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.

Paint it black

It’s been a big week or so for race in Australian politics. Last week Immigration minister Kevin Andrews announced cutbacks in African immigration claiming that ’some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life’, and yesterday John Howard announced his historic turnaround to embrace Aboriginal reconciliation. In between there was the funeral of Liep Gony, a young Sudanese-born man murdered by two whites shortly before Andrews made his announcement. This amidst the trial of two young men charged with the killing earlier this year of Morgan Harris Morgan, a young Sudanese refugee.

All the way through the media have fanned the flames. Misleadingly presented footage and hysterical reports of ‘Sudanese gangs’ brought the race issue to the fore and almost certainly prompted Andrews’ announcement, not so much playing pre-orchestrated wedge politics as playing to the media gallery in the present lead-up to the election campaign. But missing from almost all the media coverage of attacks on young Sudanese-born men is that the attackers were all white. Nor was there mention of the ethnicity of the four whites who bashed Ajang Gor, a young Sudanese-born man, in Melton, then sent his friends and relatives racist taunts using a phone stolen in the attack. Whiteness, still, is ethnically invisible in Australian race politics.

Yet race was highlighted in reports of an attack on a policeman after Liep Gony’s wake.

Andrews, for his part, pointedly refused to apologise to the Sudanese community for his ill-timed remarks after calls to do so from Liep Gony’s family at his funeral. It was a despicable act. All week he had painted the African community as criminal, and subsequently used his refusal to apologise to underline his rhetoric, by darkly mentioning secret reports he couldn’t talk about that proved his case. Smear by innuendo.

No-one doubts the difficulties faced by some in the Sudanese community, given the situation they’ve come from. But cutting back a humanitarian program won’t solve that problem. Nor will playing race politics.

But what to make of Howard’s announcement? Its proper context isn’t the background of ministrations to Aboriginal Affairs Minster Mal Brough from Marcia Langton, Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Noel Pearson that Misha Schubert and Annabel Stafford spoke of in today’s Age, which then found the prime minister’s ear. The proper context is the decision by the government a month ago to vote against a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

And if there might seem to be little wider electoral advantage in Howard’s late embrace of reconciliation then, as my partner pointed out, that’s to miss its potential political impact in the seat where it counts: Bennelong, increasingly dominated by a new, younger educated professional constituency. Langton was no doubt right to say that too many are ’stuck in their anger’ at the legacy of Howard’s treatment of Aborigines, and that ‘clear thinking and foresight’ will deliver results. But it’s hard to believe that this is the moment.

Someone in the Liberal party must have realised that people are sick of non-stop attack politics. That crunching sound you hear is Howard desperately trying to change gear.

A ‘rethink’ too far?

Interesting article by Paul Kelly in the latest ALR, most surprisingly for what it gets wrong, not least its rather narrow interpretation of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. In an opening riff that fits up Horne as a prototypical member of today’s ‘elites’, Kelly caricatures Horne as an ‘intellectual alienated by the long success of Menzies’ and therefore a despiser of an opposing ‘political class’ who have been Australia’s true and great leaders.

Horne was anti-protectionism and anti-white Australia policy, not anti-political class as such. The book is a coded jeremiad against both.

Horne’s argument was that Australia was ‘living on its luck’ because, thanks to its second-rate leaders, it had remained insular on both fronts and got away with it, but wouldn’t be able to for much longer.

Nowhere in The Lucky Country is Menzies ‘squarely blamed’ for ‘our mediocre artistic life, Anglophobia, white Australia policy, racism, cultural cringe, provincialism and ineptitude in Asia’. While he rightly criticises the inertia of the Menzies era in its final decline, Horne would have been aware of Menzies’ speechifying against racism, directly praises the easing of fears about Asian immigration that took place ‘over the period of the Menzies administration’, and champions his immigration program and his appointment of an Australian as governor-general. The book’s arguments rest on a much broader cultural critique than Kelly admits.

History proved Horne’s central arguments right. But these are ideas, too, I would have imagined, that Kelly might normally have sympathy with. Not to mention politicians since. Far from despising the political classes, as Kelly imagines, Horne embraced leaders like Whitlam (who did the last rites on White Australia), and Hawke and Keating (who did the last rites on protectionism and engaged with Asia). Nor was Horne so anti-ordinary-people as Kelly claims. On the contrary, at the time of writing The Lucky Country he was a conservative populist (who once aspired to become a Tory MP), who embraced suburbia at a time when the prevailing intellectual current was to despise it.

But Kelly’s opening riff is a false set up, in any case, to add gravitas to what amounts to not much more than a fairly standard newslimited attack on elites, personified by David Marr, Raimond Gaita and Julian Burnside. There’s some good points along the way. I can only agree, for example, that some of our prominent leftish public intellectuals are long on moral outrage but short on analysis, and that they tend not to understand the difference between high principle and governance. And most can’t countenance the possibility that economic reform has had its successes. But none of these points justifies the piece’s descent into little more than a Howard apologia. You don’t have to be a ‘Howard-hater’ (not a term Kelly uses, I should add) to believe that Howard hasn’t been a good PM on any measure. Nor has he led a good government.

Perhaps Kelly’s greatest mistake is that he uses the elites versus politicians riff not as a metaphor, but as a premise for argument, as if either group is singularly responsible for change-making. Howard, after all, has had his own court of conservative intellectuals and their antecedents.

Kevin Rudd, apparently, will be the ‘new man’ who brings these warring tendencies together. I’ve often admired Kelly’s work, including, despite its faults, End of Certainty. But there’s a hint of messiah following in his finale. Stand by for the book.