Club Troppo

At the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why he is not a libertarian:

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.

Wilkinson now identifies as a liberal. He writes: "I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives."

In the US, no major political party or movement stands for this kind of liberalism. The same is true in Australia. According to Greg Barns: "The Liberal Party, in the Howard and Abbott incarnation, is a socially conservative force which also believes that the state should play a paternalist role in steering the economic direction of the nation." Oddly, the most enthusiastic supporter of "the the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives" seems to be the Australian Treasury.

Gillard government – Not a time for political point-scoring but the sinking is all that mongrel Abbott’s fault for refusing to vote for our Malaysia Solution amendments.

Coalition -  Scott Morrison says “the tragedy confirmed the Coalition’s worst fears” but restrains himself from expressly blaming Labor until tomorrow, when he’ll assert for the umpteenth that it would never have happened but for Labor’s abandonment of Saint John Howard’s  Nauru and temporary protection visa policy.  Morrison will embrace the safe bet that a supine media will fail to point out that consistent strong DIAC advice is that the Nauru Solution simply won’t work nor notice that the tiny island nation has had three different prime ministers in the last three weeks, the first of whom resigned after corruption allegations which are unsurprising to anyone who remembers that Nauru survived for some years after the guano ran out by turning itself into a tax haven and laundering billions plundered by the Russian Mafia.

Convulsive conspiracy theorist Tony Kevin  instantly and despite a complete lack of evidence claims conspiracy and “cover-up” by ASIO and Kopassus to sink the boat deliberately to frighten and deter asylum seekers (viz re-run of his SIEV X conspiracy theories for which there was also no evidence).  David Marr can be expected to launch into a prissily sanctimonious version of the same refrain in the next couple of days.

Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition and Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens claim it’s both major parties’ fault for “demonising” people smugglers and failing to realise that the best policy would be to make it easier for them to use safe vessels.  If only those heartless government bastards didn’t confiscate the smugglers’ boats and burn them, they’d be able to charter really big and seaworthy vessels (like old cruise liners for instance) and make even bigger profits transporting the yearning masses to Australia in thousands at a time.

Peter van Onselen makes the most sense on Twitter:

“Bottom line is the arguments of the simplistic left & right on this issue don’t provide answers & moralizing about deaths at sea won’t help.”

I still argue that some version of the Malaysia Solution with adequate assured human rights safeguards + an expanded Australian humanitarian migration target of 20,000 per year (now official Labor policy) would be the least bad ex tempore solution, but the chances of Malaysia agreeing to adequate safeguards (because it fears making itself a magnet for asylum seekers in the guise of waiting room for Oz migration) or Abbott voting to enable such an approach (despite urgings from even the Murdoch press) are remote.  Merry Christmas?

I don’t imagine we’ll be running Best Blog Posts this year.  Certainly I won’t have time to be involved.

Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere.

However, if I WAS selecting a single best blog post for 2011, I wouldn’t have even a moment’s hesitation.  It would be Australian Exceptionalism by Scott “Possum Comitatus” Steel published this afternoon on Crikey. I had to stop myself from running into the street and shouting  “YES!!! EXACTLY!!! WHY COULDN’T I CRYSTALLISE IT ALL SO POWERFULLY? WHY CAN’T JULIA OR (GOD FORBID) KEV?”  It’s worth reproducing a substantial extract over the fold but do yourself a favour and read the whole thing. Moreover, although it’s a paean to Australia’s general excellence, all governments since Hawke/Keating and the Australian people generally are entitled to the credit:

(Continued)

New article by me at CDU Law and Business Online (I’ve written on this topic before at Troppo but this one is aimed at law students and is therefore a bit more academic though hopefully still accessible and interesting for a general audience – feedback in that regard is invited).

I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award. Although it’s evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Rafe involved threatening to sue him for defamation for falsely accusing me of conspiring to secretly alter a blog post about global warming.

In any event that seems to be ancient history now.  Rafe even graciously apologised, while I’ve restored his commenting access here at Troppo (a magnanimous impulse I may live to regret next time we host a global warming thread).

While I was over there, I noticed that some of the Catallaxians seem to have a bee in their collective bonnet about the constitutional validity of the Gillard government’s appointment of former Treasury head Ken Henry as a special adviser to the Prime Minister under Constitution s 67.  See this post by Sinclair Davidson and this one and this one by Samuel J.

I’m not at all sure why they’re worried about it.  Presumably Henry is seen as a class traitor for taking a job with Juliar.

In any event the discussion provoked my interest because I’d never looked closely at s 67 before. Samuel J’s argument appears to be that s 67 should be regarded as a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the first Public Service Act was enacted in 1902.  He appears to rest that argument mostly on the introductory words “Until the Parliament otherwise provides, …” .  However those words also appear in s 96 (Financial assistance to States) and no-one argues that the Commonwealth no longer enjoys the power to make grants to the States under it.  It’s certainly true that section 41 (Right of electors of States) was held to be a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the Commonwealth Parliament met and enacted the first comprehensive electoral legislation to provide for the franchise for federal elections.  But that’s essentially because it was clear that that was the Founding Fathers intention.

By contrast, it is abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers did NOT intend s 67 to be a mere transitional provision.  See the relevant part of the 1897 Convention Debates starting at page 916. As the ANU publication Public Sector Employment in the Twenty-First Century relevantly observes:

(Continued)

New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online.

"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad. "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in these major areas of policy are being shaped in meaningful ways by astroturfing."

In the UK the Guardian’s George Monbiot writes about a whistleblower who worked as "part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients." And in the US, a blogger at the Daily Kos wrote that US defence contractor planned to create an army of sock puppets using persona management software that makes it easy for a single user to manage multiple fake online identities.

Recently there have been rumours circulating in Australia about political astroturfing on blogs, Twitter and other social media. At Larvatus Prodeo, commenter Mr Demore suggests there are examples of astroturfing in comments at the ABC’s Drum website; "particularly in relation to mentions of climate change."

Is it just another internet conspiracy theory or is there something to it?

(Continued)

I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal:

A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won in all 88 counties in Ohio. In 81 of the counties, it won by a margin of at least 20 percentage points. Statewide, it won by 32 points (66 to 34 percent).

Ohio is a northern swing State not a so-called “Red State” so you’d have to regard this vote as a significant measure of the apparent unpopularity of Obamacare.  I can’t help asking why?  I’m not au fait with the details of Obamacare, but in general terms I thought it was not all that dissimilar (at least in philosophy) to Australia’s Medicare system i.e. universal health care cover.  Why then the almost diametrically opposed outcomes in terms of public support?  Australia’s Medicare system was so popular after introduction that the Coalition was forced to reverse its initial opposition to it and has promised ever since to retain it.

Are Americans so radically different from Australians?  Or is Obamacare a radically different or badly flawed initiative?  I simply don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, so I’m rather hoping some more erudite Troppo readers can advise.

BTW Despite rumblings and an application before the US Supreme Court, it doesn’t look very likely that Obamacare will be held unconstitutional.

One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday’s parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell’s sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor:

Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor “the greatest sell-out since Judas Iscariot” yesterday after the Government’s carbon tax bills were passed by the Senate.

Mr Windsor has told ABC Radio’s AM that he is not worried by the jibe.

“I don’t give a grain of salt [to] anything he’s said,” he said.

“He’s been a lap dog for the Liberals for many years. He just plays short-term politics. I take absolutely no notice of anything Ron Boswell says, and wish him well in retirement.”

It isn’t immediately obvious to me who Boswell reckons Windsor is betraying or why we should see it as having biblical proportions, but leaving that aside … I can immediately summon up several manifestly bigger betrayals:

1. Sonny Bill selling out the Canterbury Bulldogs helped by that self-important wanker Anthony Mundine;
2. Mark Thompson selling out the Cats for the Bombers.  Mind you he was a Bomber originally, but spending the entire season hypocritically trying to convince Gary Ablett that he’d be a traitorous dog if he took Gold Coast’s money and decamped northwards makes it a Big League Betrayal;
3. Ross Lyon stabbing St Kilda, his own management and Mark Harvey simultaneously by suddenly shifting to Freo;
4. Des Hasler’s selling out Manly, moving to the Bulldogs from 2013 but trying to stay on at the Sea Eagles for long enough to rape and pillage their playing list.  I’ve always been a bit mystified about how a sanctimonious tosser like Thomas Keneally, almost certainly Australia’s second most overrated author of all time and pipped at the post only by Patrick White, could have engaged with a good bloke like Hasler for long enough to write his biography.  I was beginning to think I might have misjudged old Tom, but it looks like I misjudged Des instead.  I don’t object to his doing the best for himself financially, especially if there was strife on the Sea Eagles Board, but there are ethical and unethical ways of going about it, as Chad Bennett says:

If Hasler had been significantly affected by the fractured board at Manly to the point he could no longer continue at the club, then so be it. Walk away.

But don’t try and keep your fingers in two pies at once, Des.

It’s unmanageable, underhanded and most importantly, unprofessional.

Just in case you didn’t notice it, there’s been a crevice that’s opened up on Tony Abbott’s long road to the Lodge.   A crevice that in just a few days has opened up to bloody great yawning credibility gap.

It was just last week, in the wake of  the Qantas fiasco, and the critisims from old stagers that he was being weak kneed on IR that Mr Abbott’s blokey swagger and chin jutting suddenly started to look phoney.    A more convincing performer would have leavened the posturing with a bit of pensive self-reflection, But for Mr. Abbott it’s pop out the chin, grit teeth to get those jaw muscled looking pumped, and adopt the pose of determined leadership.

Problem is that Mr. Abbott’s posing pouch is no longer ample enough to cover up the hideous truth.  The country’s rooted if he gets his hands on it.

Sober and respected business commentators are calling Mr. Abbott guilty of a gross failure of economic credibility,  and big-nob political journos who write for the Murdoch press are saying he’s gone feral, with outlandish ill-considered opinions on the Mining Tax, the European bail-out and a knee-jerk response on Qantas.

George Megalogenis says that ”the fundamental weakness of Tony Abbot is that he’ll say anything to get his face on TV” [12:12].

Whether you’re in the Laurie Oakes camp and you reckon Abbott’s  lashing out at everything like a shark in a feeding frenzy, or whether like me (and probably George) you think the whole thing’s a  B-Grade act, by a B-Grade actor who’s learned his trade from Chuck Norris films – one things for sure – people will start to twig to Mr. Abbots fatal flaw -and maybe – just maybe – Labor is in with a shot.

Interestingly Mr Megalogenis, thinks that the best strategy for Labour in these circumstances is to lose the next election.

If I were Labour I’d be prepared to take a loss in the next election knowing that their turn will come pretty quickly if they cede power to a political party that is not interested in the big ideas. [18.36]

The theory, I assume, being that if Mr. Abbott gets in then we’ll really get a taste of how much of a disaster a Prime Minister can be, and in our repentance we’ll push the reset button on Australian politics.

I think there might be something in that – Perhaps it calls for a Labor campaign under the slogan “We hope you get the government you deserve”.  But on second thoughts that sounds bitter and lacking the compassion that hopefully is still somewhere in the DNA – so perhaps a campaign based on the style of community awareness campaigns.  A simple direct message to the good people of Australia  ”We are handing over the controls to your new pilot. please fasten your seat-belt and assume the brace position – there may not be time for last drinks”.