Moving house

Thirty seven degrees south is the new home.

No power to the pundits?

There’s been a bit of talk over on LP about the demise or otherwise of neoliberalism, with a couple of side comments about the power or otherwise of conservative pundits like Bolt, Akerman, Devine et al. This is something I’ve been wondering about a bit lately. Last year, for example, I got Bolted (I first responded then when it became clear that he is in fact bonkers, walked away from the fight) and it had no after effects whatsoever. I subsequently did two months of solid media and public forums and not one person mentioned the piece, on air or off.

But still I waver between thinking they have no power and thinking that actually there is a complex dynamic at work here that gives them a large amount of indirect political power.

Whither neoliberalism? And the progressive future

Today I was supposed to be in Sydney to talk about ‘What next after neoliberalism – creating a progressive future’ to the Crunch Time conference organised by the Centre for Policy Development and other progressive organisations such as the Australia Institute. The session was a panel discussion with David McKnight and Sarah Hanson Young, But I came down with a bug earlier in the week and for the first time ever I simply wasn’t well enough to fly. Anyway, I’d prepared a few notes and here’s what I was going to say.

In perhaps typical academic style one might begin by questioning the topic. I’m not so sure that we are ‘after’ neoliberalism. Yes, there’s been lots of talk about government regaining the ascendency over markets, with ‘nation-building’ projects having been announced and ’stimulus packages’ that seemingly fly in the face of ‘hands-off’ market approaches to governance, but various forms of free-market thinking that owe much to neoliberalism remain embedded in just about all our civic and private institutions.

Been reading the Australian?

If so, you might have been relieved to discover, last Saturday, that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing not receding, and that the scientist Ian Plimer has comprehensively demolished the ‘religion’ of climate change. You can find this rubbish debunked here.

The end of neoliberalism?

And while we’re talking about the inadequacies of the Rudd government, David McKnight has a piece on the significance of the Rudd piece in the Monthly here. There’s an interesting take on the essay from Greg Sheridan, here, as well. It’s perhaps not surprising that Sheridan should think that its ‘historical and intellectual claims are entirely fraudulent’, but there’s a bit of meat in his analysis as well. As Sheridan says,

Much of Rudd’s long essay is an unexceptional account of regulatory failures that contributed to the GFC. But its serious historical and intellectual claims are entirely fraudulent. It was only 18 months ago that Rudd and his senior colleagues were, rightly in my view, lambasting the Howard government as the highest taxing and highest spending government in Australian history. Labor even criticised the Howard government for keeping the top marginal tax rate at just under 50 per cent, one of the highest rates in the developed world.

You cannot credibly then turn round and claim the almost religiously non-ideological Howard government was the embodiment of market fundamentalism, low-tax, low-government extremism, or neo-liberal ideological narrowness.

Indeed. The intellectual weakness of Rudd’s piece is that he’s unable to distentangle his analysis of neoliberalism from his political debt to neoclassicism. Brnnng, brnnng, is that Treasury I hear calling? Or perhaps the Productivity Commission? But Sheridan, too, pulls back from deeper analysis:

Similarly, Rudd’s assertion that the financial crisis was caused only by the adherence of Western governments to neo-liberal economic policies simply contradicts the facts. Banking crises, as Mead shows, are a pretty regular feature of the system. Both sides of politics frequently get regulatory arrangements wrong. Republicans and Democrats both did in the US. The initial impetus for sub-prime lending was the eminently social democratic desire to make sure low-income applicants got housing loans.

Now this is pure Pollyanna. To say that all the drama was simply a routine banking crisis brought about by a bit of democratisation of the loans market isn’t to ‘contradict the facts’ so much as ignore them altogether.

And now . . .

181 and more dead, fires still raging, temperature records shattered, country that I’ve ridden and driven through hundreds of times over decades in trips to the family farm (the 07 fires came within 2km of the front gate) destroyed; when is the penny going to drop that there is something seriously amiss with the climate?

Dear Kevin (why did we elect you?)

Dear Kevin,

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Melbourne, along with most of southern Australia, has lately busted all records. Last week we had three consecutive days of well over forty degrees, the last and hottest of which saw the mercury hit 45 degrees – the hottest January day for 70 years. Most of us had never experienced anything like it. Streets were deserted. Parks were empty. Traditional places of respite like cinemas, shopping centres and public libraries filled up with people then emptied out again as air-conditioning systems failed. Railway lines buckled in the heat and hundreds of trains were cancelled. 6 people died apparently simply because of the heat. Many people came home from work and school to find family pets dead, their noses pressed into shady airless pockets of the backyard. In Yarra Bend National Park the ground was littered with the corpses of dead bats and dead possums.

Sharing the Rudd vision

Back on deck after a nice long break and straight onto the airwaves this morning with an interview on Radio Melbourne 774 with Alan Brough (he of ABC music quiz show Spicks and Specks). Hot topic was the coverage in the Australian this weekend reporting that Rudd was proclaiming 30 years of neoliberalism over and looking to define a new role for government, which as Alan pointed out are, of course, precisely the themes of The Land of Plenty. Nice to see the PM thinking along the same lines as me. The full article will be in the Monthly, out later this week, but there’s a preview here.

Bailing out the US car industry . . .

This spoof ad is from the US satirical site BuffaloBeast.com. The copy says:

You probably thought it was smart to buy a foreign import of superior quality, with better mileage and resale value. Maybe you even thought that years of market share loss might prod us into rethinking our process and redesigning our products with better quality in mind. But you forgot one thing: We spent a shitload of money on lobbyists. So now you’re out $25 billion, plus the cost of your Subaru. Maybe next time you’ll buy American like a real man. Either way, we’re cool.

Unspinning Clean Coal

Stumbled across this earlier today – a v amusing pisstake on Clean Coal technology from a group called ThisIsReality. Yes, there may one day be something approximating Clean Coal, but for the moment it’s nothing but mining industry spin designed to legitimate a continued reliance on fossil fuels. A nice story to tell the kids at bed-time. Just think, if all the money spent on researching it was put into renewables . . .