Governing For The Boardroom – From The Barroom.

Cheers, Tony! As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

THE ROLLING of Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, offers some interesting lessons in the conduct of right-wing politics. The multi-millionaire businessman and lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who instigated the “spill”, is generally identified as the candidate of Australia’s boardrooms – someone to finally make good on his predecessor’s promise that “Australia is open for business!” Abbott, on the other hand, might best be described as the candidate of the Australian barroom. A politician with whom the “little Aussie Battler”, and his mates, were more than happy to have a beer with.

 

Turnbull caught many Kiwis off-guard by holding up their own prime minister, John Key, as the very model of a modern conservative leader. Was Turnbull’s fulsome accolade inspired by the fact that Key (also a multi-millionaire) seemed to be as comfortable in the barrooms of New Zealand as he was in its boardrooms – maybe even more so? Acutely aware that in the Party Room he had just left, Boardroom and Barroom were at daggers drawn, and that he faced a Herculean task in drawing the patrician and plebeian Liberals back together, Turnbull can be forgiven for envying Key’s ability to keep a foot in both camps.

 

The prime minister John Key defeated, Helen Clark, had tried to do the same, but with only limited success. No matter how many times she speeded to an All Black test-match, or waved at the Warriors’ Rugby League fans, very few (if any) New Zealanders were fooled. Everyone knew that Clark was more comfortable at the Opera than the footy. And the blokes who drank beer never really saw themselves sipping Chardonnay with “Helen”.

 

On the face of it, this shouldn’t have mattered. Clark was, after all, a Labour Party leader. The loyalty of the blokes in the barroom was, supposedly, a political given. And, for a little while, it held. Clark’s gender, which, normally, would have counted against her in many barrooms, was neutralised by the fact that the Nats had also chosen a woman to lead them – and a pretty scary one at that! It did not take long, however, for the Barroom’s welcome to wear out.

 

No matter how hard she tried to signal her endorsement of the plebs’ pleasures, the conviction grew that it was all a little disingenuous. To the blokes in the barroom, Clark came across as someone who inhabited a different world. Not the boardroom, exactly, although she was doing everything she could to be accepted there, but another sort of room. They might have struggled to recall its proper name, but they knew exactly what sort of room Clark would feel most comfortable sitting in – a university common-room.

 

Key observed the steady alienation of Clark’s barroom allies and drew the appropriate lesson. Whatever else he did as New Zealand’s prime minister, he must never allow the blokes in the barroom to form even the faintest outline of a notion that he thought he was better than they were, or that he considered their views to be bigoted and ill-informed. If the Barroom listened to Newstalk-ZB, or Radio Sport, or The Edge – then he would talk to them from there. The listeners to Radio New Zealand’s “Morning Report” would just have to suck it up. The ones who voted National would forgive his nonappearances. The others didn’t matter.

 

John Key: Just one of the guys.

 

The Boardroom might have sniffed at this sort of pandering to the hoi-polloi, but Key knew better than to worry too much about the prejudices of the “1 Percent”. They may control an obscene percentage of the nation’s wealth, but their share of the nation’s votes would always and only be – 1 percent. Not that as a One-Percenter, himself, Key was in any way unsympathetic to the Boardroom’s needs – far from it. What he’d learned from Clark, however, is that, in a democracy, it pays to make haste slowly – always allowing time for the doubters to be persuaded.

 

As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

If Malcolm Turnbull’s wise, he’ll cultivate John Key’s taste for beer.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 September 2015.

Where Loyalty No Longer Counts.

He's Behind You! Malcolm Turnbull rolls Tony Abbott with ruthless efficiency. Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

YOU CAN’T HELP ADMIRING the Aussies. There’s a raw energy about them that grabs, and holds, your attention. A brutal kind of honesty, too, which is equally compelling.

 

It was all there on display, on Monday night, as Malcolm Turnbull’s faction of the Liberal Party cut down Tony Abbott and his lieutenants with chilling efficiency. Watching Sky News Australia’s seven-hour, live-commentary marathon, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

The way Abbott’s loyal ministers were rotated through the Sky News studio, each one just a little more desperate than the last, seemingly unable to believe that they were in the middle of the very thing they had railed against when the hapless Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were hacking away at each other on prime time – a leadership spill involving a sitting Prime Minister.

 

“Good God! As a country we’re better than this!” Was Abbott’s anguished observation as the realisation that Turnbull was about to remove him from power finally beat its way past his emotional defences and made contact with the rational centre of his brain.

 

Paul Murray, a big, burly, bearded bloke, who makes his living telling Sky’s right-wing viewers “what’s really going on” spent the night acting as Abbott’s emotional proxy.

 

Right-wing Commentator, Paul Murray. Abbott's emotional proxy.

 

Alternately flailing his arms about in a balletic combination of anger and despair, and roaring defiance at a studio full of journalists and commentators who were clearly relishing the slow demise of the “Mad Monk” (as Abbott’s less charitable fellow citizens were wont to call him) Murray more and more came to resemble a baited bear. It seemed inevitable that the smooth young fellow seated well within range of Murray’s agitated paws would offer one acerbic taunt too many and end up smearing claret all over the studio floor.

 

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor joker. Especially when he blurted out the obviously painful question about whether it was any longer possible for conservative politicians like Tony Abbott to survive in the tolerant culture of twenty-first century Australia. You could read the anguish plainly on his bluff features as he internally answered his own question.

 

Because, of course, the answer is “No, Paul, it’s no longer possible.”

 

Not that his sort of Aussie is easy to convince. Not even when the Irish – yes, the Irish! – vote in favour of Marriage Equality. That’s right, Rome’s most dutiful daughter, snapping her fingers at the Clergy like she just didn’t care anymore about who did what, where, and to whom – just so long as love got a look in there somewhere.

 

Why couldn’t the Liberal Party Right see it? Why didn’t Abbott just declare a free vote on the Marriage Equality issue and save his rapidly diminishing supply of bullets for something that really mattered – like getting the deficit down and keeping all those tailored suits in the high towers of Sydney and Melbourne smiling their special, self-satisfied, squatocratic smiles.

 

Sacking the bloody useless Joe Hockey was the easiest way to do that, but Tony just wouldn’t. Loyal to a fault, poor fella. As Murray put it: “He was loyal in a game where loyalty no longer counts.” Honestly, I thought the guy was going to cry.

 

The other journos in the studio just shrugged. They knew it was all over for Abbott when reports from a weekend corporate shindig started filtering back to the Canberra press gallery. Turnbull had been present and, apparently, he had the more than 400 business leaders present eating out of his hand.

 

Secure in the knowledge that the mood of the boardroom was solidly behind a change at the top, the silver-haired millionaire locked and loaded his supporters for a leadership spill on Monday afternoon.

 

Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and Hockey are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

Not that anybody’s ever going to say that about Malcolm Turnbull. Like that other Malcolm, the late Malcolm Fraser, he fits right in – a leader in the Menzies tradition.

 

Not a pair of Speedos in sight.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 September 2015.

What's Good For Them: Tony Abbott And The Australian Electorate

Tuning Out: Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his Chief-of-Staff, Peta Credlin, epitomise that faction of the political class which believes that popular consent is no longer essential to effective governance. The Australian electorate is fast disabusing them of this elitist political fantasy.

 

TONY ABBOTT, Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister, is just the latest (and nearest) casualty of a steadily widening rift within the international political class. Essentially, this class is split between those who believe that effective and efficient governance is possible without popular consent. (Which, they assert, can now be convincingly simulated without political risk). And those who continue to believe that a certain, irreducible, measure of popular consent remains indispensable to the maintenance of a government’s political legitimacy.

 

Abbott is a particularly vivid exemplar of the non-democratic mode of governance. The speed with which he jettisoned his electoral promises to the Australian electorate confirms his entirely instrumental view of the electoral process. In Abbott’s eyes, a party manifesto should never be construed as some form of contract with the electorate. This is because electoral promises are not promises in the conventional sense. They are, rather, to be understood as straightforward voter motivators: an important means to the ultimate end of amassing more votes than one’s opponents and winning power.

 

Abbott’s extraordinary practice of making “Captain’s calls” – decisions made without reference to either his cabinet colleagues or his own backbench – epitomises his view of governance as a series of top-down directives – to be implemented without question or delay. In pursuing this strategy, Abbott is strongly assisted by his controversial chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, who has repeatedly demonstrated her contempt for cabinet ministers and back-benchers alike. Working together, Abbott and Credlin have perfected an Australian variant of government-by-decree – a practice more usually associated with hard-pressed presidential regimes (most infamously with the ill-starred Weimar Republic).

 

That Abbott sees himself as some sort of presidential figure was made clear in his outraged reaction to the suggestion that his colleagues might be preparing to over-turn “the people’s choice” for prime-minister. In advancing this position (with considerable support from the right-wing news media) Abbott was, in effect, turning the whole Westminster System of parliamentary government on its head.

 

Between elections, he was saying, the Prime Minister must be invulnerable to challenge. A notion which directly contradicts the long-established convention that the Prime Minister holds office at the pleasure of Parliament, and that democratic accountability is traceable through the people’s representatives exclusively. It is Members of Parliament who determine, by majority vote, the composition of the government – and no one else.

 

The problem with this convention, at least as far as the non-democratic faction of the political class is concerned, is that it places far too much power in the hands of politicians who are, themselves, vulnerable to the electoral power of the voters. Inflict too much pain on the electorate and it just might decide to turf the government responsible out of office.

 

That this is much more than a theorem of political science was demonstrated to the Australian political class by the voters of Queensland, who, only last month, rounded savagely on their proudly non-democratic premier and his unmandated assault on the people of the sunshine state by emphatically reinstalling a thoroughly chastened Labor Party to office.

 

It was this demonstration of the voters’ power (which, itself, followed hard on the heels of a similar upset in the state of Victoria) that prompted a significant minority of Abbott’s back-benchers to call for a leadership ballot. That Abbott held them off was in large measure due to the formal loyalty of his Cabinet. But even inside the Cabinet Room, a restive and growing group of Liberal Party ministers are rapidly coming to terms with the practical political dangers of persisting with the fiction that Abbott is some sort of elected Kaiser and Peta Credlin his Iron Chancellor.

 

The neoliberal zealots who populate the think-tanks, employer lobbies and commentariat of the Australian Right may have convinced themselves that elections are mere charades to be managed by public-relations mavens, pollsters and spin-doctors; and that, as soon as these irritating democratic rituals have been safely concluded, the real business of “responsible” governance can resume – regardless of promises made and any naive voter expectations that those promises will be kept. Wiser heads within the political class know better.

 

Major economic and social changes, imposed without a clear electoral mandate, can only be preserved through an ever-increasing reliance on political distraction, demagoguery, and outright deceit. Inevitably, this sort of political chicanery, accompanied, as it so often is, by the imposition of unannounced and unfairly distributed pain, will be answered by the sort of emphatic electoral rejection so recently demonstrated in Victoria and Queensland.

 

As the moderate faction of the political class absorbs these fundamental democratic realities, and their unease is communicated to the Liberal Party’s wavering politicians, Abbott’s position will become increasingly untenable. Sooner or later (and most probably it will be sooner) he will be made to pay the price for ignoring the pragmatic examples set by his more durable predecessors.

 

The best Aussie barbeques are those where the guests get to eat the steaks and salads they’ve prepared themselves – not the ones where the host alone decides what’s good for them.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Saturday, 28 February 2015.

Firing Tony Abbott: Whose Job Is It To Make Or Break Australia’s Prime Minister?

"Awh, Come On, Cobbers - Give Us A Fair Old Suck Of The Sav!"  Tony Abbott’s assertion that he is the government and the government is him, and that the House of Representatives has no right to depose him, is not only absurdly narcissistic but dangerously unconstitutional and undemocratic.

TONY ABBOTT’S QUERULOUS CLAIM that the Australian people, alone, have the right to “fire” him, misrepresents his country’s entire political system. Even worse, it suggests that the Australian Prime Minister has begun to conflate his own narrow personal interests with the broader interests of the nation as a whole. That Australia’s political leader is so heedless of his proper constitutional function is the most vivid proof of that country’s intensifying political difficulties.

 

Abbott’s argument – backed, irresponsibly, by the Murdoch press – is that he has been “hired” by the Australian people on a three-year contract, and that he should, therefore, be protected from any and all leadership challenges until that contract expires at the next election.

 

In other words, Abbott is not really a prime minister at all, but a president. Or, perhaps, given his recent knighting of Prince Philip, a king? He is clearly of the view that effective executive authority in Australia resides not in the Cabinet, whose ministers are drawn from the two elected houses of the Australian parliament, but in his own person. As is actually the case with the USA’s Barack Obama and France’s Francois Hollande, Tony Abbott wrongly believes that the buck of ultimate political responsibility stops with him.

 

Quite where his view of things leaves Australia’s official Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, and her vice-regal proxy, the Governor-General, is anybody’s guess. The same place, one imagines, as Australia’s long history of representative democracy.

 

Central to that history, and, indeed, to the historical evolution of representative democracy throughout the Commonwealth, is the steady expansion of the constitutional authority of the elected parliamentary chamber: the House of Commons in England and Canada, the House of Representatives in Australia and New Zealand.

 

Nominally, the monarch exercises sovereignty over the realms of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Historically, however, the power of the monarchy has been steadily reduced to the point where the sovereign now reigns but does not rule. It is in the body of elected representatives that sovereignty, for all practical purposes, has come to reside.

 

In both Australia and New Zealand the day-to-day decisions of government are made by the Sovereign’s council of ministers, the Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister. But even this powerful organ of executive power is, ultimately, responsible to the elected representatives of the people. The Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers must be elected Members of Parliament, and remain in office only for so long as they enjoy the support of a majority of the House of Representatives.

 

The political dynamism of the Westminster system, as it has evolved over the past four hundred years, is located in the relationship between the relatively small fraction of the House that sits in Cabinet, and the much larger fraction that does not. This latter group is itself made up of those MPs who mostly vote in support of the Cabinet and those who range themselves in consistent opposition to its policies.

 

The survival of any “Ministry” – as the cabinet selected by the politician commanding a parliamentary majority (i.e. the Prime Minister) is rightly called – is thus dependent on that politician’s ability to retain the loyalty of the MPs who originally gave him or her the job. An effective prime minister, respected by his colleagues and warmly supported by the voting public will have little difficulty remaining in office. A prime minister who loses his colleagues’ respect and who finds him or herself despised by a majority of the electorate will (quite rightly) struggle to keep it.

 

Tony Abbott’s assertion that he is the government and the government is him, and that the House of Representatives has no right to depose him, is, therefore, not only absurdly narcissistic but dangerously unconstitutional and undemocratic.

 

It completely ignores the central reality of the Westminster system: that the Ministry must at all times enjoy the confidence of the House. If, by forfeiting the trust and support of his colleagues in the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott has called the solidity and reliability of his parliamentary majority into question, then his colleagues are perfectly entitled to depose him and install a leader with sufficient support to once again render all questions of confidence moot.

 

Or, as an Aussie Liberal MP might put it behind the closed doors of the Party Room:

 

“Tony, mate, if it was just a question of the punters hiring or firing you, we’d have no problem at all. But, as you well know, that’s not the case. If they want to fire you, sunshine, then, as things now stand, they’ll have to fire the Liberal-National Government as well. That’s us, mate! And, I’m sorry, but if you really expect us to go down with the good ship Tony Abbott, then you’re a bloody mug. With a new Prime Minister and a new Cabinet there’s every chance we can hold onto power well into the future. But, if we accept your version of the constitution, Tony, then this party has no future. So, sorry mate, but we think you ought to call it quits. For the good of the party, Tony. Piss off.”

 

The people don’t elect prime-ministers, parliamentarians do. But, that’s okay, because the  parliamentarians are chosen by the people. In the final analysis, it’s not about them, it’s about us.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 4 February 2015.

What's In A Name? Let The Anzacs Rest In Peace, Mr Key.

Imperial Folly: If the Anzac legend is about anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they called home.

 

IF ANYTHING can still be considered “sacred” in New Zealand it’s Anzac Day. For Pakeha New Zealanders, in particular, the commemoration of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 holds a visceral significance which Waitangi Day has never achieved. That the day has survived the passing of all those who were actually there bears testimony to its status as one of the most potent symbols of our national identity.

 

In her nine years as Prime Minister, Helen Clark devoted considerable energy (and a not insignificant amount of taxpayer cash) to enhancing the power and reach of Anzac Day. Ms Clark’s purpose was to underscore the military tragedy’s role in nudging New Zealanders forward from their reflexive identification with the British Empire towards the first, tentative, notion that they might, one day, become something more than mere “loyal subjects” of the King-Emperor.

 

You might, therefore, think that Ms Clark’s successor, contemplating the hundredth  anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, would be anxious to ensure that nothing happened to besmirch or cheapen the solemn character of this major historical commemoration. But, in this matter, as in so many other matters of late, our current prime minister, John Key, is full of surprises.

 

At his post-Cabinet media conference on Monday, Mr Key announced that: “it’s not impossible that they [the training components of Australian and New Zealand military contingents poised to join the international effort against Islamic State] could be badged as an Anzac unit.”

 

Mr Key and his Australian counterpart, Tony Abbott, have clearly been mulling over the possibility of resurrecting the Anzac “badge” ever since the two politicians teamed-up in the West Australian port of Albany to jointly preside over commemorations of the original Anzacs’ embarkation for Egypt on 1 November 1914.

 

It is difficult to know where to begin the list of reasons why the Prime Ministers’ suggestion should be dismissed out of hand.

 

Perhaps we should start by reviewing why the original Gallipoli Campaign proved to be such a disaster.

 

In April 1915 New Zealand was ordered into a hastily improvised invasion of the Ottoman Empire with no clear understanding of what we were being asked to do – or even if we could do it. If the Anzac legend is about anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they called home.

 

We honour the 2,779 young Kiwis who fell in that fight not simply for their tremendous courage, but also for the terrible lesson which their utterly needless deaths have, hopefully, inscribed upon our national memory. That it is terribly wrong for our leaders to send young New Zealand men and women to right wrongs that we, as New Zealanders, did not commit and which we cannot hope to end.

 

Mr Key has stated that he has no intention of “doing something that’s disrespectful”. But allowing us to be drawn into a joint role with the Australians under some sort of sentimental throwback to the Anzacs is, as Labour’s Andrew Little noted: “pretty cynical”.

 

Especially since it would be a joint mission without clear objectives; lacking any reliable metric for success; and which will likely end with New Zealand’s soldiers being hastily withdrawn amidst recrimination and disgust.

 

Dry Run? US Marines and New Zealand soldiers conduct joint military exercises, "Dawn Blitz", at Camp Pendleton, California, in 2013.

 

Iraq is a failed state riven with corruption and religious enmity. Its standing army is a standing joke. Nine tenths of the men we’d be “training” have no wish to either kill or die for a regime they neither respect nor trust. The remaining tenth will gladly put themselves and their weapons at the disposal of Islamic State. Nowhere in Iraq is “behind the wire”. The whole country is a combat zone.

 

If the “strategic studies” departments of our universities were worthy of the name they would be condemning the madness of sending foreign troops to Iraq in order to crush a movement brought into being by the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. With Australian planes strafing IS positions and its special forces readying themselves for combat, nothing could endanger New Zealand’s “home front” more than publicly joining our name with that of the United States’ gung-ho “Deputy Sheriff”.

 

Imperial folly has claimed enough New Zealand lives. No more.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 December 2014.

Abandoning Science - And The Planet

Weeping For The Planet: The famous "Crying Indian" advertisement, produced by Keeping America Beautiful, struck a deep chord with Americans when it first screened on "Earth Day" - 22 April  1971. It was a time when both the Left and the Right respected ecological science and were ready to take action to protect the environment. How times have changed. In 2014, right-wing politicians are unwilling to tolerate "any measures which are socialism masquerading as environmentalism".

 

MANY NEW ZEALANDERS are puzzled by the sudden descent of right-wing political parties into anti-environmentalism. Forty years ago, in the first flush of global ecological awareness, political parties of every ideological stripe were ready to put aside their differences for the sake of the environment. There was a strong bi-partisan agreement that, regardless of whether they were Left or Right, every human-being had a personal vested interest in improving the health of the planet.

 

It was a Republican President, Richard Nixon, who signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which, for the first time, required federal agencies to file environmental impact statements for federally funded programmes.

 

Nixon who oversaw, in 1970, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Clean Air Extension Act, imposing strict controls on airborne pollutants known to be hazardous to human health.

 

Nixon who, in 1972 offered whales, dolphins, sea otters, polar bears and seals the protection of the US Government by signing the Marine Mammals Protection Act.

 

Nixon who, likewise, presided over the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act 1974.

 

Though a deeply conservative (and deeply flawed) politician, Nixon was a shrewd enough politician to grasp the electoral heft of the burgeoning environmental movement.

 

By the 1980s, however, political parties of the Right around the world were rapidly distancing themselves from the “environmentally friendly” legislative reforms of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan was no Richard Nixon.

 

The Right’s growing antipathy to environmentalism was fuelled by the world-wide ideological resurgence of laissez-faire capitalism. The so-called “New Right” was hostile to just about every kind of regulatory regime, but it was environmental regulation that earned its special ire. This was because the much admired dynamism of “the free market” was hugely dependent on the capitalists’ ability to “externalise” (i.e. not have to account for or pay for) the environmental and social consequences of their behaviour.

 

If capitalists were required to fully account for and pay for their detrimental impact upon the natural and human environments, then their profitability would be seriously (and in many cases irreversibly) reduced.

 

In the 1970s, political leaders like Nixon still felt obliged to respond to the voters’ pleas to save the planet. By the 1980s, however, the priorities of the Right had changed. The mission of conservative parties everywhere was now to convince voters that capitalism’s ultimate contradiction: the extraction of infinite profits from a finite planet; wasn’t really a contradiction at all, and that industrial capitalism’s most fearsome externality, anthropogenic global warming, was nothing more than “green propaganda”.

 

This was not an easy sell. Historically speaking, the rise of capitalism and the rise of science had coincided, spurring one another on to new discoveries, new applications. Persuading people to reject the science of global warming could only be achieved at the cost of abandoning the rationalist project itself.

 

But it was rationalism and science which had, ever since the eighteenth century, imbued capitalism with its progressive economic, social and political force. To reduce scientific knowledge to the status of exculpatory evidence bought and paid for; and scientists to little more than the servants of big business; would strip capitalism of its intellectual potency. It would mean abandoning what Professor Niall Fergusson calls its “killer apps” – the critical advantages that had enabled capitalism to see off all its ideological rivals.

 

These potentially fatal dangers notwithstanding, by the second decade of the twenty-first century it was possible for right-wing political leaders to win public office in spite of (or even because of) their refusal to accept the findings of environmental science.

 

Across the Tasman, for example, the Cabinet of the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has proclaimed, with a straight face, that it is not prepared to tolerate “any measures which are socialism masquerading as environmentalism”.

 



Who Speaks For The Trees? Ancient Huon Pine, Mt Read, Tasmania. These trees are among the oldest on the planet (3,000-10,000 years old).

 

Included among these allegedly “socialist” measures, is the World Heritage Status of both the Tasmanian wilderness and the Great Barrier Reef. In any stand-off between ecological science and Australia’s extractive industrialists it’s not difficult to predict who will win the Abbott Government’s support.

 

We shouldn’t feel too smug and superior, however, when it comes to our Australian cousins. Not when the difference between their right-wing politicians and ours is, as always, more a matter of subtlety than substance.

 

Environmental destruction masquerading as economic growth.

 

This essay was originally published by The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 August 2014.

Let Them Eat Cheese

 Cheese On Toast: Not for New Zealanders the reckless, ideologically-driven fiscal mayhem that Joe Hockey saw fit to visit upon their Australian cousins. Here in the Shaky Isles, Finance Minister Bill English delivered up a steady-as-she-goes financial statement so wholesome and tasty that even Labour’s own supporters could not resist giving it a big tick when the pollsters came calling.

 

FINDING A CONTRAST more dramatic than the respective receptions of the Australian and New Zealand budgets would not be easy. With hardly a sector of Australian society spared the heat of Joe Hockey’s fiscal blowtorch, a bushfire of dissent has erupted across a broad political front. Not surprisingly, Australian public opinion has turned decisively against the Liberal-National Coalition. So much so that, according to the New Zealand National Party’s pollster, and well-known blogger, David Farrar:

 

“I don’t think the question anymore is whether Tony Abbott has lost the next election, and the Coalition will be a one term Government. I think the question is now how many terms in opposition will they have?”

 

What has angered Australians the most are the crude ideological justifications offered up by Tony Abbott’s government. Treasurer Joe Hockey’s swingeing fiscal cuts were, he insisted, a necessary response to a genuine fiscal crisis. Rescuing Australia from the long-term economic imbalances inherited from the previous Labor Government would require sacrifices from every sector of Australian society.

 

Hockey’s economic justifications have been greeted with scorn by just about every Australian economist not infected with the Australian Centre for Independent Studies’ (CIS) uniquely virulent strain of neoliberalism. These resistant economists have pointed out that Australia’s economy is more securely foundationed than most comparable countries, and that bringing the deficit under control in no way necessitates the social carnage Hockey’s budget threatens to create.

 

So why did Abbott, Hockey and their colleagues sign up to such a self-defeating document? To answer that question it is necessary to examine the Australian neo-liberal virus more closely. Cultured for nearly forty years in its New South Wales laboratory, and marketed under the “Classical Liberal” brand, Australian neoliberalism not only features all the usual justifications for restoring to the ruling elites as many of the powers stripped from them by successive waves of progressive reform as possible, but it also insists that this can be done without incurring a democratic backlash.

 

Much like the ACT Party here in New Zealand (which maintains close personal and philosophical associations with the CIS) the far-Right faction of the Australian Liberal Party purports to believe that if its policies are explained calmly and rationally to ordinary voters, then eventually the scales will fall from their eyes and they will understand that policies which hitherto had appeared to be directed against their interests are, in fact, aimed at propelling them into prosperity.

 

Joe Hockey: Expecting ordinary people to vote for their own impoverishment.

 

In spite of all historical evidence to the contrary, these neoliberals simply refuse to give up their belief that ordinary people, rationally propositioned, can be made to vote for their own impoverishment. It is an ideological affliction which both Labour and the conservative parties on both sides of the Tasman have struggled to confine to the margins of electoral politics since the early 1980s – not always successfully.

 

The Australian Labor Party negotiated the international neoliberal surge of the 1980s and 90s with particular skill (and thus avoided the decade-long civil war that so debilitated the New Zealand labour movement). The Australian Liberals under the (mostly) pragmatic John Howard were similarly successful. (Setting aside the brief reign of the arch-neoliberal ideologue, John Hewson.)

 

The equally pragmatic National leader, Jim Bolger, was unable to drive his own arch-neoliberal, Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, out of his cabinet until the fall-out from her “Mother of All Budgets” had driven National to the very edge of destruction and contributed substantially to the demise of New Zealand’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system. The resurrection of arch-neoliberal extremism under Dr Don Brash came very close to unleashing fiscal savagery of the sort Abbott and Hockey are currently perpetrating. With a little bit of luck, however (not to mention the Labour voters of South Auckland) National and New Zealand managed to dodge Dr Brash’s bullets.

 

Which brings us to John Key, Bill English and New Zealand’s 2014 “Cheese-on-Toast Budget”. Not for New Zealanders the reckless, ideologically-driven fiscal mayhem that Joe Hockey saw fit to visit upon their Australian cousins. Here in the Shaky Isles, Finance Minister Bill English delivered up a steady-as-she-goes financial statement so wholesome and tasty that even Labour’s own supporters could not resist giving it a big tick when the pollsters came calling. With increases to paid parental leave, and free doctor’s visits for children under 13 years, how could they not?

 

Which is not to say that English’s budget is entirely ideology-free – it isn’t. It’s just that the history of the past thirty years in New Zealand (if not in Australia) has taught the more thoughtful and moderate elements of the Right that it is better to give a little than to take a lot. The protection of elite power, conservatism’s fundamental mission, is best achieved by surrounding the privileged with crowds of contented citizens munching cheese-on-toast – not with angry mobs waving pitchforks.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, May 27, 2014.

Rupert Murdoch's Revealling Tweet

Mission Accomplished: The Australian electorate may have believed they were getting rid of a dysfunctional Labor government, but media mogul Rupert Murdoch knows better. What the Australian election was really about was purging the welfare rolls and getting rid of thousands of public servants.

 

WITHIN MINUTES of Tony Abbott’s crushing election victory being confirmed, the Australian-born media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, tweeted. “Aust election public sick of public sector workers and phony welfare scroungers sucking life out of economy.”

 

Is that really what the Australian election was all about? Did it really have nothing to do with the Australian people’s impatience with a Labor Government seemingly more interested in publicly disembowelling itself than governing wisely? Had Australian voters really forgiven Julia Gillard for reneging on her promise not to introduce a carbon tax? Did Australia’s perennial xenophobia really play no part in the outcome? Was Tony Abbott’s succinct injunction to “stop the boats” really without effect?

 

Former Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, early on confided to his Sky News audience that: “I really believe this was an election that was lost by the government rather than one that was won by Tony Abbott.” As the grim tally of lost seats mounted, Labor politicians, both successful and unsuccessful, told reporters a very similar story. On the hustings, the message from constituents had been remarkably consistent: if voting for the Liberals was the only way to bring Labor to its senses, then, however reluctantly, that is what they were prepared to do.

 

What, then, are we to make of Mr Murdoch’s tweet? Why did the billionaire owner of nearly two-thirds of the Australian news media characterise Australian public servants and beneficiaries as metaphorical vampires sucking the life out of the Australian economy?

 

The idea that someone as wealthy and powerful as Rupert Murdoch might be driven by the same petty prejudices as the whinging cobber propping up the bar at the nearest RSL is unnerving. Much more reassuring is the notion that someone with Mr Murdoch’s resources is morally obliged to take a more detached and informed position on the challenges facing Australia.

 

Perhaps he knew something we didn’t.

 

Which is, of course, highly likely. The Murdoch Press, long the implacable foe of both Kevin Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s Labor governments, undoubtedly expended considerable sums on opinion polling and focus groups. Under the right moderator, these latter can deliver information inaccessible to all but the old-fashioned party canvasser: the sort of unvarnished, uninhibited and spontaneously delivered expression of opinion that all-too-often eludes the professional opinion pollster.

 

Deep-seated antipathy to the poor and public servants almost certainly emerged from the research undertaken on Mr Murdoch’s behalf. And there is a good chance that these powerfully negative attitudes were present at both the top and the bottom of Australian society.

 

The working poor, and beneficiaries struggling to escape their situation, have no reason to love either the people they perceive to be “bludging” off their meagre incomes, or the public servants who exercise so much power over their own and their families’ daily lives. For these Australians the emotional connection between personal experience and political response is direct and visceral. Associating it with the name of a political party is a highly effective political tactic.

 

In the case of the wealthy, the hostility towards “public sector workers and phony welfare scroungers” arises out of a more complex series of calculations.

 

The “phoney welfare scroungers” are proxies for the much larger number of economically stressed Australians who might, with the right political inspiration, be persuaded to back an aggressive redistribution of wealth across Australian society. Forestalling such a move requires the wealthiest Australians to convince a majority of their fellow citizens that the poor and disadvantaged are responsible for their own misfortunes. They are lazy and live only for the moment and cannot, therefore, lay legitimate claim to the resources of their more diligent and self-disciplined neighbours.

 

That these “scroungers” are, nevertheless, allowed to gobble up so much of the Australian federal budget, the wealthy argue, is attributable to a “culture of entitlement” fostered by a parasitic class of intellectuals and activists located, overwhelmingly, in the public sector. What’s more, this “new class” of middle-class professionals and managers has become a law unto itself, funded by and lording it over the “productive sector” of Australian society. (A category which embraces not only the captains of Australian industry, but also the “battlers” of the hard-pressed Australian working-class.)

 

Following in the footsteps of the hard-line Republican Governors of American states like Wisconsin and Michigan, and David Cameron’s coalition government in the UK, Mr Murdoch’s tweet signals his expectation that Mr Abbott’s newly-elected government will safeguard the interests of people like himself by attacking the entitlement culture from both ends

 

First, by dramatically down-sizing the public sector. Second, by forcing beneficiaries off the welfare rolls.

 

The massive fiscal savings resulting from such a policy mean that the redistribution of wealth that would otherwise be required can be avoided.

 

In that triumphant tweet, Mr Murdoch let slip his real reasons for backing Mr Abbott.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 September 2013.