Category Archives: Politics – national

Worth a Look

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Jeff Sparrow on ‘the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt’ and Unseen Academicals:

…“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], “that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni).”

Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t possess a university degree is an imbecile? That would be some 60 per cent of the working population, casually dismissed as moronic. Going to uni might not, in and of itself, make you a member of an elite. But class, ethnicity and geography still play a major role in determining access to higher education. It behoves progressives – particularly those in academia – to remember that there’s plenty of very, very bright people out there who never attended a university but who nonetheless might have something to say…

…Take the passage above. Andrew Bolt an imbecile? It might console those on the Left to think so but the notion’s entirely ludicrous.

In reality, Bolt’s a talented prose writer, adept in the tabloid genre. He’s a powerful speaker (as anyone who has seen him ruthlessly destroy academic critics in public debates would know) and an extraordinarily effective populariser of ideas. Andrew Bolt is conservative and many of his ideas are repellent. But it’s ridiculous to call him stupid on the basis of how many university degrees he does or doesn’t possess.

Now compare Simmonds’ description of Australian academics.

“Academics may also not want to enter public debate. And I can understand why. Firstly, they receive no rewards in terms of career advancement for writing for the public. And secondly, many may not want to engage with a knife-drawn public prone to Goldstein-style Two-Minute Twitter Hate Rituals. Academics are often timorous folk who specialise in showing the complexity of issues, not offering tweet-sized solutions. Social media doesn’t democratise debate. It limits it to the resilient. Snark triumphs over insight, and commentary is reserved for those with voluminous folds of scar-tissue. Sensitive thinkers rarely fit this bill.”

Academics don’t want to engage with public debate because it won’t advance their careers – and also because people might say mean things about them. They’re sensitive, don’t you know!

Does this not perfectly exemplify the problem with the liberal Left? Rather than fighting the Right, liberal academics want to be treated like philosopher kings: protected from snark and richly rewarded any time they deign to comment on public events.

Instead of dismissing polemicists like Bolt, the Left might do better to ask why we lack anyone of a similar calibre…

If I weren’t plagued with ruminations at the moment I might have a few things to add on this subject myself.

The Corporatist Manifesto II: the Pernicious Vice of Welfare Dependency

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(You can catch up with Part I here.)

One thing that’s become obvious as I’ve read through the CIS’s corporatist manifesto is that their TARGET30 campaign is very much a moral crusade with two goals. First, to reduce the burden (of taxation) on future generations. Second, to eradicate the pernicious vice of welfare dependency which deforms the character just as surely as habitual masturbation saps your manly vigour leading to unmanly weakness, blindness and insanity:

Before the state created a right to unemployment benefits, for example, people saved or insured through friendly societies and trade unions to ensure an income if they lost their job. Nowadays, few bother. Before Medicare, families insured themselves so they could buy treatment if they fell ill, and charitable foundations raised money to build and run hospitals. But now that the state provides health care, individuals are less inclined to insure themselves. When government takes over such functions, therefore, the market shrivels, philanthropy dwindles, and self-reliance is replaced by state dependency. (TARGET30—Towards Smaller Government and Future Prosperity by Simon Cowan (with contributions from Robert Carling and Peter Saunders (and Andrew Baker, Jennifer Buckingham, Stephen Kirchner, Peter Kurti, and Jeremy Sammut)))

…Tax-welfare churn leads to economic costs—for example, administration and compliance costs, a higher tax burden, and higher effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) and non-economic costs including increased welfare dependency, government paternalism and patronage…(TARGET30—Tax-Welfare Churn and the Australian Welfare State by Andrew Baker)

Generally, when someone makes a moral pronouncement like ‘People should be more self reliant.’ the phrase ‘like me’ is crammed in at the end between the last word of the sentence and the full stop. Rarely does such a sentence end with an implied ‘well, not me of course, I’m a special case with a special exemption’ – it’s much harder to cram into that tiny space. But that’s a subject best left for another post.

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Missing in action: Nick Cater and the failure of Australia’s conservative intellectuals

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LuckyCulture

Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes:

A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it is going. Only they have the skills of abstraction and gift of eloquence to capture shared emotions, to explain the past, frame the present and embrace its destiny.

Cater argues that Australia’s intellectuals have failed to deliver. On the one hand is a new Knowledge Class that disparages ordinary people’s moral emotions and sense of common purpose. And on the other is a cowardly rump of conservative thinkers who have failed to champion the nation’s culture and defend it against attack.

"If a charge of intellectual cowardice were to be brought against conservative thinkers, the National Museum would be Exhibit One", writes Cater. A initiative of the Howard government, the museum came under the control of the became "an assault on the very idea of nationhood."

In Cater’s account the conservatives’ defence of nationhood was half-hearted. They failed to challenge Knowledge Class doctrines like diversity, historical injustice and compassion – "ideas that subvert the democratic principles of an ordered society."

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The Dole Bludger Myth and Government Policy: ‘Support the System that Supports You’

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*Guest post by Paul “Gummo Trotsky” Bamford (I’ve invited Paul to join the Troppo stable/pony club, and am pleased to advise that he’s accepted. So expect more from Paul very soon).

2006-10-24-dole-bludgers-must-keep-diary-226The mythical – or legendary if you so prefer – figure of the dole bludger has haunted our political folklore since the Whitlam years of the 1970s. In, I think, 1973 the Whitlam government outraged the editors of the major Australian newspapers by doubling the dole and not long afterwards, the public opinion informed by those papers was equally outraged.

The Melbourne Herald did some especially sterling work to raise public awareness of the insidious problem of dole bludging. For a while it ran a regular feature of inside stories about dole-bludgers thwarted from a source within the CES.

One choice example featured a bloke who went to CES to claim the dole saying he was a lion tamer. As there was a circus in town, the CES worker rang them up and asked if they would be prepared to take him on. Suddenly the would-be dole-bludger discovered a revived interest in factory work. With the benefit of hindsight I’d say that the so-called CES insider was no further from the Herald’s newsroom than the sub-editors desk.

Thanks to a lot of newspaper op-edding and talk-back radio shock-jocking the idea that much of Australia’s unemployment – definitely too much, and probably most of it – was voluntary became conventional wisdom in the community at large. Everyone knew of someone who was living the easy life at the taxpayer’s expense. If you were unemployed it wasn’t because of a lack of jobs – for many it was a lifestyle choice.

For many, unemployment remained a lifestyle choice even after Reserve Bank and Federal governments accepted an official unemployment rate of 5% of the Australian workforce rate as ‘full employment’. At least so says the myth.

In reality policy makers have accepted the 5% rate as the natural unemployment rate and stopped worrying about how much of it was frictional – people temporarily out of work while they were changing jobs – and how much was structural that is, caused by economic conditions and the government’s economic management.

When you’re stuck with an official unemployment rate of 5% and op-edders and shock-jocks are telling the public that it’s mostly dole-bludging, why bother to correct them? In pragmatic political terms, they’re on your side. Ratings hungry TV current affairs producers might even prove a source of electorally attractive policy proposals such as ‘Work for the Dole’.

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