Steven Smith and Good International Citizenship
Hansard, June 2008 (okay, so it's been made up).
Published on Newmatilda.com on the 10th June 2008
Michael Connors
Steven Smith: Mr Speaker, I am honoured tonight to announce two measures to increase our commitment to international aid, going forward into the future. Occasioned by a future of resource scarcity, and destructive tendencies of over consumption, it is now time to revive, resuscitate and rekindle and er…. er….sorry Mr Speaker I have lost my thesaurus, …ah yes, to renew the idea of good international citizenship among Australian cricket fans, sorry Mr Speaker, among Australian citizens.
Necessarily, some reduction in life choices, product acquisition and budget bonuses will follow, in turn, and will follow Mr Speaker.
The Speaker: The Honourable Member for Perth will return to his seat. The Leader of the Opposition has a point of order?
Brendon Nelson: Mr Speaker, every time Australians go to petrol bowsers, they must understand that petrol is five cents more expensive…
The Speaker: The Honourable Leader of the Opposition will return to his seat, that is not a pint of beer…I mean a Point of Order.
Steven Smith: Thank you Mr Speaker we are very strongly of that view; very strongly, I stress Mr Speaker, of that view that … yes, as I was saying, perhaps it is better for me to read this speech?
While luck of geographical birth has unduly and indiscriminately determined global access to the fundamentals of consumptive life, we recognise and commit to the luck of what might be called our aristocracy of birth, which has afforded us the pleasures of the consumptive life.
Now Mr Speaker, if I may digress, as a government, we are beholden to the taxariate not to foreign alms-seekers and beggars Mr Speaker. I would underline the point there is no sense of shame in our good fortune. I underlined that point, Mr Speaker. And I underline this point, Mr Speaker. It is right to maintain our borders, adjudicate entry, and police the prudent dispensation of taxes against a global torrent of refugee migration, barbaric wars, and structural adjustment riots.
That being said, Mr Speaker, the social contract that we uphold to Australian citizens is made real not merely in the civil peace, stability and peace, and order, and peacefulness that generates growth, but in our commitment to the global aid-tithe. While short of the ideal aid commitment of .7% of GDP, our current .3% of GDP bespeaks the spirit of Australia’s generosity. It reflects the Australian government’s, the Australian nation’s, and the Australian people’s position and view that we are a good mob, at heart. But Mr Speaker, our aristocracy of birth, would be greater still were we to return to the spirit of noblisee oblige. There is greatness in realising and progressing that we can do more. This government has given contemplation to these matters, contemplation Mr Speaker, consideration, thought. And we have concluded that the road to that progressing, Mr Speaker, lies in reprising our reputation as a good international citizen in the world of the needy.
The Speaker: The Member of Wentworth, a point of order?
Malcolm Turnbull: Mr Speaker, I do not understand what the Foreign Minister is saying, his torturous attempt at erudition reminds me no less than some suburban upstart mumbling Latin at Sydney Grammar in the hope they will pass muster over supper. Mr Speaker, the house must stand up for good speech, Mr Speaker, I implore you to maintain house standards.
The Speaker: The Member for Wentworth, will resume his seat. The Minister of Foreign Affairs will continue. Please be clear.
Steven Smith: Mr Speaker marking this commitment tonight, we are pleased to announce the following measures, aimed at redistributing wealth to the wretched of the earth, while maintaining dignity and wellbeing at home.
.
Our first measure, Mr Speaker is an AID-tax on cosmetics The cosmetic revolution has allowed the fountain of youth to enhance the lives of many millions of Australians, male and female, Australians, both those who came here, those who were made here, and those who never got here Mr Speaker, I mean the unborn, Mr Speaker, not the ones those on the opposition benches allowed to sink, Mr Speaker. All are beneficiaries of a prosperous Australia. The Australian government commits to the imposition of a 2% tax on all cosmetic purchases made above $100, allowing richer Australians, who are often too busy to act on their charitable impulse, an opportunity to fulfil their noblisee oblige. As well as cream medication Mr Speaker, this measure includes, Mr Speaker, Botox injections, liposuction for cosmetic purposes, eye and nose jobs, butt-reduction and enlargement, and Mr Speaker penile enlargement.
The Speaker: A point of order? The member for O’Connor has the floor.
Wilson Tuckey: Mr Speaker, I’m not sure about the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he might have a big head, but I don’t know about that other thing, Mr Speaker, but a tax on penile enlargement, Mr Speaker is just not a fair cop. Now that this Ruddy government has placed a tax on so-called luxury cars, where will all the small-dicked men go, Mr Speaker. It’s a feminist plot Mr Speaker. The Deputy Prime Minister may smile, but why is she wearing trousers? The great thing about Australia Mr Speaker is that we can all have big dicks or sports cars…Mr Speaker. Where does it stop, Mr speaker, castration?
The Speaker: Order, Order! The Member for O’Connor will leave the house immediately.
Steven Smith: Thanks You Mr Di..Mr Speaker. Secondly Mr Speaker, we will discontinue the scheme whereby daily accommodation allowances paid to honourable members of house are used to pay rent to a spouse who is purchasing the property so rented [Indistinct shouting can be heard from the opposition benches].
The Speaker: Order! Order! Order in the House, the Member for Wentworth, will return to his seat. I said the Member for Wentworth will return to his gilded seat!
Stephen Smith: Mr Speaker, All savings from this measure, audited, committed, and going forward Mr Speaker, will be used to enable an annual meeting in London of the League of Parliamentarians Concerned with the Construction of Affordable Housing in the Lesser Developed World.
The Speaker: The Minister of Foreign Affairs will resume his seat. Yes, the Leader of the Opposition?
Brendon Nelson. Mr Speaker, a matter that lies gravely on the hearts of Australians right now, in the context of the speech on international AID, is the question of petrol…
The Speaker: The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. You are out of turn.
Brendon Nelson. Mr Speaker, I would merely like to suggest that the Foreign Minister has ignored a fourth measure that would help the needy of the world. May I, Mr Speaker?
The Speaker: go on, but be warned to speak to the topic! The Leader of the Opposition
Brendan Nelson: Mr Speaker, the needs of the common people around the world are at the heart of tonight’s discussion. I see no better way for the government to make real its commitment and sincerity by speaking to the battlers, those who may well be privileged by birth, Mr Speaker, but who battle no less… I would like to announce that every time someone fills up at the petrol…
The Speaker: Order, Order! Return to your seat!! Return at once!
Brendan Nelson: Mr Speaker you can not stop me from caring for the people of the world, I say it one more time, every time some one fills up at the petrol station, they should know Mr Speaker it will be 5c cheaper under a Nelson government. This is the greatest issue, Mr Speaker that faces us today.
The Speaker: You are given one last warning, return to your seat. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, would you like to resume?
Stephan Smith. Mr Speaker, I believe less is more Mr Speaker, diminishing what you say over time and in brief is better than more, going on indefinitely, without end is better than saying less, I mean more, so I will leave it there Mr Speaker.
Showing posts with label Australian Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian Politics. Show all posts
October 7, 2007
Oh, the Dumb Things
Oh, the Dumb Things
Michael Connors
An edited version of this now appears on newmatilda.com October 16, 2007
In October’s edition of The Australian Literary Review (2, 9, pp. 3, 14-16) journalist Paul Kelly offers an intellectual road trip, riffing on the theme of “The Lucky Country”. Kelly devotes two thousand words too many to an exploration of “second rate” Australian public intellectuals’ incapacity to appreciate the Australian electorate’s genius in electing a first rate political leadership. This is such a hackneyed theme (elitism of the intellectual class, not the genius of the Australian electorate) that it would be surprising if Kelly had anything fresh to say. As it turns out, he doesn’t, unless the spectacle of a journalistic “national treasure” delivering a home-song eulogy to prime ministers Hawke, Keating and Howard counts as such.
In his version of the “The Lucky Country” Kelly argues that current Australian prosperity (that is the emerging American style wealth-divide) is the fruit of successive Labor and Liberal party political acumen, epitomised by their respective management of the US alliance and their differential, but consonant, agenda of working with Asia, particularly China.
I would say that apart from the brazen act of currency deregulation under Hawke in 1983 and that act's related consequences, Australian prosperity has been delivered in spite of government policy, in the same manner as a randomly thrown dart at an inventory of stock exchange listed companies is better at picking winners than the Mercedes-chasing stockbroker selling his expertise. Truly a nation of gamblers. The rest of the Australian Story has been about management, packaging, marketing and keeping the game on the road.
In Kelly's Eastern Suburbs – detour via Canberra road trip, the vantage point is not the slum, the junkie’s needle point exchange, or the sweat of an AWA, rather it is the six-lane highway of national achievement; a vantage point, he claims, that the precocious “second- raters” of the aristocratic left have ignored in their supposed rush to condemn the Australian electorate as inane and immoral.
Kelly’s derivative self-denying ironic title,“The Lucky Country" - following the title of Donald Horne's famous 1960s book - should have been a warning to the literary editor that this was going to be an article of imprecise hackdom. Kelly lives up to the dull title. In what counts as the intellectual equivalent of grievous bodily harm, he takes a handful of thinkers as representative of the total sum of anti-Howard intellectuals, and then narrows the field further by concentrating on an easily beratable, shrill and fanciful David Marr. Marr's over the top statements about Howard’s Australia in his Quarterly Essay "His Master's Voice: the Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard", are easy enough to dismiss. Kelly paints Marr as a kind of Jeremiahic Bertrand Russell in the antipodes, minus the math. All this leads Kelly to a lamely ironic twist: that Horne's supposed depiction of a country with second rate politicians and first class intellectuals has been reversed.
Kelly is right to point out that some ridiculous analogies have been doing the rounds among the intelligentsia (that there are homologies between pre-Nazi Germany and contemporary Australia), but he fails to then offer a single word about the Right’s own disingenuous mob of time-servers, Kelly’s News Limited colleague Janet Albrechtsen or the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt. Is there some unwitting aesthetic judgement on Kelly’s part that these people should not be taken seriously as intellectuals? They have been singing the praises of first rate political leadership for a decade. Is he jealous of their foresight?
What Kelly’s atrociously selective piece does is to suggest that public intellectuals (meaning "Howard-haters") are so far removed from the ordinary concerns of life that the necessarily pragmatic and compromised nature of politics that supposedly delivers national prosperity and relative domestic and regional cohesion are seen by them to be contemptible.
There is certain hubris in Kelly’s rant about second-rate public intellectuals: he should have declared his own interest as a fellow traveller. “The Lucky Country” marks a low point in his political journalism, an altogether too confident declaration of his undiluted national-interest account of the sublime art of Australian compromise.
While Kelly’s decades of access to the corridors of power may have led to the production of a certain banal commentary, he is not completely incapable of the lyrical insight of his namesake troubadour. Just as clichés capture certain truisms, Kelly’s journalistic writing, as do all journalistic writings, reflect some wilful zeitgeist - the first draft of history. In this instance that zeitgeist now has it that Australia has enjoyed national prosperity and relatively moral and sincere leadership. Kelly’s imaginative leap is to turn Donald Horne’s devious title into a homily. Australia is lucky because Howard is incapable of duplicity and mendacity on the big questions – so Kelly believes. Rarely has the first draft of history looked so needy of revision.
Michael Connors
An edited version of this now appears on newmatilda.com October 16, 2007
In October’s edition of The Australian Literary Review (2, 9, pp. 3, 14-16) journalist Paul Kelly offers an intellectual road trip, riffing on the theme of “The Lucky Country”. Kelly devotes two thousand words too many to an exploration of “second rate” Australian public intellectuals’ incapacity to appreciate the Australian electorate’s genius in electing a first rate political leadership. This is such a hackneyed theme (elitism of the intellectual class, not the genius of the Australian electorate) that it would be surprising if Kelly had anything fresh to say. As it turns out, he doesn’t, unless the spectacle of a journalistic “national treasure” delivering a home-song eulogy to prime ministers Hawke, Keating and Howard counts as such.
In his version of the “The Lucky Country” Kelly argues that current Australian prosperity (that is the emerging American style wealth-divide) is the fruit of successive Labor and Liberal party political acumen, epitomised by their respective management of the US alliance and their differential, but consonant, agenda of working with Asia, particularly China.
I would say that apart from the brazen act of currency deregulation under Hawke in 1983 and that act's related consequences, Australian prosperity has been delivered in spite of government policy, in the same manner as a randomly thrown dart at an inventory of stock exchange listed companies is better at picking winners than the Mercedes-chasing stockbroker selling his expertise. Truly a nation of gamblers. The rest of the Australian Story has been about management, packaging, marketing and keeping the game on the road.
In Kelly's Eastern Suburbs – detour via Canberra road trip, the vantage point is not the slum, the junkie’s needle point exchange, or the sweat of an AWA, rather it is the six-lane highway of national achievement; a vantage point, he claims, that the precocious “second- raters” of the aristocratic left have ignored in their supposed rush to condemn the Australian electorate as inane and immoral.
Kelly’s derivative self-denying ironic title,“The Lucky Country" - following the title of Donald Horne's famous 1960s book - should have been a warning to the literary editor that this was going to be an article of imprecise hackdom. Kelly lives up to the dull title. In what counts as the intellectual equivalent of grievous bodily harm, he takes a handful of thinkers as representative of the total sum of anti-Howard intellectuals, and then narrows the field further by concentrating on an easily beratable, shrill and fanciful David Marr. Marr's over the top statements about Howard’s Australia in his Quarterly Essay "His Master's Voice: the Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard", are easy enough to dismiss. Kelly paints Marr as a kind of Jeremiahic Bertrand Russell in the antipodes, minus the math. All this leads Kelly to a lamely ironic twist: that Horne's supposed depiction of a country with second rate politicians and first class intellectuals has been reversed.
Kelly is right to point out that some ridiculous analogies have been doing the rounds among the intelligentsia (that there are homologies between pre-Nazi Germany and contemporary Australia), but he fails to then offer a single word about the Right’s own disingenuous mob of time-servers, Kelly’s News Limited colleague Janet Albrechtsen or the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt. Is there some unwitting aesthetic judgement on Kelly’s part that these people should not be taken seriously as intellectuals? They have been singing the praises of first rate political leadership for a decade. Is he jealous of their foresight?
What Kelly’s atrociously selective piece does is to suggest that public intellectuals (meaning "Howard-haters") are so far removed from the ordinary concerns of life that the necessarily pragmatic and compromised nature of politics that supposedly delivers national prosperity and relative domestic and regional cohesion are seen by them to be contemptible.
There is certain hubris in Kelly’s rant about second-rate public intellectuals: he should have declared his own interest as a fellow traveller. “The Lucky Country” marks a low point in his political journalism, an altogether too confident declaration of his undiluted national-interest account of the sublime art of Australian compromise.
While Kelly’s decades of access to the corridors of power may have led to the production of a certain banal commentary, he is not completely incapable of the lyrical insight of his namesake troubadour. Just as clichés capture certain truisms, Kelly’s journalistic writing, as do all journalistic writings, reflect some wilful zeitgeist - the first draft of history. In this instance that zeitgeist now has it that Australia has enjoyed national prosperity and relatively moral and sincere leadership. Kelly’s imaginative leap is to turn Donald Horne’s devious title into a homily. Australia is lucky because Howard is incapable of duplicity and mendacity on the big questions – so Kelly believes. Rarely has the first draft of history looked so needy of revision.
September 13, 2007
Howard, a retiring man
Howard, a retiring man; Rudd, the class A jerk
Having done his utmost best, with his party’s backing, to turn the electoral cycle of Australian politics into a presidential-style circus of idiocy focused on the populist imagery of ‘everyman’ (for it remains everyman), John Howard’s latest spin (12th September on the 7.30 Report) that leadership is a team thing and ‘that’s a good thing’ marks the end of the politician as we know him.
It appears Howard has been trumped by all-style no-substance Ruddy-good two shoes. Rudd has mastered the presidential game with fervour. Even Rudd’s naughty escapades at a US strip club played in his favour; recasting him as the favoured son of the church to be redeemed. Cast a vote so he can still go to heaven.
Rudd, the man who believes he can smile with his faith, played class jerk at APEC and won them over with his impressive Mandarin. There is much to be said about this; for Rudd stands at the historical conjunction of Australia’s two-timing poise between the US and its client, the Japanese state, and the mightily rising Chinese behemoth.
When Rudd visited La Trobe University in 2005, as then shadow spokesperson on foreign affairs, I asked him at a public lecture what his stance would be regarding Chinese human rights if Labor won office. His response surprised me; he was upset by my criticism that Labor has always been willing to put national interest well above human rights considerations. His response reflected the luxury of the opposition benches, and also the presence of a dim part of the brain that represses memory of East Timor.
Yet, it’s hard to see how a Labor government under Rudd will deviate from the Howard government’s closed door private dialogues on human rights with China.
When the feudalistic and beatific Dalai Lama visited Australia in June, Rudd showed great sensitivity only agreeing to meet with the eminent Presence of the Buddha in Compassion, after Howard intimated he might do so. Presidentialism is also followerism.
Howard’s presidentialism stumped the Labor Party’s committee people: they could not contemplate as leader the articulate Julia Gillard, so they went through a range of potentials such as Crean-Latham-Beazley, succeeding only in proving the law of diminishing returns. Rudd rode to the leadership on a wave of desperation. He is desperation’s destiny.
Howard’s recent declaration of playing with the team holds promise for a more substantive politics, one focused on big questions as opposed to hair-style and grandfatherly comforting and giving succour to religious congregations. At last, I have found something on which I can agree with Howard. Yeah, sure.
Having done his utmost best, with his party’s backing, to turn the electoral cycle of Australian politics into a presidential-style circus of idiocy focused on the populist imagery of ‘everyman’ (for it remains everyman), John Howard’s latest spin (12th September on the 7.30 Report) that leadership is a team thing and ‘that’s a good thing’ marks the end of the politician as we know him.
It appears Howard has been trumped by all-style no-substance Ruddy-good two shoes. Rudd has mastered the presidential game with fervour. Even Rudd’s naughty escapades at a US strip club played in his favour; recasting him as the favoured son of the church to be redeemed. Cast a vote so he can still go to heaven.
Rudd, the man who believes he can smile with his faith, played class jerk at APEC and won them over with his impressive Mandarin. There is much to be said about this; for Rudd stands at the historical conjunction of Australia’s two-timing poise between the US and its client, the Japanese state, and the mightily rising Chinese behemoth.
When Rudd visited La Trobe University in 2005, as then shadow spokesperson on foreign affairs, I asked him at a public lecture what his stance would be regarding Chinese human rights if Labor won office. His response surprised me; he was upset by my criticism that Labor has always been willing to put national interest well above human rights considerations. His response reflected the luxury of the opposition benches, and also the presence of a dim part of the brain that represses memory of East Timor.
Yet, it’s hard to see how a Labor government under Rudd will deviate from the Howard government’s closed door private dialogues on human rights with China.
When the feudalistic and beatific Dalai Lama visited Australia in June, Rudd showed great sensitivity only agreeing to meet with the eminent Presence of the Buddha in Compassion, after Howard intimated he might do so. Presidentialism is also followerism.
Howard’s presidentialism stumped the Labor Party’s committee people: they could not contemplate as leader the articulate Julia Gillard, so they went through a range of potentials such as Crean-Latham-Beazley, succeeding only in proving the law of diminishing returns. Rudd rode to the leadership on a wave of desperation. He is desperation’s destiny.
Howard’s recent declaration of playing with the team holds promise for a more substantive politics, one focused on big questions as opposed to hair-style and grandfatherly comforting and giving succour to religious congregations. At last, I have found something on which I can agree with Howard. Yeah, sure.
September 8, 2007
Hegemony is not the Name of a Band
International Relations: Hegemony Is Not The Name of A Band
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 11 July 2007
New Matilda
What to make of Australia’s forays into international politics? Of its double-timing of the US and China? Does it really matter what an apparently bit-like player such as Australia does, even if it does occasionally punch above Alexander’s waistline? On that point, how should we interpret Australia being ranked 12th in the world for military expenditure, while ranking 54th in population terms?
In the next few months I’d like to offer some of my own musings on these matters. This week I’ll begin with the idea of hegemony, since it is the pursuit of this, or resistance to it, which defines the play of world politics.
Here in Australia, both Labor and the Coalition have made fundamental commitments to anchoring Australia’s future to the US Alliance. Even as they exchange tit-for-tat recriminations on the management of the Alliance relationship, neither Party’s leadership could imagine a foreign policy bereft of it.
The basis of the Alliance is simple: mutual interest. Australia and the US share not only similar security and trade interests, but also an interest in jointly pursuing a particular world order. John Howard joined the war in Iraq not just to earn brownie points within the narrow Alliance relationship, but because he believes that Australia’s future is best secured in a US-structured world. Such a world is safe for market capitalism, a system in which Australia does well.
It is my guess that what is written in the above paragraph would not be controversial inside the PM’s Office. It is a statement of the obvious.
One of the strangest paradoxes of international politics is that hardened Rightwing realists and critical theorists often agree with each other. That’s Kissinger and Marx in bed together. Or of a lesser stature, imagine Howard and Chavez knocking the bedposts against the wall at Kirribilli.
In between the Left and the Right, with a head ache, are soggy-lettuce liberals who are maligned by realists as tree huggers, and by the Left as, well, tree huggers.
Against the gumph that is ‘liberalism’ (that we can build a peaceful world order of market capitalism mediated by national cultures), critical theorists and Realists agree that the international system is driven by competing States, power, empire and exploitation — and within these different arenas is the pursuit of hegemony or counter-hegemony. The difference lies in whose side you are on. Do you finish all the huffing and puffing by getting out of the Right or the Left side of bed?
One of the most noxious views of realism comes from that latter day Rudyard Kipling, Niall Ferguson, who fears a world without a superpower, in much the same manner I imagine John Howard does. You will recall that in his book Empire, Ferguson calls upon America’s distracted youth to serve the new empire for the global good. Writing in 2004 in Foreign Policy, Ferguson argued that without a global superpower, a new Dark Age will descend upon us:
Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century…Technology has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it.
Fundamental to realism in international politics is the belief that States — other than your own, of course — are up to no good. Some call this the ‘security dilemma.’
Basically put, because another State can never be trusted, and because the international system lacks any regulatory body that can universally enforce rules, it’s best to stock up on weapons, alliances and the like. That’s why Australia has recently added steroids to its Defence budget. Given what happened to Saddam’s Iraq, the message is clear: no insurance policy (WMDS), no security. Now to reduce a piddling or moderately-sized State’s security dilemma, big States can offer alliances and prophetic visions of global order. So the world is full of complex alliances and international bodies.
For realists, it is only by journeying on the rollercoaster of security dilemmas that the balance of power in world politics is forged. There is no doubt that there is thrill in the ride. Every other ride is for five-year-olds, including the UN and human rights regimes.
John Howard should not be judged too harshly for the debacle in Iraq. He sees the world from the heights of his own realist rollercoaster, and the supersonic vibrations of that ride no doubt affected his balance.
Realists are good at imagining they can plan world order by the use of power and diplomacy. Henry Kissinger, the consummate realist, may have been joking when he said, ‘Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full,’ but he also revealed the fundamental pretensions of those in power — that the world revolves around them. It’s an understandable pretension to fall into. After all, as one wit put it, when you are the equivalent of an 800kg gorilla (as the US is) in the zoo of world politics, the rest of the world’s eyes are on you; but your eyes are on the bananas. Yum!
Eight hundred kilogram gorilla-States in international politics are called hegemons, from the Greek ‘to lead.’ That is, they have the power and the means — by virtue of superior military capacity — to shape the direction of international politics and to enforce their will. Consider the fact that the US’s military expenditure is greater than the combined expenditure of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Israel and the Netherlands. That’s why the US could go to war in Iraq in defiance of the United Nations. It had nothing to do with the superiority of argument.
Even so, there are limits to hegemony — as the US is now realising. Just as it messes up in the Middle East, to its South a wave of Left populism is shaping a new soul order based on rolling back neo-liberalism and US meddling.
In Asia, the rise of China is of such consequence that US foreign policy has been preoccupied by it since the end of the Cold War. Under the convenient excuse of the ‘war on terror,’ the US has expanded its military bases through mineral rich Central Asian States as a means of ensuring its continued but troubled hegemony.
How Australia relates to this hegemony, its role in its enforcement, and the forces gathering against that hegemony will be my concern in future articles.
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 11 July 2007
New Matilda
What to make of Australia’s forays into international politics? Of its double-timing of the US and China? Does it really matter what an apparently bit-like player such as Australia does, even if it does occasionally punch above Alexander’s waistline? On that point, how should we interpret Australia being ranked 12th in the world for military expenditure, while ranking 54th in population terms?
In the next few months I’d like to offer some of my own musings on these matters. This week I’ll begin with the idea of hegemony, since it is the pursuit of this, or resistance to it, which defines the play of world politics.
Here in Australia, both Labor and the Coalition have made fundamental commitments to anchoring Australia’s future to the US Alliance. Even as they exchange tit-for-tat recriminations on the management of the Alliance relationship, neither Party’s leadership could imagine a foreign policy bereft of it.
The basis of the Alliance is simple: mutual interest. Australia and the US share not only similar security and trade interests, but also an interest in jointly pursuing a particular world order. John Howard joined the war in Iraq not just to earn brownie points within the narrow Alliance relationship, but because he believes that Australia’s future is best secured in a US-structured world. Such a world is safe for market capitalism, a system in which Australia does well.
It is my guess that what is written in the above paragraph would not be controversial inside the PM’s Office. It is a statement of the obvious.
One of the strangest paradoxes of international politics is that hardened Rightwing realists and critical theorists often agree with each other. That’s Kissinger and Marx in bed together. Or of a lesser stature, imagine Howard and Chavez knocking the bedposts against the wall at Kirribilli.
In between the Left and the Right, with a head ache, are soggy-lettuce liberals who are maligned by realists as tree huggers, and by the Left as, well, tree huggers.
Against the gumph that is ‘liberalism’ (that we can build a peaceful world order of market capitalism mediated by national cultures), critical theorists and Realists agree that the international system is driven by competing States, power, empire and exploitation — and within these different arenas is the pursuit of hegemony or counter-hegemony. The difference lies in whose side you are on. Do you finish all the huffing and puffing by getting out of the Right or the Left side of bed?
One of the most noxious views of realism comes from that latter day Rudyard Kipling, Niall Ferguson, who fears a world without a superpower, in much the same manner I imagine John Howard does. You will recall that in his book Empire, Ferguson calls upon America’s distracted youth to serve the new empire for the global good. Writing in 2004 in Foreign Policy, Ferguson argued that without a global superpower, a new Dark Age will descend upon us:
Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century…Technology has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it.
Fundamental to realism in international politics is the belief that States — other than your own, of course — are up to no good. Some call this the ‘security dilemma.’
Basically put, because another State can never be trusted, and because the international system lacks any regulatory body that can universally enforce rules, it’s best to stock up on weapons, alliances and the like. That’s why Australia has recently added steroids to its Defence budget. Given what happened to Saddam’s Iraq, the message is clear: no insurance policy (WMDS), no security. Now to reduce a piddling or moderately-sized State’s security dilemma, big States can offer alliances and prophetic visions of global order. So the world is full of complex alliances and international bodies.
For realists, it is only by journeying on the rollercoaster of security dilemmas that the balance of power in world politics is forged. There is no doubt that there is thrill in the ride. Every other ride is for five-year-olds, including the UN and human rights regimes.
John Howard should not be judged too harshly for the debacle in Iraq. He sees the world from the heights of his own realist rollercoaster, and the supersonic vibrations of that ride no doubt affected his balance.
Realists are good at imagining they can plan world order by the use of power and diplomacy. Henry Kissinger, the consummate realist, may have been joking when he said, ‘Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full,’ but he also revealed the fundamental pretensions of those in power — that the world revolves around them. It’s an understandable pretension to fall into. After all, as one wit put it, when you are the equivalent of an 800kg gorilla (as the US is) in the zoo of world politics, the rest of the world’s eyes are on you; but your eyes are on the bananas. Yum!
Eight hundred kilogram gorilla-States in international politics are called hegemons, from the Greek ‘to lead.’ That is, they have the power and the means — by virtue of superior military capacity — to shape the direction of international politics and to enforce their will. Consider the fact that the US’s military expenditure is greater than the combined expenditure of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Israel and the Netherlands. That’s why the US could go to war in Iraq in defiance of the United Nations. It had nothing to do with the superiority of argument.
Even so, there are limits to hegemony — as the US is now realising. Just as it messes up in the Middle East, to its South a wave of Left populism is shaping a new soul order based on rolling back neo-liberalism and US meddling.
In Asia, the rise of China is of such consequence that US foreign policy has been preoccupied by it since the end of the Cold War. Under the convenient excuse of the ‘war on terror,’ the US has expanded its military bases through mineral rich Central Asian States as a means of ensuring its continued but troubled hegemony.
How Australia relates to this hegemony, its role in its enforcement, and the forces gathering against that hegemony will be my concern in future articles.
KEVIN RUDD: SMILE TO WIN THE ELECTION
Cartoon by sharyn ragget at http://www.brilliantthings.com.au/sharyn/
The Next Big Idea
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 17 January 2007
New Matilda
Labor is in need of something special to overcome John Howard’s habit of always having the Next Big Idea: foreigners, immigrants, aliens, them, Muslims, terrorists…
There is a danger that with Kevin Rudd as its principled new leader, Labor is above stooping so low as to reach up for an abstraction that moves the electorate. But it must do so if it is to win office. Labor needs its own Next Big Idea (NBI).
The idea must be robust, outwit a sound byte, and find its way into everyday practise: otherwise it’ll come across as the hybridised random aggregate of a latte-fuelled focus group, high on new-new-Labor optimism. Best to go for something ordinary, folksy. Something that is not even a word perhaps, but a gesture. The next big idea may not even be an idea, but the conveyor of an idea.
It is true that NBIs tend to be dumb — but only in retrospect. The End of History, Clash of Civilizations, Bankruptcy For Winners, War on Terror, The Third Way… You have to admire how easily the phrase-crazemongers dominate public and academic discourse, despite their banality. Those writing NBIs are writing for an audience whose entire adulthood reading experience is based on reading executive summaries. To work on the NBI is to accept a withering of the mind for the ease of manufactured public deliberation. If it can’t be summarised, don’t write it.
The life-cycle of the common NBI is shorter than that of a Labor opposition leader, and it is just as hollow. Only exceptional NBIs — meaningful ones — last beyond a few years. Ordinary NBIs serve limited purposes. In this case, it’s about winning an election.
What matters is that people put the NBI into the shopping trolley, that presidents and husbands talk about it, and that Tony Blair carries it — for instance Wise Ways Wanting: How to be the Medium of Other People’s Desires — next to the Koran, with a look of such ridiculous sincerity that his deserting ministers read it. The NBI is a club, and the author offers readers the key to its entry by mastery of jargon. If they succeed, they will have ‘squared the circle’ by ‘thinking outside’ the ‘reengineered box’.
For the management guru working up the next NBI the rewards and the markets are endless. There can never be enough NBIs waiting in the wings. The business shelves of bookshops are so full of wisdom one can randomly pull out any book and be struck by its insight. Of course one must be prepared to ditch one’s prejudice that a book must be a logical and systematic exposition of its chosen theme.
I did such an experiment and pulled out a random book. I was motivated by the need to get Kevin Rudd to dumb down a bit, to work at not being so smart. He needs to wipe from his face that barely visible sneer of knowing-it-all that attends his public speaking. Cameras can do close-ups, Mr Rudd. Your sneer, Mr Rudd, may prove to be not so much your Achilles heel, as your Latham’s handshake. Faced with this problem, I think I have found the next NBI. While not its author, I would like to claim some credit in locating an answer to Labor’s woes.
Party faithful, go to any bookshop and you will find a priceless store of conceptual mud awaiting Rudd in JH Carver’s book, Smile with your faith: the beginning is not the end (Cockeyed Press, Ohio, 2001).
Carver’s strength is not precision — he tends to offer ponderous qualifications. However, he does develop a memorable, for five-year-olds, three-fold conceptual schema of such profound dimness that all those who want to make good from bad beginnings will see it as bright lights.
Carver’s NBI is to ‘SMILE WITH YOUR FAITH, NOT YOUR FACE’. (The shrieking font is as per the original.) His book seeks to provide leaders whom take part in prayer circles with the means to move on from the troublesome beginnings that accompany any rise in politics. His triangular route through the guilt of bad beginnings is as follows:
Smile with your faith, not your face. Because you believe in something bigger than the man you see in the mirror every morning. When you smile, imagine God smiling.
Guilt is for losers. No one else is feeling guilty, just pissed off that you won.
The past is not the present. So you were a two-faced liar, but what would Jesus do now?
Readers’ testimonies include those from governors of various American states. One reads:
The rosy optimism that comes from following the three step formula of Smile with your faith will spread good will among those around you. And a smile that is bigger than you is a vote winner. Offer the people something, but first read Carver.
Party faithful, put away your elitist obsession with big thinkers, and purchase Carver with pragmatic pride; consider too, the practical wisdom of smiling with your faith. Kevin Rudd is an intelligent man. He can do nothing other than smile.
US objectives in the War on Terror
America used terror to mask its real aims
By Michael Connors
The Age, Melbourne
September 2, 2005
Canberra has stifled debate while hitching its cart to the US, writes Michael Connors.
HUGH White is the talking head of the Australian foreign policy commentariat. He is a professor of strategic studies at the ANU, and the security analyst of choice for many in Australia. But his comments on this page yesterday demonstrate an appalling lack of understanding of the politics of the war on terrorism in this country.
White confesses to what most of those people imbibing at diplomatic functions and academic talk-fests have known for quite some time — that the hysterical (he chooses the word heroic) public presentation of the threat of terror is at odds with the more realistic threat perceptions regarding terrorism held by those in power.
The fact is that "terrorism" is not going to wipe out whole societies in the way that nuclear conflict during the Cold War might have done.
White notes the divergence between rational discussion and sensible gradation of threat possibilities among government insiders, flanked by the growing entourage of terror experts, and the ersatz Churchillian thunder of politicians in public.
to explain this divergence? It's a good question, but White's answer fails. He writes: "Politicians (and commentators for that matter) talk about terrorism in what we might
call heroic terms because that is how we as publics want them to talk about it."
Do you get that? It's your fault. You weren't happy with the Government's anti-terror campaign, you wanted to be alarmed. You are aching for a chance to sacrifice, seeking an escape from your meaningless existence. It is you who forces onto politicians an excessive language of threat and extinction. Terror has given your life meaning and, as a consequence, politicians are hostage to popular prejudice. They can only repeat ridiculous rot about barbarians at the gate because if they don't, you won't be happy.
White hopes that if we reflect on this insight we might find a way out, be more sensible, listen to the experts more. Honesty might be a better option.
The Government has not been reluctantly serving up a feast of vacuous platitudes to satiate popular prejudice. It has willingly mastered the art of confection, recklessly serving "sexed-up" intelligence, homilies to our sacred way of life, and, at times, lies.
It has done this to ensure that Australia is hitched to the world's superpower. This is the highest priority of nation-interest diplomacy, and if joining in the "war on terror" is required, this Government will bleat with the rest of them. It'll go to war, too, on totally false premises.
The Government, not the people, is to blame for the woefully inadequate public discussion of terrorism in this country. The language of terror, the inflation of threat and the manipulation of news have been instrumental in furthering US and, by this Government's logic, Australian strategic objectives.
Using terrorism as a cover, the US has embarked on a remarkable expansion and repositioning of its global presence. Bases have sprung up in central Asia and the Middle East.
Why have we witnessed an expansive US policy if terrorism is not the global threat it is made out to be, and if policing is a better option than military deployment? The simple answer is that the US seeks to maintain its present status as sole superpower.
Since the early 1990s when Paul Wolfowitz, then a defence official, penned a memo about the need to thwart the emergence of a regional or global rival to US global hegemony, the US has been playing the game of being the only game in town.
It's no secret.
Even the US National Security Strategy of 2002 addresses the overriding imperative of US global hegemony. To achieve this goal the US needs resource security and unsurpassed military presence.
The rhetoric of the war on terrorism has cloaked these objectives. After all, it is easier to win popular support with talk of evil than with talk of hegemony, military expansion and resource security.
The debacle in Iraq, a more sceptical population, and opposition to national security legislation are all undermining the instrumental uses of the inflated threat of terror.
As Australian foreign policy elites try to pick up the pieces, cover their tracks, and disown some of their erstwhile commentary, it must be tempting to point the finger at someone.
By Michael Connors
The Age, Melbourne
September 2, 2005
Canberra has stifled debate while hitching its cart to the US, writes Michael Connors.
HUGH White is the talking head of the Australian foreign policy commentariat. He is a professor of strategic studies at the ANU, and the security analyst of choice for many in Australia. But his comments on this page yesterday demonstrate an appalling lack of understanding of the politics of the war on terrorism in this country.
White confesses to what most of those people imbibing at diplomatic functions and academic talk-fests have known for quite some time — that the hysterical (he chooses the word heroic) public presentation of the threat of terror is at odds with the more realistic threat perceptions regarding terrorism held by those in power.
The fact is that "terrorism" is not going to wipe out whole societies in the way that nuclear conflict during the Cold War might have done.
White notes the divergence between rational discussion and sensible gradation of threat possibilities among government insiders, flanked by the growing entourage of terror experts, and the ersatz Churchillian thunder of politicians in public.
to explain this divergence? It's a good question, but White's answer fails. He writes: "Politicians (and commentators for that matter) talk about terrorism in what we might
call heroic terms because that is how we as publics want them to talk about it."
Do you get that? It's your fault. You weren't happy with the Government's anti-terror campaign, you wanted to be alarmed. You are aching for a chance to sacrifice, seeking an escape from your meaningless existence. It is you who forces onto politicians an excessive language of threat and extinction. Terror has given your life meaning and, as a consequence, politicians are hostage to popular prejudice. They can only repeat ridiculous rot about barbarians at the gate because if they don't, you won't be happy.
White hopes that if we reflect on this insight we might find a way out, be more sensible, listen to the experts more. Honesty might be a better option.
The Government has not been reluctantly serving up a feast of vacuous platitudes to satiate popular prejudice. It has willingly mastered the art of confection, recklessly serving "sexed-up" intelligence, homilies to our sacred way of life, and, at times, lies.
It has done this to ensure that Australia is hitched to the world's superpower. This is the highest priority of nation-interest diplomacy, and if joining in the "war on terror" is required, this Government will bleat with the rest of them. It'll go to war, too, on totally false premises.
The Government, not the people, is to blame for the woefully inadequate public discussion of terrorism in this country. The language of terror, the inflation of threat and the manipulation of news have been instrumental in furthering US and, by this Government's logic, Australian strategic objectives.
Using terrorism as a cover, the US has embarked on a remarkable expansion and repositioning of its global presence. Bases have sprung up in central Asia and the Middle East.
Why have we witnessed an expansive US policy if terrorism is not the global threat it is made out to be, and if policing is a better option than military deployment? The simple answer is that the US seeks to maintain its present status as sole superpower.
Since the early 1990s when Paul Wolfowitz, then a defence official, penned a memo about the need to thwart the emergence of a regional or global rival to US global hegemony, the US has been playing the game of being the only game in town.
It's no secret.
Even the US National Security Strategy of 2002 addresses the overriding imperative of US global hegemony. To achieve this goal the US needs resource security and unsurpassed military presence.
The rhetoric of the war on terrorism has cloaked these objectives. After all, it is easier to win popular support with talk of evil than with talk of hegemony, military expansion and resource security.
The debacle in Iraq, a more sceptical population, and opposition to national security legislation are all undermining the instrumental uses of the inflated threat of terror.
As Australian foreign policy elites try to pick up the pieces, cover their tracks, and disown some of their erstwhile commentary, it must be tempting to point the finger at someone.
Howard's Grave Diggers
Industrial Relations: Howard’s Grave-Diggers
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 21 June 2006
New Matilda
In one of the greatest modern works of insightful polemic, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers ...’
In this age of reduced expectations we might now read that prophetic announcement as meaning that capitalist assault will, in time, produce its own working-class response. Courtesy of the reactionary assault on working-class employment conditions occasioned by the Coalition’s capture of the Senate, we see, at present, a process of class politics re-emerging.
Not yet the grave-diggers of capitalism, frightened and angry workers may yet halt the Howard Government’s neo-liberal assault that aims to bring globalisation of the labour market closer to home.
In the world envisaged by Howard, Australia will soon have a working poor. This will dilute the power of organised or regulated labour. Instead of the dole acting as the benchmark of whether one will accept employment or not, it will now be the worker next to you, brow-beaten into reduced conditions, who will serve as the measure of what is acceptable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, stonemasons and building workers won the right to an eight-hour day. The ‘8 Hour Day Monument’, which celebrates that achievement, stands adjacent to Victorian Trades Hall Council in Melbourne. It now looks like a futuristic piece of art.
As wages are driven down among unskilled labour and those pockets of white-collar labour that are in long supply, we must expect further assaults on unemployment benefits. The logic is inexorable. If anything gets Howard’s heart beating faster than a regulated labour force, it is the socially secured unemployed.
The sad thing is that Labor paved the way for the present situation.
Beginning with the Hawke Labor Government’s close relationship with business and trade union leadership, the 1980s witnessed the weakening of working-class organisation. As union leaders demobilised militants in the union movement — moving instead to the provision of discount cards and cheaper dental services — a new form of politics emerged in Australia that eschewed collective commitment.
It was the Labor Government that attacked compulsory unionism and it was under Labor that historically high levels of union membership — up to 50 per cent in the 1970s — began their downward slide to 40 per cent in the mid 1990s and around 25 per cent today.
The 1980s were marked by an ideological assault that used the spectre of global competition as the sledgehammer to nail unions to self restraint. Threats of capital flight if Australia didn’t ‘deregulate’ were used to cajole workers to accept a weaker bargaining position and to accept centralised negotiations.
The social wage promised by Labor’s tripartite Accords between government, employers and workers produced a 15 per cent decline in wages over the decade it was in office. The Hawke and Keating Governments’ historic achievement was to weaken working-class organisation, not by malicious intent, but by being carried away with notions of global competition and capitalist nation building.
When workers broke from the straightjacket of fiscal discipline and arbitrated wage rises they were demonised — such was the fate, for instance, of the Victorian nurses whose 50-day strike in 1985–6 sent Laborites into a blue-blooded rage worthy of Thatcher.
However, no comment on Labor presiding over the decline in working-class living standards can proceed without recourse to irony.
The first irony of Labor’s first years in office is that Australia in the mid-1980s was not so much reacting to global conditions as acting as a pioneer for the neo-liberalism that was soon to be ascendant globally. That Australia had its own nomenclature for this is indicative — we called it ‘economic rationalism.’
The second irony is that Labor, in pioneering a new way of seeing the world, would give rise to ideologies of new individualism that would undermine its own electoral position. Stock market postings became as avidly read in some quarters as AFL results. Later it would be property prices.
Labor delivered the aspirational voter to the Liberal Party. It turned unionism into a defensive position for workers, and it released hundreds of thousands of overly confident workers into the clutches of financial advisors.
Now, as the screw turns, for many the question of unionism is a matter of calculus of what they can personally gain. There is now an army of workers who will only be recruited to the union if a gimmick is offered or the threat of dismissal is looming.
Union delegates the country over are now telling prospective members that surely the cost of union membership is not prohibitive, especially given the gains in wages that have been secured by various Enterprise Bargaining Rounds. The response is sometimes telling. ‘Sorry, got to pay off the investment property,’ ‘sorry, my finances are so poor,’ ‘sorry, but I think I’ll look after myself.’
The greatest challenge facing Australian unions is not recruitment but the re-creation of the notion of solidarity. While unions will grow in the short term — based on the fear of Howard’s IR agenda — recruitment will mean nothing unless that ethic of solidarity re-emerges.
Howard might not like it, but he will be the very source that will drive this new ethic.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 21 June 2006
New Matilda
In one of the greatest modern works of insightful polemic, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers ...’
In this age of reduced expectations we might now read that prophetic announcement as meaning that capitalist assault will, in time, produce its own working-class response. Courtesy of the reactionary assault on working-class employment conditions occasioned by the Coalition’s capture of the Senate, we see, at present, a process of class politics re-emerging.
Not yet the grave-diggers of capitalism, frightened and angry workers may yet halt the Howard Government’s neo-liberal assault that aims to bring globalisation of the labour market closer to home.
In the world envisaged by Howard, Australia will soon have a working poor. This will dilute the power of organised or regulated labour. Instead of the dole acting as the benchmark of whether one will accept employment or not, it will now be the worker next to you, brow-beaten into reduced conditions, who will serve as the measure of what is acceptable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, stonemasons and building workers won the right to an eight-hour day. The ‘8 Hour Day Monument’, which celebrates that achievement, stands adjacent to Victorian Trades Hall Council in Melbourne. It now looks like a futuristic piece of art.
As wages are driven down among unskilled labour and those pockets of white-collar labour that are in long supply, we must expect further assaults on unemployment benefits. The logic is inexorable. If anything gets Howard’s heart beating faster than a regulated labour force, it is the socially secured unemployed.
The sad thing is that Labor paved the way for the present situation.
Beginning with the Hawke Labor Government’s close relationship with business and trade union leadership, the 1980s witnessed the weakening of working-class organisation. As union leaders demobilised militants in the union movement — moving instead to the provision of discount cards and cheaper dental services — a new form of politics emerged in Australia that eschewed collective commitment.
It was the Labor Government that attacked compulsory unionism and it was under Labor that historically high levels of union membership — up to 50 per cent in the 1970s — began their downward slide to 40 per cent in the mid 1990s and around 25 per cent today.
The 1980s were marked by an ideological assault that used the spectre of global competition as the sledgehammer to nail unions to self restraint. Threats of capital flight if Australia didn’t ‘deregulate’ were used to cajole workers to accept a weaker bargaining position and to accept centralised negotiations.
The social wage promised by Labor’s tripartite Accords between government, employers and workers produced a 15 per cent decline in wages over the decade it was in office. The Hawke and Keating Governments’ historic achievement was to weaken working-class organisation, not by malicious intent, but by being carried away with notions of global competition and capitalist nation building.
When workers broke from the straightjacket of fiscal discipline and arbitrated wage rises they were demonised — such was the fate, for instance, of the Victorian nurses whose 50-day strike in 1985–6 sent Laborites into a blue-blooded rage worthy of Thatcher.
However, no comment on Labor presiding over the decline in working-class living standards can proceed without recourse to irony.
The first irony of Labor’s first years in office is that Australia in the mid-1980s was not so much reacting to global conditions as acting as a pioneer for the neo-liberalism that was soon to be ascendant globally. That Australia had its own nomenclature for this is indicative — we called it ‘economic rationalism.’
The second irony is that Labor, in pioneering a new way of seeing the world, would give rise to ideologies of new individualism that would undermine its own electoral position. Stock market postings became as avidly read in some quarters as AFL results. Later it would be property prices.
Labor delivered the aspirational voter to the Liberal Party. It turned unionism into a defensive position for workers, and it released hundreds of thousands of overly confident workers into the clutches of financial advisors.
Now, as the screw turns, for many the question of unionism is a matter of calculus of what they can personally gain. There is now an army of workers who will only be recruited to the union if a gimmick is offered or the threat of dismissal is looming.
Union delegates the country over are now telling prospective members that surely the cost of union membership is not prohibitive, especially given the gains in wages that have been secured by various Enterprise Bargaining Rounds. The response is sometimes telling. ‘Sorry, got to pay off the investment property,’ ‘sorry, my finances are so poor,’ ‘sorry, but I think I’ll look after myself.’
The greatest challenge facing Australian unions is not recruitment but the re-creation of the notion of solidarity. While unions will grow in the short term — based on the fear of Howard’s IR agenda — recruitment will mean nothing unless that ethic of solidarity re-emerges.
Howard might not like it, but he will be the very source that will drive this new ethic.
The Democratic Paradox, not liberal and not democratic
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com/New Matilda
Prime Minister John Howard is history incarnate, but not in the sense of being the underwhelming expression of ordinary Australia. Howard has shifted the permanently unsettled but delicate balance of liberalism and democracy in Australia towards a system of majoritarian illiberalism. This will be his legacy.
The marks of this shift are evident in the treatment of refugees, the incredulous denial of knowledge about AWB kickbacks to the Saddam regime, the introduction of an industrial relations system designed to produce a working poor, and in the decline of ministerial accountability.
The op-ed pages of Australian newspapers are full of dismay for this democratic malaise. Comparisons with early Nazi Germany are flippantly thrown around. John Hooker, regular columnist for New Matilda is one such example.
Hooker is notoriously angry, but righteous anger is not a good conduit for analysis. Through Hooker’s trembling pen the ‘people’ and their ‘suburbs’ have become an object of derision by a seemingly progressive commentariat. It is as if the ‘people’ are to be blamed for Howard’s political crimes. Hooker’s own elitism is symptomatic of many in the commentariat who bemoan the loss of Australian democracy.
I want to suggest that illiberal shifts in Australian politics and elsewhere are not representative of a politics of indifference in ‘the suburbs,’ rather they signify the historical emergence of a new elite ethos of management and control that is taking shape globally.
That few ministers have been forced to resign in the (later) Howard years has nothing to do with the fact that the electorate is now less demanding. It has to do with the fact that segments of the Australian elite are less demanding of themselves and their milieu. In this new climate, ministerial accountability strikes them as quaint and old-fashioned. And to push the point home, they go on about having a democratic mandate.
The emergence of illiberalism in Australia is part of a systemic global trend most recognisable in a number of established semi-authoritarian countries and newly democratising countries, where the rhetoric of popular sovereignty is used to justify any number of venal and elite-defined security interests.
Every system has an exception that proves the rule, and in this case it is the USA. President Bush’s first term was initially based on a minoritarian illiberalism involving the disenfranchisement of segments of the Black vote, a supportive Supreme Court and the cowered, defeatist Al Gore. Then possessing the levers of power, the Bush cabal was able to win a second term.
Bush’s greatest regret will not be birthing the Iraqi civil war — that is his prized baby — but coming to power in a period when the possibility of removing the two-term limit on the presidency is not yet feasible. Illiberal trends may make that a possibility in the future. That will perhaps properly mark the end of the great Jeffersonian compromise.
The bombing of the Middle East into democratic submission illuminates something about the state of democracy elsewhere. It brings into relief the blackhole that lies behind most democratic rhetoric, both of the exported and home-grown variety.
US attempts to export democracy are premised on a notion of popular sovereignty that is already blue-printed. The blueprint reads: ‘You will be like us.’ As Rousseau noted, people have to be forced to be free. And to update the old French philosopher, people have to be forced to be like us.
In this era of democratic imperialism, the US State can’t have people choosing to be free unless that freedom is institutionally defined by enlightened despots who know the people’s will. And just in case the people don’t agree with that ‘will,’ democratic despots are willing to lead people to it. Are established democracies much different?
Contra the position that argues democracy has been felled by an alliance of cynical consumers and reactionary rulers, it is clear that the illiberal shift is taking place among elites, and relates to questions of desired regime form in a new era. Majority mandates may be invoked to justify the shift, but this raises the question of how a mandate is secured.
When democratic autocrats speak of ‘the people’ they are gesturing in the direction of an abstraction: ‘a people’ historically mobilised around fear and driven to surrender their deliberative capacities in the face of elite-led democratic disempowerment. This is the shape that the autocrat’s popular mandate assumes.
When people such as John Hooker blame the electorate for Howard’s excesses, he is taking as self-evident Howard’s claims to a popular mandate. This assumes that democracy really is democratic.
Democracy, as it is presently constituted, is a system of electoralism and a diminution of the liberal desire for checks and balances. It can not offer a genuine mandate. Nor can it cope with a genuinely active citizenry. Just as the broader structures surrounding education ensure that schools are programmed for failure so as to deliver most people to a job requiring submission to mundane labour and the petty tyranny of a boss, democracy is contrived to deliver people to a political system that disempowers them and that now deadens the historical gains contributed by the liberal system of checks and balances.
Democracy’s failure to live up to its rhetorical promise is its most enduring success. No one understood this better than Joseph Schumpeter whose 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remains one of the most insightful studies on the functioning of elite democracy.
Schumpeter eschewed classical rhetoric about democracy being a noble project of self-realisation and civic good; he saw it as an institutional arrangement for elites to acquire power ‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ Unlike homicidal struggles for power in the past, when defeat meant death, democracy gave elites a chance of comeback in the next election. Schumpeter famously went on to declare that, ‘Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.’ His was not a critique but an endorsement.
It may be said that if Howard has played a historical role in giving concrete shape to the reassertion of illiberal democracy, then history itself is quite undemanding of the kind of people it selects. This would be a mistake. It is no mean feat to attack the fundamental principles that have defined the liberal tradition.
Historically, it was liberals who feared the tyranny of the majority — the great unwashed — and hence their desire for all sorts of checks and balances under the guise of protecting the minority. This was their condition for accepting mass democracy.
Is it not a pitiful irony that a man who leads a party of liberalism now deploys the rhetoric of majoritarianism to attack that very liberalism? What paradoxes the new global climate does throw up! In all of this, one thing is certain: any real democratic expression by the masses will be met with all the disdain liberals have for the unwashed. When governing liberals start talking about the tyranny of the majority again, we will know we have turned a good corner.
The Howard Generation?
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com/
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
New Matilda
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
Political Nobodies
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.comPolitical Nobodies
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 1 February 2006
New Matilda
In this instant-celebrity drenched culture, driven by facetious obsession with the goings on of Big Brother housemates, it's easy to lose sight of the good work that many people do. They seek no cash prize, no public absolution, and certainly have no gratification in confessional exposure. A book that is selling well in the US at the moment details the activities of such people. It has the unfortunate title of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 1 February 2006
New Matilda
In this instant-celebrity drenched culture, driven by facetious obsession with the goings on of Big Brother housemates, it's easy to lose sight of the good work that many people do. They seek no cash prize, no public absolution, and certainly have no gratification in confessional exposure. A book that is selling well in the US at the moment details the activities of such people. It has the unfortunate title of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
Part of the art of changing the world these days appears to be becoming a personality, so that you can advance a cause. Activists are getting caught up in the image society. Naomi Klein is as branded as they get.
Personally, I still prefer the down-to-earth, easy-going activism that I have encountered for most of my life. That's why when my friend Graham Willett and I considered editing a collection of essays and personal biographies on Australian political activism, I proposed the title Political Nobodies.
The title summed up the status of thousands and thousands of individuals who make Australia a better place by virtue of their often unnoticed contribution to social justice in all its forms. Just like 'queer' and 'wog' have been appropriated, it's time some of us got used to being proud 'nobodies.' The book was to be a collection of unique untold stories fit for an age when it is clear Australian politics needs activism outside the parliamentary mainstream.
Graham didn't like my proposed title, and from a marketing perspective it wasn't exactly upbeat, so we workshopped with the help of a breakfast at a cafe befitting the chardonnay-drinking chattering classes. Graham came up with The Chanting Classes and we filled in the obligatory post-colon subtitle later: Organising for Social Change in Australia.
We imagined the front cover thus: a Howardian white picket fence fronting a perfect green lawn into which were staked banners spruiking various progressive causes. The idea was inspired by seeing various houses in the northern suburbs of Melbourne with signs declaring 'Escaped Refugees Welcome Here.'
We approached over ten potential contributors to cover topics such as AIDS activism, the waterfront workers dispute, women and development, East Timor solidarity, rural environmental issues, Aboriginal activism, refugees, and organising against Islamophobia. The idea was to let activists tell their own stories: how they got involved, what resources they used, and how their activism had changed them. The book intended to show that it's possible for any of us to get active and change things.
New Matilda's own Helen Smith wrote a wonderfully insightful piece for the book on opening her and her partner's home to Sri Lankan refugees. Part of a general campaign for the rights and wellbeing of refugees, the Spare Room for Refugees project was as demanding as activism can get. Anyone can attend a demo, but to open your life and physical space to a stranger is a massive undertaking. Helen tells a tale of real people, living in close quarters, with limited means. She shows how living with her new friends changed parts of her life. The local cricket club also got in on the act, welcoming the refugees to play games. It's a story that's crying to be read.
Helen's is a story of uplifting decency in indecent times. We were confident that publishers would be interested in the collection.
We submitted three sample chapters to four publishers. We argued that the book would have a natural market, and also a niche market among students of social movements, as well as the thousands of people who had been involved in the campaigns covered in the book.
While we waited for the publishers' responses, we approached several prominent Australians to pen a preface - to no avail.
Bob Brown was approached. I met Bob during the Franklin River Blockade. I spent a week with him in Risdon gaol, before he left to take up a vacant Upper House seat in Tasmania. I left the prison about a week later when the Green ranks had dwindled, the novelty of prison food had faded, and my adolescent zeal to be a martyr had been dented after being the target in a game of 'remand cricket.' The rules included the batsman being awarded a six each time he hit a Greenie. Stuck in the prison courtyard, there was nowhere to hide.
I met Bob a number of times after that and he was always friendly and down-to-earth, so I was hopeful he would remember me and be happy to help. I wrote, explaining who I was, hoping that the old connection would pay off - but then, he probably gets hundreds of such letters a year from people wanting to recapture the good old days before the mortgage and second job to pay for the offsprings' private education.
To my disappointment I received a letter from a Greens staffer explaining that Bob was too busy to write the preface, but that we might like to excerpt parts of his recent book. Oh, and he sent his warm regards. I began to feel that my initial title was right: Political Nobodies.
This set the stage for further disappointment - admitting this might be career suicide - four Australian publishing companies turned down the book.
The first company was kind, the publisher got on the line explaining it wasn't their thing, and that we might try someone else. he second company was slow and forgetful, finally being reminded of the submission three to four months later and just as quickly saying no. The third was polite.
The last publishing house we approached was stuck up. We got a simple rejection notice with wording to the effect that no further correspondence would be entered into. I'd like to suggest in future they at least offer a reason, and they take the aristocratic disdain out of their rejection letters.
So, our idea had fallen between the cracks of publishers' bottom lines, affectations, and their judgement about the limited appeal of stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
The cult of celebrity is actually the new economy - 'nobodies' do not sell. I now realise that we should have offered a book on celebrity recipes inspired by life changing events: Mark Latham's humble pie; Russell Crowe's calming balsamic salad; Princess Mary's conception-enhancing yoghurt.
In fact, last month, New Matilda featured an excerpt from Emma Tom's new book, Something About Mary, which was published by a small Australian publishing house. The book is about that Tasmanian woman (I refuse to remember Her name) who married Prince Charming, lost Her Australian accent in the process, and discovered the dignified poise of the lady class. The excerpt covered how the two met, including dress arrangements, dancing, and bar decor.
Was it always thus: the mundane details of celebrity life being more saleable than people changing the world?
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He is currently writing a book on Shane Warne's contribution to philosophical reflection and the Australian way of life, entitled Shane's Way: The Art of Spin and the Politics of Unintentional Solecism.
John Howard's pendulum
Howard's New Year's (Core) Resolutions
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 11 January 2006
New Matilda
It's 11:55 pm on New Year's Eve.
Janette is looking every bit as radiant as a good nuclear power station might, if only we could get one going. In a moment we will embrace. In that embrace will be everything that's passed between us — it's lucky ASIO did the check and cleared her.
Still, in this state of heightened terrorist threat and face transplants, one has to be fearful. I'll not mistake any bomb wiring for a bra strap. I've done the training.
What a year! Terrorism, Latham, Windbag's return, IR, and Costello wetting the bed again. Beazley's such a winner for me - if a soufflé doesn't rise twice, what about a pork pie?
It's Latham I most regret. Nice lad, eager to do well - but no constitution for it.
Staffers have told me about the Costello diaries -it's something we'll need to monitor. Apparently, he's obsessed with me - counts the number of dandruff flakes on my suit collar; catalogues how many times I inadvertently spit on him (he shouldn't stand so close). There is even an entry on eyebrow clippings. He's done a tally and correctly estimates I get it done once a month. I might note that the beauticians use plastic tweezers - on the advice of Security.
Costello will come to nothing. That is my first core resolution. It's the half-grin I don't like. It writes smugness all over his face, as if he's behind all we've done. With Hawke and Keating, the Treasurer had a right to the big chair - but Costello? Well, I've not demanded much, just bring in the tax, quarry the mines, let the invisible hand of the market (our friends at the gentleman's clubs) get on with its business.
Costello had Labor's economic reforms to surf home on - all I had was a big pile of cow turd called 'political correctness.' I moved a self-righteous country that was scared of offending an ant's sensibilities to a State of shock-jockeydom. That's what I call a historic achievement. May a hundred prejudices blossom on the cow turd of the pink-Left!
The clock is ticking, it's close to midnight.
Dubya will back slap me again in public. That is my second core resolution. Not sure how I am going to get this one going. If we could get out of Iraq, I would. But the US will probably want to do a massive offensive before they go, so they can get rid of their excess munitions that will be too costly to return home. Dubya will want us in on it, but the body count might be high.
I've got Amanda working on conditional bridging visas that require compulsory service in war zones. I must admit, there's beauty in the irony of Iraqi refugees fighting Iraqi insurgents on their own home turf - something about crafty accounting I recall from those long-gone days of ledger sheets. There is the slight question of the Convention on Refugees, but hell, Dubya's made it clear where Conventions belong: in Pansy Alley with the lawyers.
The clock is clicking, and Janette moves closer to me.
I will end the culture wars. That is my third core resolution. I've been briefed that some academics who write for obscure journals, and who work in tax-funded (not for long) universities, have been talking about culture wars. They also think I have it in for them, but I don't even know their names - I prefer to court the journos.
Anyway, it's all a bit vague to me. Not sure why arts professors are going on about culture wars, shouldn't that be left to the medicos working on various strains of bacteria? It must be something to do with that horrendous trend towards inter-disciplinarity at universities. Little Nellie Brendan was complaining about it the other day when he was telling me which research grants he'd rejected, despite their getting the green light from the Australian Research Council.
Apparently, some bugger, literally, wanted to look at the constructed meaning (socially and medically) of 'transgendered lesbian relationships.' Funny how I should remember the details so well.
Anyway, back to the culture wars, I'll instruct the Health Department to contract a private company to see what lies behind these raging bacteria - I know that golden staf is taking over the hospitals, so it's getting serious. Whoever is behind this proliferation of colonising bacteria will be dealt with severely. Funny name for it though, 'culture wars' ...
It's midnight, the fireworks begin. Janette embraces me. No wires. 'God you've been a naughty boy this year,' she whispers in my ear. The clock's pendulum is vertical, and all is good in the world.
I am the iron man.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 11 January 2006
New Matilda
It's 11:55 pm on New Year's Eve.
Janette is looking every bit as radiant as a good nuclear power station might, if only we could get one going. In a moment we will embrace. In that embrace will be everything that's passed between us — it's lucky ASIO did the check and cleared her.
Still, in this state of heightened terrorist threat and face transplants, one has to be fearful. I'll not mistake any bomb wiring for a bra strap. I've done the training.
What a year! Terrorism, Latham, Windbag's return, IR, and Costello wetting the bed again. Beazley's such a winner for me - if a soufflé doesn't rise twice, what about a pork pie?
It's Latham I most regret. Nice lad, eager to do well - but no constitution for it.
Staffers have told me about the Costello diaries -it's something we'll need to monitor. Apparently, he's obsessed with me - counts the number of dandruff flakes on my suit collar; catalogues how many times I inadvertently spit on him (he shouldn't stand so close). There is even an entry on eyebrow clippings. He's done a tally and correctly estimates I get it done once a month. I might note that the beauticians use plastic tweezers - on the advice of Security.
Costello will come to nothing. That is my first core resolution. It's the half-grin I don't like. It writes smugness all over his face, as if he's behind all we've done. With Hawke and Keating, the Treasurer had a right to the big chair - but Costello? Well, I've not demanded much, just bring in the tax, quarry the mines, let the invisible hand of the market (our friends at the gentleman's clubs) get on with its business.
Costello had Labor's economic reforms to surf home on - all I had was a big pile of cow turd called 'political correctness.' I moved a self-righteous country that was scared of offending an ant's sensibilities to a State of shock-jockeydom. That's what I call a historic achievement. May a hundred prejudices blossom on the cow turd of the pink-Left!
The clock is ticking, it's close to midnight.
Dubya will back slap me again in public. That is my second core resolution. Not sure how I am going to get this one going. If we could get out of Iraq, I would. But the US will probably want to do a massive offensive before they go, so they can get rid of their excess munitions that will be too costly to return home. Dubya will want us in on it, but the body count might be high.
I've got Amanda working on conditional bridging visas that require compulsory service in war zones. I must admit, there's beauty in the irony of Iraqi refugees fighting Iraqi insurgents on their own home turf - something about crafty accounting I recall from those long-gone days of ledger sheets. There is the slight question of the Convention on Refugees, but hell, Dubya's made it clear where Conventions belong: in Pansy Alley with the lawyers.
The clock is clicking, and Janette moves closer to me.
I will end the culture wars. That is my third core resolution. I've been briefed that some academics who write for obscure journals, and who work in tax-funded (not for long) universities, have been talking about culture wars. They also think I have it in for them, but I don't even know their names - I prefer to court the journos.
Anyway, it's all a bit vague to me. Not sure why arts professors are going on about culture wars, shouldn't that be left to the medicos working on various strains of bacteria? It must be something to do with that horrendous trend towards inter-disciplinarity at universities. Little Nellie Brendan was complaining about it the other day when he was telling me which research grants he'd rejected, despite their getting the green light from the Australian Research Council.
Apparently, some bugger, literally, wanted to look at the constructed meaning (socially and medically) of 'transgendered lesbian relationships.' Funny how I should remember the details so well.
Anyway, back to the culture wars, I'll instruct the Health Department to contract a private company to see what lies behind these raging bacteria - I know that golden staf is taking over the hospitals, so it's getting serious. Whoever is behind this proliferation of colonising bacteria will be dealt with severely. Funny name for it though, 'culture wars' ...
It's midnight, the fireworks begin. Janette embraces me. No wires. 'God you've been a naughty boy this year,' she whispers in my ear. The clock's pendulum is vertical, and all is good in the world.
I am the iron man.
The National Interest
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com
When the Chips Are Down, the Gulls Get Pecking
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 17 August 2005
New Matilda
Nations are selfish by constitution. Exclusive, and often boys' clubs, they function to win people over to the narcissistic idea that there is a national character and a national interest that must be preserved. But this is not fruit we are talking about - nicely jarred in some rustic kitchen. No, the 'national interest' animates political life: commercialized sport is its stupid aspect, war its most malicious.The 'national interest' is advanced by, among other things, the covert state, the military state, and diplomatic gymnastics. Sometimes the national interest advances through breathtaking pragmatism - witness the 'no we won't sign, yes we will' position of the Australian Government regarding ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Episodes such as this are as enlightening to the true nature of the beast as watching seagulls fight over castaway chips on St Kilda beach.
Alexander Downer (a seagull in stockings?) has long been underestimated by those who glorify the legacy of the ALP's Gareth-Gareth Evans. He can squawk with the best of them - when the chips are down he goes in for the peck. He plays the game, and has won some mighty things. Thankfully, during Downer's tenure as Foreign Minister there is none of the dovish indulgence that featured in the preening days of Evans.
Gareth Evans, with Bruce Grant, wrote Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s (MUP, 1995). The book was an unabashed eulogy to Evans's foreign policy and became the standard text in university foreign policy courses. That's like reading history only through the memoirs of its vainglorious makers. It poisoned the critical mind of a generation of scholars and students with the idea that a government in power might do something good in the world if it could balance, prudently, morality and national interest. In his own reckoning, it seemed as if Evans was at the centre of every progressive development in international politics while he was Australia's Foreign Minister.This is what the mass of former diplomats miss the most, having a leader who gave their cause nobility. Downer has turned the diplomatic corps into second-hand car dealerships, soap-boxing for Australia's 'national interest'.
There is no shame in what Downer does: if we must go to war on totally false pretenses to maintain the US alliance, then that is what we must do. How more refreshing could it get? Downer has knifed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of its rhetorical fat, and given us a lean, mean machine of national interest. Downer spares us the huggish language of international good citizenship. He spares us having to cringe at a duplicitous policy shrouded in the language of noble intent: think the ALP, Evans and East Timor. Instead, Downer knows that the business of foreign policy is not to get elected to the UN Secretary General's position with barrels of idealist trash, but to get at the chips before the other bastards do. As he said in a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, in May 2002, 'To borrow the words of English realist Martin Wight, “A foreign minister is chosen and paid to look after the interests of his country, and not to delegate for the human race.”'
When Alexander Downer is seen as a paragon, the prudent foreign policy sage in all his pedestrian venality, we know something is wrong not just with the player but with the rules of the game. Indeed, let's go so far as to say something is wrong with the game itself.Do we really want to cling to a vision of the world based on map-lines that are materialized, very selectively, by passports and visas, and which are enforced by war machines? Should birth on the wrong side of a border have to entail starvation, as the world's nations judge famine to be low down in their priority list of national interest, even as they applaud themselves for their altruism on debt relief?
But what is the national interest? One answer is that those who have the power to define it, do so as they see fit. If this is so, we should understand foreign policy, contra textbook definitions, as 'the externalization of vested interest presented as the outcome of a national mandate'. That stamp - the mandated national interest - is more virtual than real because of the manufactured indifference to world affairs inherent in a consumer citizen. There is no real national mandate for foreign policy, only a slothful mandate at the best of times. For example let's take the typical consumer citizen: Epiphany, the sister of Mercedes and Paris, knows there is something wrong with the world when the petrol for her Landcruiser, which she needs to get her to rock-climbing classes at her inner-city gym, costs more than a meal in London. As she drives away from the petrol bowser, she hopes the US hurries up and wins the war in Iraq. Another example: Phillip, who enjoys knitting and delivering meals-on-wheels, is more upset by the number of times he has to knock on the door to rouse his soporific clients, than he is by ASIO's right to break down his neighbour's doors and take them in for questioning.
The whole character of contemporary life is geared towards the inane not to rational engagement with the world. Big Brother was not meant to be the spectator sport of watching characters with poorly-formed morals stumble through 24 hours of invited, benign surveillance. It was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of surrendering hard-won civil liberties at a time of crisis. But the state doesn't need the real Big Brother (except in reserve, for those few who escape the loop of inanity) as long as its dilettante cousin, TV, delivers the Weapons of Mass Stupefication.Apart from fleeting interest, the massacres, tragedies, betrayals and struggles that play out around the world, rarely touch us. Instead of hearing in the wind the sigh of humanity, we wonder if the wind portends rain and whether we should fetch an umbrella. In our inane world, tragedy and joy ring out equally from the cash register. It's a world of the envied nip-and-tuck as observed on TV; of fib and fuck in cricket; and of a squib of global havoc on SBS news.
I am not running the familiar 'the masses are stupid' argument. We are not. Rather, the system we currently labour and love under allows self-aggrandizing elites to ascend the ladder of opportunism, while ensuring there are enough crumbs to keep the masses at bay.It is a smart game, but not one the Establishment always wins. Millions protested the illegal war in Iraq, Americans are currently turning against Bush, and Blair remains under pressure despite a bomb-induced national piety.
As for Howard, we have a case of knowing what we've got: he softens an impending economic downturn by digging the quarries for the China boom, while shoo-ing concern for human rights into a private bilateral dialogue with the Chinese leadership; he keeps the national budget surplus by never allowing a line to be drawn in the rightful place across the Timor Sea; he signs and signs Free Trade Agreements with all and sundry to enable us to do what, by constitution, he deems we should do: produce and consume - in the national interest. On Thailand, where I am currently based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, I did not hear a pip-or-squeak from the Australian Government over the 'war on drugs' in 2003 that left close to 3000 people dead, nor was there any public statement against the mass killing of Muslim protestors in October 2004. Well of course I didn't hear anything - Australia was in the middle of negotiating and implementing a Free Trade Agreement with the Thai Government.
The 'big-quiet' on Thailand makes me wonder why Australia was reported as having concerns about ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and its principle of non-intervention/interference in the internal affairs of a member state. After all, when it comes down to it, Australia seems quite exemplary at keeping its hands off and its nose clean.Break down this stupor of the 'big-quiet' and we may succeed in seeing the crooked ways of a world bound by national boundaries and conceits, and recognize how such boundaries limit what we see and say. We may well be able to say that foreign policy is not in our name, only in our credit cards' name. Then we could begin the process of undoing the dissemblance of foreign policy and of the 'national interest'. We could construct policies that speak to our real selves as members of a broad human community, beyond the exclusive borders that enslave us to national accounts.Were that the case, the London bombings would not have led to the shameful liberal hysteria that recently arose around multiculturalism. Instead, we would look beyond national boundaries and ask what is wrong with ourselves and the world. At the very least, we would find that part of the answer lies in the national boundaries that imprison us all, and we might realize that if anything is in the national interest, then chances are it's wrong.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 17 August 2005
New Matilda
Nations are selfish by constitution. Exclusive, and often boys' clubs, they function to win people over to the narcissistic idea that there is a national character and a national interest that must be preserved. But this is not fruit we are talking about - nicely jarred in some rustic kitchen. No, the 'national interest' animates political life: commercialized sport is its stupid aspect, war its most malicious.The 'national interest' is advanced by, among other things, the covert state, the military state, and diplomatic gymnastics. Sometimes the national interest advances through breathtaking pragmatism - witness the 'no we won't sign, yes we will' position of the Australian Government regarding ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Episodes such as this are as enlightening to the true nature of the beast as watching seagulls fight over castaway chips on St Kilda beach.
Alexander Downer (a seagull in stockings?) has long been underestimated by those who glorify the legacy of the ALP's Gareth-Gareth Evans. He can squawk with the best of them - when the chips are down he goes in for the peck. He plays the game, and has won some mighty things. Thankfully, during Downer's tenure as Foreign Minister there is none of the dovish indulgence that featured in the preening days of Evans.
Gareth Evans, with Bruce Grant, wrote Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s (MUP, 1995). The book was an unabashed eulogy to Evans's foreign policy and became the standard text in university foreign policy courses. That's like reading history only through the memoirs of its vainglorious makers. It poisoned the critical mind of a generation of scholars and students with the idea that a government in power might do something good in the world if it could balance, prudently, morality and national interest. In his own reckoning, it seemed as if Evans was at the centre of every progressive development in international politics while he was Australia's Foreign Minister.This is what the mass of former diplomats miss the most, having a leader who gave their cause nobility. Downer has turned the diplomatic corps into second-hand car dealerships, soap-boxing for Australia's 'national interest'.
There is no shame in what Downer does: if we must go to war on totally false pretenses to maintain the US alliance, then that is what we must do. How more refreshing could it get? Downer has knifed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of its rhetorical fat, and given us a lean, mean machine of national interest. Downer spares us the huggish language of international good citizenship. He spares us having to cringe at a duplicitous policy shrouded in the language of noble intent: think the ALP, Evans and East Timor. Instead, Downer knows that the business of foreign policy is not to get elected to the UN Secretary General's position with barrels of idealist trash, but to get at the chips before the other bastards do. As he said in a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, in May 2002, 'To borrow the words of English realist Martin Wight, “A foreign minister is chosen and paid to look after the interests of his country, and not to delegate for the human race.”'
When Alexander Downer is seen as a paragon, the prudent foreign policy sage in all his pedestrian venality, we know something is wrong not just with the player but with the rules of the game. Indeed, let's go so far as to say something is wrong with the game itself.Do we really want to cling to a vision of the world based on map-lines that are materialized, very selectively, by passports and visas, and which are enforced by war machines? Should birth on the wrong side of a border have to entail starvation, as the world's nations judge famine to be low down in their priority list of national interest, even as they applaud themselves for their altruism on debt relief?
But what is the national interest? One answer is that those who have the power to define it, do so as they see fit. If this is so, we should understand foreign policy, contra textbook definitions, as 'the externalization of vested interest presented as the outcome of a national mandate'. That stamp - the mandated national interest - is more virtual than real because of the manufactured indifference to world affairs inherent in a consumer citizen. There is no real national mandate for foreign policy, only a slothful mandate at the best of times. For example let's take the typical consumer citizen: Epiphany, the sister of Mercedes and Paris, knows there is something wrong with the world when the petrol for her Landcruiser, which she needs to get her to rock-climbing classes at her inner-city gym, costs more than a meal in London. As she drives away from the petrol bowser, she hopes the US hurries up and wins the war in Iraq. Another example: Phillip, who enjoys knitting and delivering meals-on-wheels, is more upset by the number of times he has to knock on the door to rouse his soporific clients, than he is by ASIO's right to break down his neighbour's doors and take them in for questioning.
The whole character of contemporary life is geared towards the inane not to rational engagement with the world. Big Brother was not meant to be the spectator sport of watching characters with poorly-formed morals stumble through 24 hours of invited, benign surveillance. It was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of surrendering hard-won civil liberties at a time of crisis. But the state doesn't need the real Big Brother (except in reserve, for those few who escape the loop of inanity) as long as its dilettante cousin, TV, delivers the Weapons of Mass Stupefication.Apart from fleeting interest, the massacres, tragedies, betrayals and struggles that play out around the world, rarely touch us. Instead of hearing in the wind the sigh of humanity, we wonder if the wind portends rain and whether we should fetch an umbrella. In our inane world, tragedy and joy ring out equally from the cash register. It's a world of the envied nip-and-tuck as observed on TV; of fib and fuck in cricket; and of a squib of global havoc on SBS news.
I am not running the familiar 'the masses are stupid' argument. We are not. Rather, the system we currently labour and love under allows self-aggrandizing elites to ascend the ladder of opportunism, while ensuring there are enough crumbs to keep the masses at bay.It is a smart game, but not one the Establishment always wins. Millions protested the illegal war in Iraq, Americans are currently turning against Bush, and Blair remains under pressure despite a bomb-induced national piety.
As for Howard, we have a case of knowing what we've got: he softens an impending economic downturn by digging the quarries for the China boom, while shoo-ing concern for human rights into a private bilateral dialogue with the Chinese leadership; he keeps the national budget surplus by never allowing a line to be drawn in the rightful place across the Timor Sea; he signs and signs Free Trade Agreements with all and sundry to enable us to do what, by constitution, he deems we should do: produce and consume - in the national interest. On Thailand, where I am currently based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, I did not hear a pip-or-squeak from the Australian Government over the 'war on drugs' in 2003 that left close to 3000 people dead, nor was there any public statement against the mass killing of Muslim protestors in October 2004. Well of course I didn't hear anything - Australia was in the middle of negotiating and implementing a Free Trade Agreement with the Thai Government.
The 'big-quiet' on Thailand makes me wonder why Australia was reported as having concerns about ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and its principle of non-intervention/interference in the internal affairs of a member state. After all, when it comes down to it, Australia seems quite exemplary at keeping its hands off and its nose clean.Break down this stupor of the 'big-quiet' and we may succeed in seeing the crooked ways of a world bound by national boundaries and conceits, and recognize how such boundaries limit what we see and say. We may well be able to say that foreign policy is not in our name, only in our credit cards' name. Then we could begin the process of undoing the dissemblance of foreign policy and of the 'national interest'. We could construct policies that speak to our real selves as members of a broad human community, beyond the exclusive borders that enslave us to national accounts.Were that the case, the London bombings would not have led to the shameful liberal hysteria that recently arose around multiculturalism. Instead, we would look beyond national boundaries and ask what is wrong with ourselves and the world. At the very least, we would find that part of the answer lies in the national boundaries that imprison us all, and we might realize that if anything is in the national interest, then chances are it's wrong.
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