Politics
Shakespeare on politics
John Bell is presenting this year’s Boyer Lectures, and unsurprisingly he will be talking to us about Shakespeare. His lectures Shakespeare: soul of the age “examine how the Bard's life and works have profound relevance to contemporary issues, such as political self-interest, gender inequality and the growing need for good governance.”
His first lecture – Life Lessons from Shakespeare – introduces us to this playwright, observer of the human character, political commentator, satirist … “No other artist has ever even attempted such a wide range of expression”.
Reflecting on the speeches of Mark Antony and Henry V, Bell observes that “language has more than just lyrical beauty; when used by a gifted speaker, it can have powerful political consequences”.
In that regard we might think of Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, or, closer to home, Paul Keating in his 1992 Redfern Speech and his 1993 Unknown Soldier Speech. But the power of rhetoric does not always lie with the righteous or the honourable: Bell reminds that Hitler and Trump stand out for their command of language. He writes that societies embrace a “leader” offering “blunt and simple answers to complex questions”. (“Jobs and growth”, and “Technology not taxes” come to mind.)
Morrison – crafted authenticity
Morrison was unknown to the public when he took over from Malcolm Turnbull in the 2018 putsch. Writing in Inside Story – Inventing ScoMo – Sean Kelly describes how, almost immediately on becoming Prime Minister, Morrison went about crafting an image to display to the public, presenting himself as “the authentic outsider”, while downplaying and ridiculing established institutions, including government itself.
Kelly’s analysis is largely around the way Morrison wove snippets about football (rugby league) into his media appearances as a means of establishing his “authenticity”. That image as an authentic bloke didn’t really tell us much about Morrison – certainly nothing about his political beliefs or moral codes – but people were able to latch on to it. It gave him enough of a lift in the opinion polls to establish his position within the Liberal Party and to scrape his way into winning the 2019 election.
Albanese – authentic small target
Hardly a dinner-table conversation in Canberra does not find someone asking why Anthony Albanese doesn’t come out of his cocoon. Why does he not announce some grand policy initiatives that will capture the headlines? Why does he not lay out a social-democratic agenda?
The short answer, in an Inside Story article by Brett Evans – How Labor wins – is that Albanese doesn’t have to do any of these things. Opinion polls reveal that the Coalition is in deep trouble, although you wouldn’t know it from the Murdoch media.
In Labor’s three federal victories in the last 70 years – Whitlam in 1972, Hawke in 1983, Rudd in 2007 – the common element has been that “they faced tired, dysfunctional Coalition governments”. This government is certainly dysfunctional, (But is it tired? They have plenty of energy to fight one another.)
Evans believes that the election will almost certainly be fought on climate change: can we trust the Coalition to take us through the difficult task of structural change to decarbonize our economy?
Our vandalized relationship with France
Last week’s roundup covered press reports of French Ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault’s address to the National Press Club following Morrison’s abrupt announcement of the AUKUS deal. Those reports and comments by other parties tended to focus on Morrison’s deceit and diplomatic ineptitude – serious issues in themselves.
Thebault’s full address is now available on ABC iview. His message is about much more than cancellation of a contract. It is about scuttling a relationship involving defence cooperation, not just with France, but with Europe as a whole.
This was not a commercial contract. This was not about the merchandise. It was about an agreement, an alliance.
The relationship developing around the submarine contract was about transfer of technology, including a sharing of France’s strategic secrets, and establishment of a sophisticated naval shipbuilding facility. Thebault mentions several times that the relationship preserved and enhanced Australia’s defence sovereignty, while he politely contrasts it to the AUKUS deal that involves a subservient role for Australia (if it ever comes off).
France, along with other mainland European countries, has an ongoing strategic interest in the Asia-Pacific region. As diplomatically as he can put it, he suggests that Europe’s interests in the region may better align with Australia’s security interests than America’s interests do.
His speech is 43 minutes. In the first 34 minutes he talks about the damaged defence relationship, before he moves on to climate change, another area where he politely hints that the Morrison government is not living up to its responsibilities.
Why have Americans turned against the Democrats?
Commentators are looking for specific reasons, such as Republicans’ dirty tricks, or poor showing by individual candidates, for the Democrats’ poor performance in recent state and local elections. But the swing was general, across regional, ethnic, gender and racial groups, writes Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson: Democrats Are Getting Crushed in the “Vibes War”.
He notes that “despite many positive economic trends, Americans are feeling rotten about the state of things – and, understandably, they’re blaming the party in power”. Even though official measures show the economy to be booming, consumer confidence is down. To put the mood into Australian vernacular, Americans are pissed off.
That’s the present mood, but he believes that as vaccine mandates take effect, and as the labour market and commodity markets settle down, voters will come back to support the governing Democrats before the 2022 mid-term elections.
Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian, believes that once again the working class has abandoned the Democrats, or more properly that the Democrats have forgotten how to engage with the working class: It’s not all about the culture war – Democrats helped shaft the working class. The working class is not lost to the Democrats, he believes. The Democrats need to pull together “a large coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, Blacks and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the huge shift in wealth and power to the top”. And they need to distance themselves from the top end of town. (Is such class-based politics possible, however, in a country held together by a myth that it does not have class?)
James Arvanitakis, writing in Open Forum, A week in politics the Democrats must learn from, believes that the Democrats must focus on the economic conditions of the working class, while acknowledging that the working class is socially conservative, and likely to be working in industries subject to global competition and pressure to reduce GHG emissions. Issues such as “defund the police” do not resonate with them.
Close the schools?
In an article on Club Troppo, Nick Gruen has resurrected Ivan Illich’s 1971 utopian idea of deschooling society, without necessarily endorsing it. Illich believed that schools prepared young people to live in a society in which they would accept without question their place in the institutions of market capitalism. If schools could be de-institutionalized, society could be de-institutionalized. (Fifty years on we might ask if, in 1971 when Trump was still in his formative years and Morrison was an infant, Illich realized that while schools may indeed support the institutions of capitalism, they can also support the institutions of democracy.)
Gruen’s article Practical steps towards Ivan Illich’s world doesn’t go as far down the libertarian and anarchist path as Illich, but he does suggest that professions and associations should be less bound by institutional norms – norms that are shaped by small elites – and become more representative of the people affected by their behaviour. He is enthusiastic about mechanisms such as citizens’ juries, for example.
Journalism in an age of impunity
Peter Pomerantsev is a British journalist, born in the Soviet Union. On the ABC’s Sunday Extra program he discusses with Julian Morrow the task of journalists reporting on human rights abuses. While journalism has always been dangerous, it has become easier to report on what’s going on, but at the same time accounts of human rights abuses seem to have less influence on public opinion and on pressure for political action than they once had. Also, the tyrants exposed by such abuses seem to suffer no shame, fear or embarrassment. It’s as if such behaviour has become normalized in the public mind.
He believes that the narrative of human rights has possibly been over-used by those who have no commitment to implementing them. Did not Bush use the language of human rights to justify US military action in the middle east, for example?
Observing protest movements around the world, Pomerantsev is reasonably optimistic about the future, however, and he has some advice for journalists who would like their work to have more impact. (16 minutes)
The essay to which he refers is Memory in the age of impunity, on the Coda Story website.
Political loyalty for sale
Brendan Lyon is a former Liberal Party staffer, a former head of Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, and a board member of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific. He has also been a consultant working for one of the big four accounting firms providing advice to governments.
One of the readers of this roundup has drawn attention to Lyon’s difficult relation with the New South Wales Government when he dared to give independent advice about safety issues. His case is described by Bernard Keane writing in Crikey: Brendan Lyon exposes the down and dirty world of high-stakes consulting.
It’s an account of how governments use consultants not to provide an independent or outside perspective, but to provide advice in line with what the government wants to be told. If one consulting firm doesn’t provide that advice the government’s loyal myrmidons will keep hounding and bullying consultants until they find one ready to abandon professional standards and provide the advice the government wants to hear. Once such compliant consultants are found, they become embedded within the circles advising government, in positions traditionally occupied only by senior public servants.
Gaming
“Implementation theory” is a high-falutin name given to the study of a branch of game theory. In many situations involving parties with different interests, although there are “win/win” opportunities, the path to those opportunities is often blocked by the apparently limited number of choices available to parties seeking agreement. His point is illustrated by the problem of achieving international cooperation on climate change, a textbook example of the “prisoners’ dilemma”: because short-term advantages accrue to countries that can free-ride off the efforts of others, every country has a disincentive to make the first move.
Writing in The Conversation, UNSW economist Richard Holden, using a biblical example, points out that although the formal study of games and strategy is comparatively recent, there have always been wise people with a sound working understanding of implementation theory: Vital Signs: Borrowing from King Solomon, economists are getting closer to working out how good leaders can make good decisions. His message, consistent with the findings of negotiation theory, is that people need to feel comfortable in revealing their interests and their private information, and that policy makers need to be on the lookout for situations in which parties have an incentive to game the system through strategic behaviour that thwarts the achievement of mutually beneficial outcomes.
More people are hungry
The UN world Food Program reports on growing hunger in the world. The number of people “teetering on the edge of famine” has risen to 45 million – up from 42 million last year and 27 million in 2019. Most hunger they report is in Africa and the Middle East: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.