Political events in Australia have been moving so fast, no one has really caught up. A week ago, Labor looked very likely to win the election (held last Saturday) and there seemed a good chance that Liberal (= pro-business right) Prime Minister John Howard would lose his own seat. Those things duly happened, and that seemed to be about as much as we could expect or hope for. Instead, there has been a meltdown of spectacular proportions on the losing side.
From the category archives:
Oz Politics
Not only has the Labor party won a crushing victory in Australia’s national election but conservative Prime Minister John Howard has, very probably, lost his own seat. Details here.
Given that the economy is going very well, and that the Iraq war, while unpopular, was not a central issue in the campaign, I think it’s reasonable to mark this down as the first national election in which climate change played a pivotal role. Howard, following Bush, refused to ratify Kyoto. This was highly unpopular, and served as a more general symbol of a government stuck in the past.
The other big losing issue for the government was the passage of a package of anti-union laws called Workchoices.
It’s election time here in Australia, and there are some reasons why readers Down Under (from our perspective)
might be more interested than usual.
George Bush has no more reliable ally than the Liberal (=conservative) government of John Howard. Howard has backed Bush straight down the line on Iraq and climate change, and (unlike Tony Blair) raised no objection when Australians were held in Guantanamo Bay for years on end. The general assumption among political hardheads until about a year ago was that, although these positions might be unpopular, Australians would not vote against an incumbent government when the economy was going well. Labor was ahead in the polls, but no-one really believed it. But after a change of leaders at the end of 2006, Labor moved to a large lead in the polls, which it has kept ever since.
To Al Gore and the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the second time the Nobel prizes have honored work on climate change, the first being the award of the 1995 Chemistry Prize to Crutzen, Molina and Sherwood for their discovery of the chemical reactions that led CFCs to deplete the ozone layer.
That award came at an opportune time. Although the world had agreed under the Montreal protocol to phase out CFCs, US Republicans working through the aptly-named DeLay-Doolittle committee were working to undermine it, attacking the science and so on, with the support of a number ofleading delusionists (Sallie Baliunas, Pat Michaels, Fred Singer and others). The Nobel award took the wind out of their sails and most of the “skeptical scientists” involved went very quiet on the issue thereafter. That didn’t stop them using the same tactics and arguments regarding CO2 and global warming.
I hope the 2007 Peace Prize award will have a similar impact. While it’s not a science prize, it would certainly not have been awarded if there was any serious doubt about (rather than politically motivated opposition to) the science of climate change. And it rightly honors Gore’s role in solidifying public opinion on the issue.
Of course, for those inside the Republican bubble of delusion, it will have the opposite impact (since they are opposed to both peace and science, it could hardly do otherwise). But it will certainly have an impact on the imminent election campaign in Australia, leaving those who have been scathing about Gore and the IPCC with (yet more) egg on their faces. Of course, that group includes PM John Howard who refused to meet Gore last year, though he has modified his position since then. Since he seems to be in the mood for changing his tune , he would be well advised to take this opportunity to ratify Kyoto.
The arrest of a doctor in at the Gold Coast Hospital near Brisbane, accused of being connected to the failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow, brings international terrorism a lot closer to home than it has ever been before for me. Of course, it’s front page news, and the fact that most of the (alleged) participants in these attacks were doctors is pretty disturbing. Not surprisingly, the hospital’s switchboard was jammed with calls.
Still, my impression is that most people here are taking it in their stride. The risk of being caught up in a terror attack is part of the background of modern life, along with other largely random risks like hit-and-run drivers and street thugs, to name just two. At a policy level (and arguably in terms of moral response, though I think they are all fairly similar cases) these problems are different, and require different responses. But as far as day to day life is concerned, it’s mainly a matter of getting on with it.
Update “Alleged” turns out to be the operative word. The case against the Brisbane doctor apparently turns on the fact that when police tried to interview him about his links to one of the British accused, they found him at the airport with a one-way ticket to India. But it appears he was going there to join his wife who had gone home a week or so earlier after having a baby.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s plan to ban alcohol and pornography in indigenous communities has, unsurprisingly, attracted world wide attention. Probably inevitably, the framing of the issue in the international press is largely in terms of civil liberties versus intervention, and this is also the frame preferred by Howard himself.
The situation in many remote indigenous communities, and in camps on the edge of rural towns is so bad that concerns about civil liberties are unlikely to trump any policy that has a serious chance of improving matters. Not only is unemployment high to universal and abuse of drugs and alcohol, with the associated violence and crime, chronic but recent reports have shown high rates of child sexual abuse. Howard’s rhetoric suggests that what is needed is drastic intervention, and a willingness to slay the sacred cows that have dominated policy in the past.
In fact, the situation is far more complicated than that.
I’ve been an observer at the National Conference of the Australian Labor Party, which is being held in Sydney.* One of the few real debates at the (generally tightly controlled) conference concerned a proposal under which couples could register their relationship to protect property rights, pension entitlements and so on. This proposal is somewhat less than a civil union, since there is no associated ceremony, and is explicitly claimed not to represent gay marriage. A couple of states have already implemented the idea. A striking feature, mentioned in the debate but not in newspaper reports is that registration is available for people in a carer-dependent relationship rather than a partnership.
Australian news rarely makes it out of the sporting pages internationally (and we’re not looking too good there just now) so it’s pretty exciting for us to make into New York Times coverage of the presidential election campaign. The occasion is a statement by our prime minister, John Howard, to the effect that a vote for the Democrats, and in particular for Barack Obama, would be a vote for Al Qaeda*.
This is not the first time an Australian political leader has commented on the choices available to US electors. A few years ago, then Opposition leader Mark Latham described Bush as ‘incompetent and dangerous’, but this accurate observation did not seem to have much effect in the 2004 US election campaign and probably contributed to Latham’s defeat in the Australian election the same year.
Latham was well known as a loose cannon, and this kind of remark was in character, but Howard has generally been seen as the embodiment of cautious solidity. As far as US politics go, he’s generally been seen as an advocate of unconditional support for US policy, regardless of the political colour of the Administration. He’s been very happy to cash in on his close relationship with Bush, but he was quite keen enough for photo-ops with Clinton. So what possessed him to take a high-risk, low return line like this
Australia now has its own version of the Downing Street memos, dating back to 28 February 2002. That’s when Trevor Flugge, Chairman of our (massively corrupt) grain trading monopoly AWB was told of the invasion of Iraq, and of Australia’s planned participation by our Ambassador to the UN*, John Dauth who even predicted that readmitting weapons inspectors would only produce a short delay.
This adds yet another layer of deception to what was already an amazing story of duplicity.
- The official line from our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is that Dauth was just making a lucky guess.
Like many countries Australia is experiencing Industrial Relations reform. The reforms are a curious mixture of deregulation and compulsion. On the one hand, all sorts of conditions and requirements are stripped away, but in their place there has been created an array of new criminal and civil offences, prohibited terms in contracts, requirements to offer particular employment forms such as AWAs and so on.
Making sense of this seeming contradiction is not so hard. The deregulation is all for employers, and the regulation is all imposed on workers and, particularly, unions. Lockouts are now almost unrestricted, but strikes are subject to strict regulation. Employers cannot be sued for unfair dismissal, but employees are prohibited from including protection against unfair dismissal in a proposed employment contract and so on.
An obvious interpretation is the Marxist one, that this is class-based legislation, designed to increase profits and reduce wages by driving down workers’ bargaining power. That’s part of the story but not, I think, the most important part.
The real issue, I think, relates to the personal power relationship between employers and employees. The complaints of employers about bad employees and the difficulty of sacking them echo very closely the complaints of a century ago that ‘you can’t get good servants any more’. The changes made in the IR laws make most sense if they are read as an attempt to remove constraints on the day-to-day power of bosses to be bosses, whether these constraints are imposed by law, by collective agreements or by individual contracts with workers.
This also helps to explain some of the class alignments we see in Australian politics. While political alignments continue to be determined to a significant extent by income, there are groups with relatively high incomes, such as academics and other professionsals, who tend to support Labor. On the other side of the fence, managers tend to support the conservative parties more strongly than their incomes alone would suggest. The obvious point is that managers are, by definition, bosses. Professionals, who mostly in hierarchical institutions, can identify either as bosses or workers, but with the rise of managerialism, most professionals find themselves on the workers side of the divide.
The debate over the need for new ideas on the left isn’t confined to the US. Australia has also experienced a shift to the right, but the process and outcomes have been different, being much more similar to Britain and New Zealand. This post from my blog is about Australia but most of what follows applies to all three countries.
Andrew Norton at Catallaxy has an interesting piece responding to a claim by Dennis Glover that rightwing thinktanks in Australia are much better funded than their leftwing counterparts. He makes the contrary argument that the universities represent a left equivalent, a claim which I don’t think stands up to the close examination it gets at Larvatus Prodeo.
More interesting, though is Norton’s characterisation of the state of the debate
Since most of the institutions of the social democratic state are still in place, social democratic ideas are perhaps going to seem less exciting than those of their opponents on the right or the left. They are about adaptation and fine-tuning more than throwing it all out and starting again. …. The right doesn’t have ideas because it has think-tanks, it has think-tanks because it has ideas that need promotingThis was a pretty accurate description of the situation in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it has ceased to be so. The right hasn’t had any new ideas for some time, and the policy debate between social democrats and neoliberals has been a stalemate for most of the last decade.
You may have noticed that pro-war blogs have gone kind of quiet about the Oil for Food “scandal’ lately. But unless you follow the Australian press, you probably don’t know why. While the Volcker inquiry turned up lots of instances of oil export licenses given by Saddam’s regimes to various individuals and groups, presumably with some quid pro quo, the real revelation was that Saddam extracted corrupt payments from suppliers of food and other imports. By far the largest party to these dealings was an Australian quango, AWB Limited which, before its privatisation in the late 1990s, was the Australian Wheat Board. Although the story seems complicated, it’s actually fairly simple.