Purely personal reflections on the state of politics.

The existential crisis of Labour-type political parties

At one point in my student days anyone who wasn’t reading Marx on a particular day, was reading Satre, Camus and Merleau-Ponty, among others, at least in the groups that I mixed in. But then they were also reading Dostoyevsky. Whichever way – they learned a lot about class conflict and existentialism. Labour-type political parties might reflect on the concept of an existential crisis because the declining electoral fortunes around the World are of their own making and reflect a lack of identity and certainly little ‘essence’. These parties have lost their meaning and purpose of existence and everyone knows it. The reasons are relatively straightforward. They have bought into the free-market myths and demeaned the role of the State. They now only argue about how much fairer their version of fiscal austerity will be relative to the conservatives, never challenging the underlying lies that drives the austerity agenda in the first place. Here are some lunchtime thoughts on the matter.

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Crikey, why is it is honourable to deliberately increase unemployment?

Knighthoods are handed out as part of the anachronistic Commonwealth honours system. They are an ultimate symbol of cultural snobbery in the UK and cultural cringe in the former British colonies, such as Australia. The Australian government effectively abandoned the system in 1983 because it insulted our sense of independence even though the Monarch of England remains our head of state (why?). It was formally abandoned by agreement with the British government in October 1992. But the creepy conservative government that took over again in September 2013 decided to reinstate the system of imperial honours, specifically to resume the award of Knight and Dame in March 2014. This demonstrated how out of touch the conservatives were. The criticism reached fever pitch a few weeks ago – on Australia Day (January 26, 2015) when it was announced that Prince Phillip (the Queen of England’s husband) would receive a Knighthood, the nation’s highest honour, from the Australian government. Why? Because our Prime Minister is unbelievably stupid but that is another debate beyond of the topic of today’s blog. This UK Guardian article – How giving Prince Philip a knighthood left Australia’s PM fighting for survival – will fill you in on that decision if you are interested. Now a so-called media watchdog, the Australian media site Crikey thinks the Federal Treasurer should be awarded a Knighthood if he can further undermine economic growth and deliberately cause unemployment and underemployment to rise further, not that they said it like that.

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Inequality and growth and well-being – revolutions have occurred for less

Canberra is Australia’s capital city – a created city located in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) to house the federal government and its bureaucracy. Official – data – shows that in 2013, the ACT has the highest household incomes of any state/territory, the highest household net average net worth and is heavily dependent on its wage and salary income. It is now a focus of federal government employment cuts which are forcing thousands of workers onto the unemployment queue, with little prospect of alternative employment at this stage given the general state of the economy. Over the weekend, I saw a news segment which documented the increased access of Canberrans for emergency food relief over the last 12 months. More than 10 per cent of the population in one of the highest income per capita cities in the world are below the poverty line. How can that be?

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G20 meetings and structure part of the problem

There are parallel universes operating when it comes to neo-liberal politicians attempting to deal with reality. The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors concluded their weekend talkfest in Cairns yesterday and you might be excused for thinking there is a jobs glut across their economies. As an aside, fortunately, this pathetic lot of individuals were meeting about as far north as one can go on the Australian continent, which meant they were kept out of the civilised parts of the nation where the rest of us live. Given Australia is currently hosting the G20 this year, the event gave our buffoon of a Federal Treasurer the chance to bathe in the limelight and deliver the major press conference.

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When the left became lost – Part 1

I read a book a long time ago (1994) called “The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of Civic Order”. I note it was republished in 2009. The book by David Selbourne – who is a British philosopher and these days writes regularly for the British Magazine New Statesman. His latest article (July 24, 2014) – How the left was lost: the need to relearn what true progress means – reprises the argument made in his book. He has been making the argument for a long time, which, in itself is not a bad thing if it a reflection of a good idea being ignored. At the time I read the book the Dark Age of neo-liberalism that we are within was forming but its internal contradictions had not yet manifested fully. But the left had certainly lost direction by then, getting caught up in a Post Modernist haze with career politicians and their union buddies abandoning progressive principles and, instead, adopting neo-liberal economic stances to prove that they were ‘responsible’. The aim – to get power. That was the end game. Selbourne’s book and current article captures a lot of that but, I think, also misses some vital parts of the story.

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A trail of misinformation and manipulation

Last week, the national broadcaster ABC’s Media Watch program – Up in Smoke – took aim at the Murdoch press (in particular, the Australian newspaper) for misleading reporting. The News Limited rag (it is barely that) has been running a campaign via headline claiming that Australia’s world leading laws on plain packaging of tobacco products have failed. Of-course, News Limited is just the conduit. Lying behind the headlines are rather secretive right-wing think tanks who pump out propaganda every day which aims to undermine government intervention and activity in favour of the industrial and other interests that just happen to fund the propaganda. These organisations hold themselves out as being non-partisan and independent – only offering an evidence-based viewpoint. The only problem is they clearly do jobs for bobs and manipulate ‘evidence’ to the point of absurdity.

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Serial liars who stand for nothing that is worth supporting

Tonight is the Federal Budget night. Tomorrow’s blog analysis could be as long as “its appalling”. We already know that. So I might take a day off and leave it at that. Some of the policy changes announced already are certainly appalling. Regular readers will know I have been keeping tabs on the way the Federal unemployment benefit in Australia has failed to keep pace with the poverty line and the Government has refused to do anything about it. At present, the single unemployment benefit stands at $35.50 a day which is well the single unemployed poverty line of $A64.10 per day. For married couples the unemployment benefit is currently at $56.47 per day, while the corresponding poverty line is set at $79.99 per day. While the Government has been under intense pressure from a number of different sources (including the typical welfare lobby groups, the OECD (not typical) and even right-wing columnists (definitely not typical) to address this disgrace. It has resisted any rise in the benefit and continually claims it is about jobs not welfare and is in the process of creating work. Not much action seems to happen on that front. Tonight’s budget will announce their latest offering in this regard. They are going to allow the unemployed to earn an extra $A19 per week before their benefits is cut. It claims it cannot afford any more because it has run out of money and needs to get back to surplus as soon as possible. The reality is that it can never run out of money, it needs to triple the current budget deficit to address the growing output gap, and is once again failing the most disadvantaged Australians that it professes it care about. The Government is also comprised of serial liars who will be decimated in the upcoming Federal election because their political support base has shrunk so much because they stand for nothing that is worth supporting.

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Map of British local unemployment and the August 2011 riots

We have been working on a map to relate the local area unemployment in Britain with the incidence of riots in August 2011. I discussed why the incidence of unemployment might be a key driving factor for the riots in this blog – I blame the British government for the riots. The map we have now produced provides a stark representation of the geographic coincidence of labour market failure and the rioting.

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China is to blame – freedom and current accounts

“The freer the market the freer the people”. This is one of the questions that you are asked to assess in the the questionnaire designed by the Political Compass to determine where you stand on the economic continuum (left/right) and the social values (authoritarian/libertarian) continuum. I was reminded of this proposition when I read the latest Bloomberg opinion piece (December 7, 2010) – China Needs a U.S. Lesson – written by Alberto Alesina (Harvard) and Luigi Zingales (Chicago). They claim that the lack of freedom in China is to blame for the world crisis. They ignore the failure of the capitalist bosses and the bankers to behave honestly and competently. They ignore the wilful neglect of “free” governments who became captive of the self-regulation is good mantra proposed by the “free market” supporters. No, China is to blame because it is communist. The evidence would suggest otherwise. That is what this blog is about.

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