Oz Politics Blog

For months, the conventional Canberra wisdom has been John Howard will retire in March — on a high, after ten years in the top job. By May next year, the expectation is that Peter Costello would be Prime Minister. The strongest evidence has been Howard’s desire to get the industrial relations and anti-terror legislation through the Parliament before Christmas.

Yesterday, on channel Nine’s Sunday Program, Howard made these remarks,

LAURIE OAKES: What about your Government? Can we expect in the budget next May that you will perhaps do what Kim Beazley says should be done?

JOHN HOWARD: Oh it’s a little early to be talking about the budget, but I’m sure in the weeks ahead Peter Costello and I will be discussing these matters.

LAURIE OAKES: Will Mr Costello be bringing down that budget?

JOHN HOWARD: Laurie, another one of your trick questions. The Treasurer will be bringing down the budget, and I think Peter Costello’s been the best Treasurer this country’s ever had.

LAURIE OAKES: There are rumours of course that a reshuffle is in the wind, and that Robert Hill will be stepping down to go overseas. Is that true?

JOHN HOWARD: Laurie, there are always rumours and I never respond, as you know, to those sorts of rumours. I’d spend a lot of time doing so, so I decided a long time ago not to respond to them.

The remarks have been interpreted by Mark Metherell and Michelle Grattan as implying the Prime Minister would stay on to May, at least.

More intriguing is the speculation of a Cabinet reshuffle. If Howard is planning a reshuffle, it is probably the best evidence yet he plans to stay on and fight the next election. If he were planning to retire, the decent thing would be to leave the make-up of the ministry to his successor.

Team Costello’s number one ticket holder, Glenn Milne, chose not to comment on yesterday’s developments in his regular Monday column at the Oz. Instead he concentrated on the Coalition’s troubles with IR reform and those folksy adverts. Milne’s piece included a long quote from the 15 July issue of Workers Online, at the heart of which was,

“Stripped of the fluff, the Prime Minister’s pitch appears to be ‘If we are going to compete with China and India, then you will have to give up rights and drop your wages’. All of a sudden he is on our turf and, as the polls are showing, it is not a place he wants to be.

“All of which means two things at this early stage of the campaign: Howard is taking a major political risk in pushing through these laws and, finally, Labor has an issue where they can play on their home ground.”

I am not so sure. Once the IR legislation is through the Parliament, I suspect it will have minimal impact on wages and conditions of most workers in the short to medium term. The crunch point will be the next recession. If the Australian economy continues as it has since 1991, campaigning in 2007 on IR laws passed in 2005 would be a lot like campaigning against the GST in 2001: not a winner for Labor.

Meanwhile, Beazley has kicked an own goal with the anti-terror laws and his proposal to gaol those responsible for “hate books and violent preaching”. Kim at the Purple Rodeo saw it in these terms,

Beazley is the prisoner of his past. Unwilling just to oppose the laws (for fear of being seen as a small target driven opportunist) on the defensible grounds of process, lack of proportion and illiberal implication, he’s tried to exorcise another ghost - he who has no ticker - by trying to thump his chest and look tough on terror. A terrible day for the ALP. Shaun Carney is dead right - if Labor wins the next election, it’ll have a lot more to do with union grassroots campaigning than the uninspirational and tactically clueless shambles of an Opposition we have to put up with.

And with an Opposition like that, why wouldn’t the PM want to stay on for another three years?

If you have not noticed, I have given the mother ship a quick paint job. It looks more like the blog now. I have also opted for a name change.

I really must put the effort in and finish all the bits under construction.

A few days ago I finished David McKnight’s Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the culture wars. I have been meaning to write a review ever since. My problem was that I was not sure what to say. I found parts of the book brilliant. Yet I thought much of the book was trite. Dare I say it: drivel!

Take the opening argument: that the established spectrum of left and right is inadequate to categorise the multiplicity of views and approaches to the family, the environment, the economy, cultural diversity or the meaning of life. No one ever claimed that this simple model – which had its roots in whether one supports the orthodoxy (right) or wants to reform it (left) – would ever prove a reliable universal system of classification. What is ‘orthodox’ has always been changing: yesterday’s radical ideas are today’s conservatism. Anyway, most people and political parties are reformist on some issues and conservative on others; few are left or right on every front. Furthermore, the notions of left and right have been constructed in many ways, and not just as McKnight presented them.

It was the first of many straw men. McKnight’s economic analysis was equally hackneyed.

The last twenty years have seen the triumph of a broad doctrine which goes by many names – economic rationalism, neo-liberalism, neo-classical economics, supply-side economics – and which argues that all kinds of economic and social issues can be successfully dealt with by a combination of individualism, competition and free markets.

Get me a bucket. We live in a mixed economy, and neither Labor nor Coalition governments particularly contest that orthodoxy. There are arguments at the margins, but no calls for wholesale reform. Neither party is seriously proposing the abolition of the post World War II welfare state or a return to laissez-faire, nineteenth century England. If anything, the state’s role in the economy has grown under both sides of politics. The big differences in Australian politics (at least between Liberal and Labor) are matters of social policy, not economic policy; and even there, there is much in common between the major parties.

By the time I got to chapter 6, I was close to chucking the book. While relatively easy to read, it seemed to be describing a fantasy Australia. Much of the analysis was little more than a cartoon world viewed from afar. I found the thesis that the Right had largely defeated the Left a little difficult to swallow. As I score it, the Left has had many successes over the last 35 years — including some important wins — family law reform, gay rights, anti-discrimination legislation, multiculturalism, equal pay for women, state funded childcare, universal health insurance, etc. These are all now part of the orthodoxy. While the right may have won more on the economic policy front, the left have won more on the social policy front.

However, I digress, chapter 6 was the point where the book picked up for me. In the second half of the book, McKnight drew on Noel Pearson’s analysis of Indigenous affairs and used it as a starting point for a framework to explore the broader possibility of a new politics for family values, feminism, national identity and multiculturalism. The lessons McKnight perceived in Pearson and which he sought to apply more generally to the achievement of a fairer society are as follows (pages 164-166). They are worth pondering.

The first lesson from Pearson is that any broader renewal must boldly acknowledge unpleasant facts rather than attempting to rationalise them. George Orwell called it ‘telling people what they don’t want to hear’. Acknowledging unpleasant facts should be combined with genuinely trying to rethink the intellectual foundations of a world view rather than just fiddling with policy settings.

A second lesson is that he implicitly challenges the assumption that reform comes about largely through government action and that, conversely, if failure exists, it must be the fault of government. This is the unspoken assumption of much political action which is oriented to occupying government benches and implementing an official policy. It is not that it is entirely wrong – just that it involves the major omission of individuals and civil society from the picture. Related to this is the third lesson about social change: that poverty is not matter of material goods…

A fourth lesson about social change derived from Pearson is that focussing on rights is not enough. Social change conceived of as the spreading and advancement of abstract ‘rights’ neglects the plain truth that, in real communities and societies, rights crucially involve obligations – such as the obligation to do something in exchange for support…

Next, there is Pearson’s overt moral stance. This is in contrast to many social reformers who have tended to explain what happens by looking for rational, scientific or quasi-scientific explanations. They are often sceptical of the moral language of good and evil, and of any ’solutions’ which include blaming individuals… In rejecting this today, social reformers sometimes go to the other extreme, endorsing what is called ’social constructionism’. This is the view … which denies there is a human nature, and therefore a human condition, which establishes the moral domain within which we all function.

There are some big problems with social constructionism when such an over-arching social theory is applied directly to specific social issues. The main one is that there is no space to understand where the domain of individual moral responsibility begins and where that of social responsibility ends. As well, social constructionism discounts the ability of people to learn from experience and change their behaviour. It discounts the actions and moral choices which individuals can make in given circumstances. It concedes little or no autonomy to individuals and families, since they are seen as mere products of the wider society.

In the wider world of global politics, social constructionism is often wheeled out to ‘explain’ issues which have a moral dimension – for example, when people try to explain Islamic terrorism purely in terms of world poverty, globalism, or the evil actions of the US government. Almost invariably, such ‘explanations’ soon begin to sound like excuses.

A final wider lesson: Pearson focuses on the family as the crucial institution of social wellbeing… He points out that a stable and functioning family is a crucial element of social order, and provides a moral core to a wider community.

Having got that off my chest, I thought I would see what others have said. Rafe Champion at Catallaxy has written extensively on this book. Having just written the above, I note he quotes much the same long section I did.

Lindsay Tanner has an interesting piece in the Australian.

First the bad news: I have dropped Tim Blair from my Australian politics blog feeds. The signal to noise ratio was not high enough for me.

And the good news: I have added philosophy.com and stoush.net.

If you would like your blog to be included, drop me a line and let me know your RSS feed. As a general rule of thumb I only include established sites with more than 100 posts on Australian politics and new sites from established bloggers. I only keep sites that I judge of sufficient quality (no correspondence will be entered into), and which produce well formed feeds. I am happy to accommodate a selection of feeds that span the spectrum from the far left to the far right of Australian politics, provided the blog is well written and well argued.

According to the Australian (also here), the latest Newspoll of 1200 voters over the weekend of 21-23 October had Labor in the winning position — a primary vote of 40 per cent (up three points over the fortnight) and a two party preferred lead of 54 to 46 per cent. The Coalition’s primary vote would have been 37 per cent (down six points over the fortnight) if an election were called last weekend.

Regular readers will know that I am always sceptical of six point movements over a fortnight. I am particularly sceptical this time, as the ACNielsen poll did not find the same primary vote over the same weekend. Nonetheless, the ACNielsen poll of 1409 voters (here, here and here) told a similar headline story: It had Labor well ahead at 52 to 48 per cent in two-party preferred terms.

For the primary vote, ACNielsen had Labor on 36 per cent (up one point over the month), and the Coalition on 43 per cent (unchanged). According to ACNielsen Labor won in two-party preferred terms with 78 per cent of the non-Coalition-non-Labor preferences. To me this seems implausibly high given the 60 per cent flow to Labor at the last election (see next chart).

Both polls had the similar messages in the attitudinal polling.

• While Howard’s rating has fallen, he remains the preferred prime minister [Newspoll: 50 to 26 per cent; ACNielsen: 52 to 35 per cent; Howard is down 7 points with Newspoll and 3 points with ACNielsen]
• Satisfaction with/approval of the Prime Minister has also fallen [Newspoll 43 per cent satisfied: ACNielsen: 49 per cent approve; down 7 points with Newspoll and 4 points with ACNielsen]
• However, satisfaction with/approval of the Opposition Leader has stagnated [Newspoll: 31 per cent satisfied; ACNielsen: 35 per cent approve (the seventh consecutive decline); down one point with Newspoll and two points with ACNielsen]

The pollsters also explored attitudes to proposed laws on industrial relations and the war on terror.

On IR reform, Newspoll found,

Two in five voters believed the changes would be bad for the economy and for jobs, with a mere 11 per cent saying they believed they’d be better off under the new system.

A third of those polled said they were worried that their take-home pay and working conditions would be negatively impacted by the changes.

On the proposed terrorism legislation, ACNielsen found,

People are firmly in favour of life imprisonment for giving funds to a terrorist organisation (66 per cent); allowing terrorist suspects to be detained for a fortnight without charge (66 per cent); seven years’ jail for anyone supporting insurgency where Australian troops are deployed (64 per cent); restrictions on the rights of terrorist suspects such as house arrest or tracking devices (74 per cent), and restrictions on social contact and work opportunities for terrorist suspects (57 per cent).

But 60 per cent oppose giving police “shoot to kill” authority when pursuing terrorist suspects, with only 35 per cent in favour. Women are more likely to oppose it than men.

While the polls were bad news for Howard, it is unclear whether they represent good news for Labor and Beazley.

The media internet sites did not report on all the information available from the pollsters, so I could not update all of my graphs.