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.