Club Troppo

This is something I was thinking of doing for a while, but since Possum has started a “What if?” over at his joint, this is as good a time as any to launch Australian Alternate History Week and hope it is taken up across a few more blogs.

In short, I want participants to create a brief alternate history scenario in Australian history. There need not be a single hinge event that creates a point of divergence, it can be as many different changes you want to support an on going speculation. It’s an exercise to think about what dynamics have made Australia he way it is and how they could have been different – so the fun is in trying to explore how historical dynamics shaped Australia rather than just asking “what if?” by itself.

For example;

What if the Blue Mountains had been crossed far earlier in the history of the NSW colony, allowing the expansion of the wool industry at an earlier date. This would provide an export to financially support NSW and pay for necessary food imports at an earlier time, as well as the emergence of a wool baron class whilst convict society was still paramount – that is to say whilst there was a form of forced labour with little mitigation.

Forced labour is inefficient, but the rents from wool make the colony viable without being efficient. There is no need for Governors such as Macquarie to embrace emancipist, meritocratic policy (or even decent treatment of those that remained convicts) out of necessity to make the colony survive. The institutions of our NSW never develop. Instead, the wool baron class begin to leverage their wealth in the same way the West Indian planters did, building influence in the Westminster parliament. They request, and receive a succession of pliant governors that help establish them as an aristocracy built on land ownership and convict labour, and their men in Westminster provide ongoing support for transportation. (Continued)

Well it kept me in suspense until the last few pages.  The speech is well worth reading and is here (pdf).

The world’s most inscrutable man?

I’m probably completely wrong about this, so please help me improve on the analysis.

1. Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter do not want another election. They mean to enjoy the leverage the election outcome has given them.

2. They have consistently invoked ‘stability’ as their main objective in deciding which side to support.

3. Stability means one side commanding at least 77 votes in the House of Representatives. A government with only 76 votes would be just a single by-election away from losing its majority, a state of affairs that most people would regard as too precarious.

4. Given that Labor now has the formal support of the the Greens member Adam Bandt, both sides currently have 73 votes.

5. Therefore, a stable arrangement requires that all four independents choose the same side. (Continued)

Here’s my article from last week’s Fin which it placed below the headline “ALP sold itself short instead of selling its strengths”. I’ve also done an interview with Michael Duffy on Counterpoint which was recorded last Thursday, but went to air last night.

How did it come to this? That’s what the last two Governments asked themselves as they fought for their lives in the last two elections. Howard had presided over a decade’s surging prosperity; the ALP Government had protected that prosperity with a fiscal stimulus that Economics Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz described as world’s best practice: as good as it got – anywhere.

Part of the answer is to be found in this paradox: In seeking political advantage – in playing politics ahead of truth-telling and governing well – they ended up with a travesty of the very political objectives they were so desperate to achieve.

Take John Howard’s Workchoices. It was obvious that workplace deregulation would hurt Australia’s lower paid workers though Howard was right that it would help generate jobs for those even further down the pecking order. A frank acknowledgement of that could have saved Howard by creating the space around which he could have built a political and economic strategy to deal with the downside.

When Workchoices was cooked up, every time the Government of the Lucky Country looked, there was another few billion dollars in the kitty from surging company taxes on Australia’s miners. Usually playing political catch up, the Government shovelled it out the door as fast as it could – much of it to those battlers who were in the firing line of Workchoices.

So Howard could have focused those giveaways around the political economy of Workchoices and sold it as a wage/tax trade-off of precisely the kind that the Hawke Keating Government made a staple of their thirteen year reign. Instead he went out to sell the spin doctors’ message – that Workchoices would unchain our heart. Oh wait . . . that was the GST. Anyway you get my meaning.

The ALP Government managed to spin doctor its way to plenty of similar own goals including several right at the heart of its political viability. Some of us with some experience of government were stupefied to hear of the Government’s ‘root and branch’ review of taxation to report in an election year. I wondered what Rudd was thinking then. I wonder if even he knows now. But the announcement sure sounded visionary in the euphoria of the 2020 Summit.

Another trick from the political playbook is to divide your opponents. John Howard became so preoccupied with it that he tied himself into all sorts of contortions – like firing an environment minister for meeting quite properly with lobbyist, Brian Burke. Why? Because it seemed like a good idea in the 24 hours that Howard was going after Rudd for meeting with Bourke. Such frivolous invoking of the grave principle of ministerial responsibility only managed to highlight how much it was being traduced elsewhere. And it created an atmosphere of chaos. As in the dying days of the Whitlam Government, people wondered “What next?”.

Likewise the ALP Government focused as much on dividing its opponents over its emissions trading scheme as it did on the increasingly labyrinthine content of its own scheme. And then, famously walked away only to discover that its popularity had been built on the Australian people’s hopes for something better. We see political principle and political pragmatism as somehow in competition, but for a skilful politician – I’m thinking of Bob Hawke above others – they inextricably complement one another. As it learned in hindsight, in its passing pursuit of political opportunity it subjected itself to mortal political danger. (Continued)

I have often worried about whether promoting ‘efficiency” – in the economic sense – ensures maximum well being where it makes some people better off but others worse off – even if the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is fully met e.g. by ensuring those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it.

I discussed at length the issues involved in “The Distribution Effects of Labour Deregulation” (see article in AGENDA, Volume 14, No 2, 2007). I reached an inconclusive answer: it depends on what mix of social values appeals most (distributive justice and equality of opportunity versus choice and self-reliance).

Now Uwe Reinhardt and Steven Landsburg debate this issue in a piece highlighted in Greg Mankiw’s blog, August 27, 2010. It is most interesting discussion which I strongly recommend.

We’ve just had an election in Australia which was basically very clean, at least as far as one can tell. It was negative. It was empty but there was nothing illegitimate about what either party did or said about the other. Over the pond it isn’t so.  The Republicans are revolutionaries. That is they don’t accept the legitimacy of their opponents. But they’re the worst kind of revolutionaries, which is to say that they are not appealing to any elites who might be able to take over and run the place. They’re appealing to psychoses of various kinds. Mobs used to be left wing, or at least that was the mythology of the French and Russian Revolutions. Not any more.  Over to you Paul.

It’s Witch-Hunt SeasonThe last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had” …, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly. …

What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance:… And powerful forces are promoting … this rage…, the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but … only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. …Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now … he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. … [And] Mr. Limbaugh is … tame compared with Glenn Beck. (Continued)

One of the more extraordinary things in life is the amount you can be charged by your mobile carrier on ‘international roaming’. It’s completely extraordinary with amazing stories of people downloading serious amounts of data – eg for a movie and getting back to find bills for $60,000. I travelled to the UK and Paris a couple of years ago and used my phone sparingly. Probably spent about ten or fifteen minutes a day on it – making various calls back home and or organising things.  About 8-9 days useage cost $400.

Anyway, you’d think that this would be easy enough to bypass. You’d think you could buy SIM cards here for overseas. When the VirginMobile Australian site tells you that

Another option worth considering..

Is using a local Pre-Paid SIM card that they have purchased overseas, you’d think they might offer to sell you one – after all, that’s just more money to be made. But alas no.

So Oh Troppodillians, I’m heading to Washington DC next week and my son Alexander is going to Paris the next week (this is pretty normal for us – we’re very cool people – very very cool).

Now you can say ‘just head to your country of choice and buy a SIM card there.  Well yes, you can, but it’s surprisingly difficult.  In the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, there’s a special committee which arose in the wake of the House Unamerican Activities Committee called the House SIM Card (Protection against easy access) Committee.  Since it is implausible that no newsagent in any American airport would have heard of it, I presume this committee has prohibited SIM cards being sold in airports (after all it would just fuel terrorism, and making the terrorists go down to the local AT&T store has pretty much fixed (domestic) terrorism and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

In fact when I was last in Washington, I did go to a local AT&T shop and bought a SIM card, but it was a poxy SIM card with I think US$25 or perhaps US$50 on it which charged about 30-40 cents a minute including incoming calls, which was a bit – well Unamerican.

So, oh Tropposphere, I’m all ears for your suggestions.

It’s time libertarians ditched their alliance with conservatives and Republicans, writes Brink Lindsey. In a piece for Reason magazine, Lindsey argues that libertarians should stake their claim at the centre of American politics and imagines a new swing constituency animated by libertarian ideas — a constituency courted by politicians on both the left and right.

Lindsey is appalled by the conservative movement’s anti-intellectualism, its intolerance, sense of victimhood and delusional ideas. But worst of all is the movement’s disregard for freedom:

… the right today is a fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian movement. It endorses the systematic use of torture. It defends unchecked presidential power over matters of national security. It excuses massive violations of Americans’ civil liberties committed in the name of fighting terrorism. It supports bloated military budgets, preventive war, and open-ended, nation-building occupations. It calls for repressive immigration policies. Far from being anti-statist, it glorifies and romanticizes the agencies of government coercion: the police and the military. It opposes abortion rights. It opposes marriage equality. It panders to creationism. It routinely questions the patriotism of its opponents. It traffics in outlandish conspiracy theories. If you’re serious about individual freedom and limited government, you cannot stand with this movement.

The right’s illiberalism is not a new development. "Modern conservatism has always had an illiberal dark side", writes Lindsey. "Recall the first great populist spasms of the postwar right — McCarthyism and opposition to desegregation — and recall as well that National Review founder William F. Buckley stoutly defended both."

What’s different today, says Lindsey, is that the populist ranters and conspiracy theorists are running the movement. Conservatives used to rely on intellectual champions like Milton Friedman and George Will to represent conservative ideas in the media. But today there’s no need to win over liberal gatekeepers in the mass media. Now conservatives have Fox News, talk back radio and the internet. The result is that intellectuals no longer set the agenda:

What counts today isn’t engaging the other side with reasoned arguments; it’s building a rabid fan base by demonizing the other side and stoking the audience’s collective sense of outrage and victimization. And that’s a job best performed not by serious thinkers but by hacks and hucksters. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Joseph Farah, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin: they adorn the cathedral of conservatism like so many gargoyles.

Yes, there are still many bright and inquisitive minds on the right, but they are not the movement’s stars and they don’t call the shots. On the contrary, if they stray too far in challenging the conservative id, they find themselves cast out and castigated as heretics and RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Bruce Bartlett and David Frum (who are friends of mine) are only two of the more prominent victims of that intolerant groupthink; both were sacked by conservative think tanks shortly after loudly expressing heterodox opinions.

And last week Lindsey joined the diaspora. He is leaving his job as vice president for research at the Cato Institute to take up a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Fellow ‘liberaltarian’ Will Wilkinson is also leaving Cato.

Lindsey and Wilkinson aren’t talking about their reasons for leaving Cato, but that hasn’t stopped speculation. At Slate David Weigel wonders whether it’s a purge. And there are similar questions from the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait and Salon’s Alex Pareene.

(Continued)

It’s easier to declare a film a work of genius than to figure out its secret. But I think in the case of Boy, it’s balance. This film tempts you at the start to expect a feel-good movie, but ends up steering clear of sentimentality. There’s menace and heartbreak, but it doesn’t go over the top into numbing social realism. It’s about the clash between fantasy and reality that kids experience, some more brutally than others, but which most of us somehow survive. It highlights what is probably a near-universal experience on the road to maturity — a boy’s disillusionment with his father and the process of re-establishing the relationship on a new footing. Boy’s ride past that particular milestone is hliarious, but it’s credibile enough to be thoroughly jolting as well.

The story is about two brothers who live with their grandmother and miscellaneous young cousins on a ramshackle farm in the Bay of Plenty. Their mother is dead and their father is mostly in jail. Boy is the oldest, and already self-reliant enough to look after the other kids when the grandmother leaves them on their own for a few days. Shortly after she departs their father, like the Cat in the Hat — charming, even elegant in his best moments, and completely irresponsible. He’s destined from the outset to wreak havoc in his sons’ lives, although you sense that he’s fundamentally harmless. (Continued)