denied the opportunity to argue for even more right wing policies since the refusal of Greens to preference them would not have led to increased votes to the Liberals and other bigots. The conclusion would be forced: we must adopt more tangibly humanistic and pro-environmental policies if we are to remain competitive.
If we are willing to wait until 2013 for action on climate change, why are we not willing to wait until 2013 for the development of a real choice at the polls? In this election, at the one debate, Bob Brown was not even given a platform to put forward an alternative to the governing parties. That is how stifled our process is.
The leaks are coming from none other than the department of Kevin Rudd payback.
The Labor hacks in here can’t cry lemon drops and candy canes, because you lot were happy for Gillie to bring out the bag of knives and do Ruddy in the back swiftly and sharply.
Now the Rudd supporters in the ranks are fighting back the only way they know how.. and thats to bring out their own knives and do Gillie… slowly but surely…
Notwithstanding the veracity of the ‘leak’, the bigger story here is the vicious and brutal factional war currently being waged within the Labor Party. While factional nastiness within the Labor Party has been around since Jesus played fullback for Jerusalem, this time the war is for complete control, and the the AWU (the Right), is out to eradicate the Left from the party. In QLD the Left has been hamstrung by the attack on the LHMU which has forced this former left-wing bastion to the right and financially destroyed it, all through AWU ‘plants’ and white-anting. The AWU rules NSW; enough said. The Left in Victoria is still strong but the retirement of Tanner and the possible loss of Melbourne will leave it vulnerable. This warfare is the main reason that so many Labor supporters have now turned to the Greens, as the Workers Party no longer supports the workers. For some time now a few left-wing unions have been quietly channelling funds to the Greens, as it is the only progressive party with any sort of political clout in Australia, and they are sick of being marginalised by Labor. It is only a matter of time before the left-wing of Labor leave the Labor Party and form a new progressive party with the Greens, bringing a true third party to Australian politics. Then we would see the old Labor Party claim the centre, and attract disaffected Liberals such as Turnbull to their cause, the new Green-Labor alliance take up the left, with the LNP occupying the far-right.
Fran, I have read what you said and you are wrong. You need to do a bit more research. The Langer Option doesn’t work in Federal elections, all it will do is make your vote invalid. Under current Commonwealth legislation (Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918) voters are required to place consecutive numbers on their ballot paper. There are some circumstances where a failure to number all boxes will still result in a valid vote but giving one candidate a 1 and all others a 2 is not permitted and will invalidate the vote. Under the same legislation it is an offence to advise a voter to cast a Langer vote.
Why would anyone who claims to be working FOR The Greens advocate voting informal? I’ve always thought The Greens might be fruitloops, now I’m absolutely sure of that.
Fran, either grow up and vote properly, or don’t bother voting at all. Shonky numbering will get you one result only - an informal vote that helps no-one.
>>>> “the young boffins that surrounded him are a different kettle fish”
Revenge of the Hollomen?
It is a plausible and more benign possibility than my dark sugggestions.
On the other hand… I sometimes find myself wondering how secure telecoms between politicians really are. If individuals within ‘security agencies’ with sufficient sway and appropriate access were to ensure that Parliament House calls are recorded, who would know? Who would blow the whistle?
How well have the politicians protected themselves against surveillance and external manipulation?
Manipulation of the highest levels of government is scarcely new news in the English-speaking world, after all. It certainly shouldn’t be news in Australia, the land where the (partially informative) Spycatcher expose was published. It’s surely a lot easier to eavesdrop and monitor with 21st century electronic technology than it used to be in the old days.
I wonder if you ever really know who your friends and enemies are in politics.
I’m sure Julia Gillard knows that certain sections of the press will claw and carp at her right up until election day. That’s a given.
She knows also that the Liberal Party machine and vested interests will be doing everything in their power to undermine her. That’s a given.
But the enemies who dwell in your own party - now that must be less obvious and very disconcerting.
I’m not convinced of her politics, and I’m not sure what I think of Rudd’s demise and her part in it. But I admire her strength and resolve and if she can overcome the disadvantages of gender bias in this country, she might just see off the enemies within. Suddenly this campaign is not quite so boring.
Leone said:
Why ask when you can read what I wrote above? Plainly, you are indolent. You also got my proposal wrong. I didn’t suggest making all votes after the greens 2. I simply advocated making ALP and Liberal have the same number. In some electorates, that same number might be 7 or 8 or even 19.
Not voting is illegal, as you should know. Also, since my vote is purely symbolic, I want the symbol to be right.
[ Shonky numbering will get you one result only - an informal vote that helps no-one.
It will demonstrate my determination not to prefer either of the major boss class public policy suites. That helps in a modest way.
##It seems conceivable to me that the ‘leaks’ are agenda-driven tip-offs from within the so-called ‘intelligence agencies’.##
Bingo
@ TheTruthHurts…here he is the lib dunger boy, knows everything about nothing, back in your cage mud slinger, back with your own kind, the low life you fool
Asdusty said:
Such a realignment would be a better representation of the cultural predisposition of the voting public, but we really need a fundamentally different way of composing governance.
@Syd
It doesn’t even have to be anyone in the security services. Last year, German computer engineer Karsten Nohl told a hacker conference in Berlin that he and his team decoded the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) encryption algorithm to draw attention to gaping security holes in the technology and drive mobile operators to patch them. They still haven’t fixed all these bugs
Politicians, staffers or anyone else that discusses mission critical information that might be of interest to their competition are simply asking for trouble gabbing away on Mobile phones as they do. Once you consider the tens of millions of dollars mining companies are willing to spend in order to swing this election for their right wing political facilitators, it’s not such a stretch to believe someone might spend a couple of million on a small team of hired gun hackers to data mine the sort of information that could potentially turn the tide.
You’re a sad lot today. It’s all Oakes’ fault. He made it up. Or he has an axe to grid. Or he works for News Ltd so everything he says must be false. Rupert orchestrated this. The allegations are a fraud. They’re coming after her because she’s a woman. And that hoary old chestnut Laborites pull out whenever they get into trouble: it’s nothing, really, when you compare it to the war in Iraq! The war in Iraq? Like I said, you’re a sad bunch today.
@Acidic Muse. Acid, what you say is not out of the bounds of possibility, although there is a certain Hollywood blockbuster flavour to it. But there is something very Australian about the old-fashioned leak from disgruntled sections of political parties and the public service. I wonder if we’ll ever know where they did come from.
I assume that the cabinet leaks to Laurie Oaks are going to be drip fed, one every week between now and the election.
I look forward to next weeks thrilling installment
my guess? “Gillard criticized Rudd in cabinet meetings for being a Catholic turncoat.’
that will get the churchy voters seething
@Rupert
I am definitely not discounting it might have been Alistar Jordan or some other obsessively loyal apparatchik from the Rudd machine.
Nonetheless, there has definitely been a flagrant campaign by certain sections of the media to destabilise first Rudd and then Gillard’ electoral chances. There are no doubt a myriad of motivations for various journalists participating in this campaign, some purely partisan, some driven by their employers commercial imperatives and some purely about self aggrandisement - Laurie Oaks for instance definitely likes to see himself as a political king maker regardless of any other agenda he may or may not be running at the time.
Most of what goes on in any campaign is pretty much smoke and mirrors created for public consumption - what every election is really about is who derives the most benefit from the spoils of what is now a trillion dollar economy. One only has to look at recent disclosures about Richard Pratts penchant for buying political influence to get some insight into how this game gets played. I have no doubt it’s all far more sordid than any Hollywood thriller
Fran Barlow, if you are still following this thread, may make a personal plea?
1. Stop polluting Crikey threads with repetitive self-important nonsense about how your very own personal belief systems demand that you vote informally whils hoping for a good Greens result. We have heard it and heard it. We understand you. Many of us disagree with you. So, pleaaaase, now drop this subject.
2. Please continue to contribute your analytical and rational stuff. It is passing good at times.
John Bennetts said:
A review of the thread above suggests otherwise. I mentioned it in passing, to establish the non-parttisan character og my analysis. Afterwards, I only responded to those misrepresenting my position or querying it, or both. If no further reference occurs, I will stop mentioning it.
@ Acidic Muse
You make very good points IMO.
If they had guts and a well-developed sense of mutual self-preservation, it occurs to me that politicians from all sides could usefully agree to a thorough parliamentary inquiry into the security and privacy of communications for politicians, their staff and the upper echelons of the public service with whom they interface.
Perhaps this is already well-taken care of, but I’m not aware it’s ever really been the subject of public debate in Australia.
Fran Barlow
Fran before I address this let me say that I am a fan of yours, I enjoyed your contributions to the Nuclear energy debate immensely and found them very informative. Please don’t take this as any form of personal attack, however I have to say the above is basically nonsense.
Without even addressing what I see as misrepresentations and clear political bias in your definitions of “left” and “right” ( like comparing what those left intend and what the policies of the right entail, for example) let me address the nature of the terms themselves.
Fundamentally Left and Right are very unwieldy terms used to generally describe someone’s political persuasion but in reality they contain absolutely no intellectual content. There are too many variations of political thought to be summed up in “left or right”, in fact there are three major political spectrums (and several minor ones) which dominated 20th century political thought, progressivism - conservatism, socialism - liberalism, capitalism - communism. (I know you may know very well what I’m talking about here but allow me to explain myself fully).
Each of these political spectrums deals with something different; conservatism is defined by managing the process of organic change in society through the maintenance of tradition and custom (conservative doctrine - if there is such a thing - holds that human society is not only organic but too complex for any theory to fully comprehend). Progressivism is the exact opposite, it wants designed reform generated from political, social or economic theory driven by government.
Liberalism is defined by the maintenance of liberty for all citizens and is thus opposed to the centralization of power in any form - by emphasizing liberty Liberalism places responsibility on the individual. Again socialism is its opposite and purports the use of the state and its organs in order to address social and economic problems of societies weakest members - Socialism both requires the centralization of power into government and places the emphasis on society rather than the individual.
The communist - capitalist divide deals with property rights and the way society organizes the factors of production (land, labor and capital). Communist doctrine requires all of the factors of production to be owned collectively, capitalism requires private ownership of those factors.
Add to that the democratic- authoritarian and labor - capital divides plus the outliers like Environmentalism, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, which are significantly different from all of the above, and you start to see why the terms left and right are a catastrophically inadequate means of accurately describing someone’s political beliefs. If being a conservative makes you a right winger then does that make progressive’s lefties? Malcolm Turnbull is clearly a progressive, is he a leftie? What about the leaders of the 1992 Soviet coup attempt, they were hard line communists trying to stop Gorbachev’s free market reforms, yet they were also hard line conservatives. If being a communist makes you a left winger, but being a conservative makes you a right winger then what were these guys? If the left is the party of labor then what are environmentalists who advocate deindustrialization, rightists? The problem with left and right is its quite possible to be a progressive-liberal, a conservative-socialist or a capitalist-socialist. In fact during the 19th century Liberalism and Conservatism were sworn enemies because Liberalism is a progressive ideology (the original revolutionary assembly was divided along progressive - conservative lines), they were two separate forces in Australian politics until the rise of the Labour party.
This is why the terms leftist and rightist are intellectually invalid. The left - right divide only has any meaning if it is applied to a specific piece of political geography, i.e. what is Australia’s hard left was the Soviet Unions’ hard right. Thus how do the terms leftist and rightist, which by their very nature denote some sort of coherent ideology ( i.e. commun-ist, capital-ist or social-ist) to which someone can adhere, have any hope of possessing any real intellectual meaning?
Given all of the above - and disregarding the emotive prose - how could you say that “rightist” ideology entails “the entrenchment of the privileges of (commodity) propertied elites, often under the pretence of a warrant to defend the rights and prerogatives of decontextualised individuals and the implied want of social obligations between humans” when you haven’t even defined which political ideology you are talking about? Is that what liberalism does? Is it what neo-liberalism does? Or are you talking about conservatism here? Is that what progressivism does, or environmentalism? You are doing 500 years of political thought a great injustice by lumping such different theories together. Their founding fathers would be turning in their graves. Basically if there are leftists there has to be leftism and given the fact that leftism can not be intellectually consistent (leftism in Australia is rightism in the Soviet Union) it’s an impossibility.
This is why I have such a problem with terms like “leftist”, the people who use them are usually just fighting the typical political war of attrition; “we’re right and they’re wrong, we’ll win and they’ll lose” ect, ect. Politics is treated just like the footy by most Australians (even the dreaded latte sipping intelligentsia), you pick a side and then you barrack! But even with all the energy expended on politics in Australia no one seems to really care about ideas any more, and often once someone picks a “side” they dismiss the other “sides” ideas out of hand; like Liberalism = selfishness, Socialism = giving handouts to slackers, Capitalism = stepping on millions of poor people so a few fat cats get richer, Neo-liberalism = handing over the world to big corporations, rightists (all of the above I guess) = the entrenchment of the privileges of (commodity) propertied elites, Environmentalism = giving up all human progress to save a few trees and so on. None of these are accurate depictions of the political and economic theories they deride, and in general that derision simply makes everyone dig in deeper and creates an environment where constructive political discourse is virtually impossible.
Oblizzard
Let me return the compliment by thanking you for composing such a considered response.
It is true that terms like leftist and rightist are very broad. Their frontiers can be hazy and of course, one cannot read off from each how any leftists or rightist will respond to any presenting issue. Humans, even the most thoughtful of us, are partial in our grasp of the connectedness between ourselves and others and even more so, in the dynamic results of our interactions with human systems. Our thoughts and predispositions are played out through personal experience with all of the doubt and error that attends it.
Nevertheless, the terms “left” and “right” are useful because they go to that which is the fundamental distinguishing feature of all humanity — how we go about securing our life chances in concert with others. To what extent is that project a collective or communal one, or conversely a matter of the exercise of private initiative, in which everything that can be externalised, should be? To put it even more simply, if one grants that humans do best when we collaborate, how does one define and delimit the claims of reciprocity, or specify the private, or restrain collective action problems? What would “playing nicely with others” look like?
Almost all of us accept that every human must be able to have a degree of private space — a place where the claims of society or one’s community or even ones close family ought not to intrude. Conversely, almost all of us accept that as much as individuals have rights over themselves, that at some point, the claims of others, sometimes (but not always) manifest in the action of the states or state-like bodies may legitimately restrain the scope of individual discretion. Almost all of us accept that some property is purely private and that some property should be owned and managed collectively. Some assert that the business of humans realising their interests is inevitably, their task alone, while others, appealing to the benefits of equitable collaboration insist that the business of ensuring humans can be the best they can be is something in which the community as a whole has an interest. Inevitably, one either asserts that assets germane to the production of public goods ought to be the subject of equitable collaboration amongst ethical equals, or operated by those capable of asserting their exclusive control over them so as to decide how much of the benefit goes to the community as a whole.
Where one draws these frontiers determines whether one is on the left or the right. Broadly, leftists favour equitable collaboration, the struggle for general equality and empowerment and true human community, whereas rightists are indifferent, asserting as you say that nothing useful can be said about humans as a whole, except perhaps that they are inevitably evil or malign or undeserving or merely the victims of unintelligible circumstance, or of metaphysical forces such as god and that suffering, quite as much a joy is to be accepted as part of the human condition. The right’s impulse is to be interested in individual humans, but indifferent to humans as a whole.
Of course, as you say, there are all manner of apparent rightists and leftists. Social conservatives also put a value on community that is sharply at odds with that of rightwing libertarians. Yet by different paths they both assert the eternality of social property and property rights and thus the alienation of this for all time from the commons. Social conservatives may favour environmental issues. Sometimes they do this on quasi metaphysical or religious grounds — making it an instantiation of their view of humans as the playthings of much greater forces rather than a desire to realise and preserve the commons for human utility. You cite Malcolm Turnbull as a “progressive” but really, following my dichotomy above, he is merely someone who asserts an interest in individuals at the expense of the collective and carries this interest over into personal civil rights in a way that his conservative fellow travellers, who share his broader view of the role of the commons in public policy, do not. In macro terms, he remains clearly on the right, because for him, the primary interest is protecting elite control over the means of production and continuing, so far as he can, to alienate the commons. That he and I would share some views on civil rights is an accident, because again, he and I have reached this place by different routes.
You assert that:
This makes no sense at all. While there was a USSR, Australia’s hard left sought the political destruction of the soviet elite and its replacement by an authentic expression of the political power of the working-class. I know, because I was amongst the said hard left>/i>. We failed and instead, in 1991 the moribund clique that ran the place imploded and made way for an authentic rightwing putsch which delivered all of state property one way or another into the hands of ex-military and secret service men and/or the Russian mafia. One of our comrades was murdered in Moscow at that time, we suspect, by those associated with this gang.
You point to tribalism amongst those attaching themselves to terms like left and right, and there is no shortage of that, along with the sloganeering. The mere fact that these epithets are thrown in raised voices doesn’t make them all equally wrong. Some shed light and others obscure. Names, titles and slogans can be misleading. In this country we have a Labor Party that really has very little to do with labour, a Liberal party that is not liberal and a National Party that is mainly rural rather than based where most people live. Only the name “Greens” tells one anything about their principal politics.
My point is that politics, if it is to be meaningful, must address itself to the ways in which we resolve the conflict between the private and the public, and, speaking as a leftist, I assert that it should resolve this dilemma in ways that empower those who are disempowered and recapture control of those assets and domains which are properly the business of the commons. Nonsensical squabbling over who can best “turn back the boats”, “moderate wage demands”, “stimulate business” and “make life easier for mum and dad” or who is more honest, more buff, more in touch, more pragmatic or more authentic entirely miss the point. Amidst all that, recalling the left-right dichotomy would be a massive step forward.
There is obviously a great need for Crikey to provide a special place for wannabees to publish their papers on their political views. That would stop certain people boring the pants off the rest of us and ruining decent discussion with a deluge of meaningless drivel that has nothing whatsoever to do with the article under discussion.
Oblizzard - “Thus how do the terms leftist and rightist, which by their very nature denote some sort of coherent ideology ( i.e. commun-ist, capital-ist or social-ist) to which someone can adhere, have any hope of possessing any real intellectual meaning?”
I just wanted to say in light of your lengthy (but informed) post, capitalism is not an ideology; it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon. Saying capitalism is an ideology is like saying the law of causality is an ideology.
Plaudits though for your dispassionate analysis, it is refreshing and so lacking here on crikey. PS. You haven’t been reading the quarterly essay have you?
Fran-
“It is true that terms like leftist and rightist are very broad…”
Why can’t you just admit you’ve been rolled?
I started reading beyond this quoted sentence and I came to realise that you are just waffling on (red herring), rather than refuting the the valid point made by oblizzard: the terms ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ tell us nothing about questions of substantive policy. These terms do not facilitate thought, they replace rational argument with churlish vitriol.
This brand of partisan politics I find distasteful and indicates an obsession with teams and a disinterest in ideas.
As for your diatribe against conservatism (or “rightists” as you say) I’ll say this:
It is common in progressive political thought to dismiss conservatism as no more than an excuse for the preservation of privilege and power inequalities, as you yourself said: “Being a rightist entails the entrenchment of the privileges of (commodity) propertied elites…”.
Indeed it would be naive to assume that conservatives are immune to such motivations. But to to take your view is reductive; it designates conservatism as little more than an enemy to be defeated, rather than a worthwhile philosophical tradition to be engaged.
Perhaps one day you’ll realise that claiming moral supremacy and demonising others as ‘evil’ will rarely persuade others to your point of view.
“Amidst all that, recalling the left-right dichotomy would be a massive step forward.”
I surely think not, even in revolutionary France it told us nothing about questions of substantive policy; at different times the ‘left’ included socialistis and supporters of laissez-faire economics.
If you want to engage in accurate political discourse, use the following dichotomies:
Liberal/Socialist
Conservative/Progressive.
Fran - if you’re on the left and are disgusted with both the major parties the only option is to vote Green, and make sure your vote is effective.
Your proposal only means that your vote, instead of being one for the Greens, will be informal. If you honestly think if enough people do your sort of informal vote there will be an enquiry (not “inquiry”, BTW) you are living in cloud cookoo land. The only beneficiary of your vote will be (drum roll…) the two major parties.
In a nutshell, grow up! Voting is a civic responsibility, not a dummy spit.
Amazing how little commentary there is in the msm is about the credibility of these serial leaks. Everyone seems to be taking them at face value. Bizarre…
Malcolm I have been making exactly that point all day. Tonight the so called unbiased, trustworthy ABC24 Channel opened up with almost … there was a leak and the PM accepted it. Utter crap, she kept saying this morning time and again ask oakes, ask oakes and she should put the bloody attack right back on him and call in the Feds. My dad always taught attack is the best form of defence, works a treat. Give the big noting slob something to think about.
Malcolm Street said:
It’s a basic rule that when you correct someone’s English, you need to be right or you can appear to be a bit of a goose …
See for example
Never tangle with a schoolteacher on such matters.
As to the substantive question on informal voting, I’ve explained my position at some length above. I refer you to it.
Fireflying tried the following:
This simply underlines that your perspicacity is rather exceeded by your paradigmatic solidarity. OBlizzard made some fairly generic but unsupported claims, which could be summarised as “people are all over the place in their politics”. They didn’t address the key question which concerns how the burdens and benefits of work should be settled. Believe it or not, that is the basic question that has marked civilisation since before people were calling it civilisation. It’s why left and right are so important as concepts. It’s a shame you don’t get that.
Then you did this:
on a post where you finished as follows:
Plainly, you are a good example of someone who is all over the place. Oblizzard was onto something, because you are certainly confused. What an amusing fellow you are!
You also tried:
You will look in vain anywhere for me calling others evil. I find such concepts useless. People do what they think they have to. Good and evil don’t enter into it.
I call matters as I see them. If others don’t accept what I say, that is a matter for them.
For me, it is very clear that humans do best when they collaborate, and equitable collaboration maximises general utility. It conforms to notions of ethical equality. This last decade shows us starkly what happens when equity is absent. Humans suffer on a large scale. That is what you solidarise with. That too is a matter for you.
These “leaks” do not appear to have any credibility. If another less-known journalist then Laurie Oakes reported it, would it have received the coverage it has?
Reporting a “leak” of this kind is not serious investigative journalism. It is disgustingly biased and not even worthy of a gossip magazine, let alone the national press.
Does anyone else find it interesting that it’s the Paid Parental Leave scheme and Pension increase that she supposedly “opposed”?? Not some other scheme about roads or power plants or something….but FAMILY schemes.
VERY interesting when you think of the media coverage that has been given to Gillard’s de-facto relationship and lack of children in the last 2-3 days….while in the meantime Tony Abbott and the Liberals were out trumpeting their version of “family values” (husband and kids, in case you missed it) and being photographed with wives and kids.
Hmm, that’s very convenient for the liberals, isn’t it?
This person (or people) are the lowest of the low. And Oakes, in this case anyway, is right down there with them.
Well said Political Tarot
This is all just way too convenient for the Liberals, and with the story also being run on The Australian’s Broadcasting Corporation this sounds like a co-ordinated black bag effort from the Liberal spin team.
As I said above, I call bulls**t. Let’s see their cards.
The fact that the media are so obsessed with personality and persiflage in this campaign and so unconcerned with matters of substance seems to me to come down to two primary things.
Firstly the fact that the Government are primarily running on their existing policies on most matters and the Opposition haven’t really got their own together at all yet, provides little “easy” fodder for journalists. This means that they have to work harder if they want to pursue a story of real substance.
Secondly we are all now subject to (one might well say “victims of”) the instant buzzes of the “twitter” generation. Gossip and personality are given far greater status than they were even a few years ago. Both journalistic ability and reader attention spans have been reduced to the point where getting anyone to read more than a couple of lines has gone out the window.
Vague generalities and personal attacks are much easier to fit into a para or two than anything involving real examination.
No doubt this suits the Opposition, with their policy vacuum, down to the ground. I guess in such circumstances the Government have two options. They either soldier on, trying to keep the focus on policy, or they give up on that and start playing the personality game to its hilt. I hope they persist with the former, but I could certainly understand it if they shift tack and start playing the man rather than the ball to a much greater extent.
Do we say Attila the Hun was right-wing because he was violent and cruel? Lenin outdid him in both respects. Is Lenin to the right of Attila?
Is it left-wing to believe in individual freedom - like the right to carry guns? Is it right-wing to believe in economic freedom - like the right to unrestricted freedom of movement across national boundaries to find work?
Does the left believe in centrally panned economies, such as in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa? Does the right believe in free trade, as did Adam Smith and Karl Marx?
Is it left-wing to hate capitalism, like Hitler? Is the Left internationalist, like McDonald’s and the World Trade Organization?
Is the Right racist, like the early communist party of apartheid South Africa, whose motto was “Workers of the World Unite, and Fight for a White South Africa!” ?
“Plainly, you are a good example of someone who is all over the place…”
Well you clearly don’t understand the dichotomies OBlizzard and I outlined, allow me to define them (in a more simplified form for your convenience):
Socialism = activist state
Liberalism = limited state
This dichotomy describes competing ideas of what - and especially how big - the State’s role should be in economic and social affairs.
Conservatism = Human society is organic that evolves slowly and naturally, change comes from the bottom-up
Progressivism = Remake the world in pursuit of some ideal or theory.
As you can see, all policies fall within these two dichotomies; either you want active government intervention (socialism) or limited government intervention (liberalism).
Either you want to maintain the existing order (conservatism), or - to borrow a couple of words from OBlizzard - you want designed reform generated from political, social or economic theory driven by government (progressivism).
What is so hard to understand about these two comprehensive dichotomies?
Fireflying said
Of course not. It is doubtful if he had any kind of vision of property rights. While rightwingers often are violent and cruel, it is not one of the essential attributes. I doubt you could describe Tolkien as violent and cruel, but he was certainly a rightwinger. Nor is being violent and cruel an attribute of leftists, though clearly, some who have avowed leftist ideals have been.
Violent and cruel are imprecise terms of course. Some people (I would be amongst them) think the raising ocf animals for commercial purposes is almost always violent and cruel in practice, and yet adherents of both leftist and rightist ideas participate in this. Rightwingers are prominent in supporting the occupation of Afghanistan, which is certainly violent and cruel, but they think therer are sufficient reasons. They favour the imposition of suffering on vulnerable people so as to “turn back the boats” again, because they assert sufficient warrant. One man’s violent cruelty is another’s pragmatism, clearly. Leftists have reasoned in the same way, unpersuasively IMO, most of the time. People are often inconsistent.
It certainly can be. I believe in personal space and discretion. In some contexts, the right to carry guns is warranted. This is not a doctrinal question but a practical one — at what point do the rights of individuals impinge upon the rights of society as a whole? While it made sense to have a fairly permissive attitude to guns possession in days when the legal power was ill-fiormed and unprofessional, and one wanted the opportunity to dispossess indigenous people from the land, as was the case in pioneering Australia and the US, it is less warranted now. the indigenes have been dispossessed and we have a well-established police service. The main victims of guns tend to be vcitims of criminal or reckless usage.
Not a centrally planned economy but a corporate oligopoly — rather like Salazar’s clerical fascist state in Portugal.
The left believes in the empowerment of working people — in the political control by working people of the key infrastructure within a community. That it is centrally planned or the extent of that centralisation is a derivative feature.
Sometiomes, but more commonly, they are parochial and xenophobic, but this applies also to the communities from which the left draws support, so it is not specific. Capitalism fosters this kind of sentiment and that afflicts both sides of the political divide.
A consistent leftist would see all human claims as ethically equivalent.
Wrong. Socialism is a description of a society of material abundance in which class rule 9andf the state with it) is in a state of progressive dissolution, because class society is becoming more attenuated.
Conservatism is the desire to protect existing institutions and social arrangements from change. It is a doctrine of the virties of cultural stasis, typically focusing on a past ‘golden age” of virtue when all folks knew their place.
Ah… it has become quite clear you dispute the very premise of conservatism’s worth and do not consider it a legitimate philosophical tradition worth discussing.
I’m afraid this debate cannot continue unless you cease your misrepresentation of conservatism & socialism.
Fireflying tried:
I’ve no idea what you can mean by ‘legitimate’ in this context. It’s a grabbag of loosely connected predispositions centred around the warrant of existing privilege, if that is what you mean. Calling it a “philosophical tradition” is a bit grandiloquent.
I haven’t misprepresented socialism. You, in your ignorance, did that.