Public ideas
Populism has been rising. Can it be put down?
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Geraldine Doogue summarises the spirit of the times with this quote from W B Yeats, in last Saturday’s Global Roaming program – Populism rising.
The guests on this program are Anne Applebaum and Malcolm Turnbull. Between them they provide a worldwide and Australian account of the rise of populist strongmen who exploit the opportunity to present their offerings to people “yearning for simple solutions” to quote Turnbull.
Globalisation and technological change have widened economic disparities, leaving many people behind, but the grievances are not just economic. As Doogue says “the numbers may be fine but the vibes are bad”.
“The way of life I knew when I was younger is gone” is the way Applebaum articulates the sentiment behind Make America Great Again and similar movements. That way of life may be only imagined, or unsustainable, but the sense of loss is powerful.
Applebaum and Turnbull both come across as traditional Burkean conservatives, advocating incremental change to deal with serious problems such as climate change and widening inequality. The populists can be beaten: Turnbull believes governments with reform programs can bring people along with them, provided they offer a practical and understandable vision of where reform is leading and where people will be involved.
Turnbull believes that in democracies the populist will eventually get found out, and the electorate will return to traditional centrist governments, as they have done in the UK. That is, provided the populist, once having been elected, doesn’t change the rules so as to entrench his or her power, as has happened in Hungary and as Trump is proposing in the USA.
You can hear a longer session with Anne Applebaum on one of Phillip Adams’ last Late Night Live programs, reviewed and linked in the roundup of June 15.
Malcolm Turnbull’s public ideas are in his regular Defending democracy podcasts.
The search for the public life
Notice the name of the country we live in – the Commonwealth of Australia. It’s literally an acknowledgement of our common wealth, the public life we share (and a name we should retain when we have our own head of state).
Writing in The Monthly Jonathan Green traces the decline of the common good. “There’s something in the arrangement of the modern world that valorises individual effort while sweeping human unity under the carpet”, he observes.
In his journey he draws on many sources. He notes Hugh Mackay’s observation: “Fragmentation and division, that is the big story of contemporary life”.
He paraphrase’s Margaret Thatcher’s view of the world: “The collective does not exist other than as an unconnected collection of isolates”. He fears that this view has become normalized, supported by the isolating forces of digital technologies.
That doesn’t mean we are all comfortable in this world. He quotes extensively from Kos Samaras, who notices that people, aware of the absence of the collective are turning to small circles – their tribes or local communities.
That’s all very well, but in dealing with problems like inequality and climate change we need a bigger sense of the collective – a nation or the whole of humanity.
Ideas for Australian cities
Over the last couple of weeks readers have been sending links to ideas about the way we live in our cities.
Commuting: what’s important – the mode or the time?
The Climate Council has looked at the availability of public transport in our cities: Stuck in traffic: 7 million Aussies missing out on public transport. Only in Melbourne and Sydney do more than 50 percent of people have easy access to public transport.
The comparison between Melbourne and Sydney is revealing. Although the two cities have the same population, people living in Sydney are far better served by public transport than people living in Melbourne.
South Yarra Station
It’s strange, however, that the Climate Council should be taking up public transport as an end in itself, because it seems to cut across their climate change brief.
Our bus fleets are served largely by diesel buses, and much of Adelaide’s suburban rail is served by diesel trains. At the same time electric cars are making a steady penetration of the car market, and more people are working from home. Until our public transport systems are electrified, they will go on making their own contribution to emissions.
Even though the Climate Council seems to have confused means and ends, its findings on public transport say a great deal about the way we live in cities. One of its most striking findings is that only 5 to 6 percent of Australians use what they call “active transport” – cycling or walking. These are the most private of private transport, and tend to be overlooked by city planners who prioritize “public” transport.
The work of the Climate Council is outlined in a 10-minute interview, ironically on the ABC’s Drive program, where Estelle Grech of the Committee for Sydney outlines the findings of the study: How can we fix commuting?
The ABC’s Ahmed Yussuf, in a post How do Australian worker commute times compare to Europe and North America? draws attention to 2019 findings of the HILDA project (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia). It looked at commuting in its study of the way Australians balance work and home lives, finding that workers in 2017 were spending 4.5 hours a week commuting, up from 3.7 hours in 2017. Yussuf points out that Australians have longer commuting times than people living in other countries.
Policymakers can easily get drawn into seeing the provision of public transport as an end in itself, when maybe the most important issue, as Yussuf suggests, is the time spent in commuting and in other journeys. A city in which most people have ten-minute commutes in cars, on foot or by bicycle, may be much more pleasant than one in which most people have half-hour commutes by public transport.
Urban travel needs, as Grech points out, are related to urban planning decisions about location of employment, retail zones, entertainment, public housing and open space. Policymakers need to appreciate that cities are complex ecosystems that require a system approach rather than pursuit of a single objective such as “public transport”.
Making the best use of toll roads
Phil Laird has brought to our attention a Conversation contribution by David Levinson of the University of Sydney: Toll roads charge too much yet we don’t have enough of them. To fix both things, NSW should buy their private owners. He outlines some of the well-known problems with toll roads, mainly that they remain under-utilized while people avoid tolls by rat running in already congested routes, essentially defeating the very purpose of toll roads. (Economists identify this as a case of “deadweight loss”, which can occur when a high quality but underutilized charged system is in competition with an uncharged system.)
Why pay to drive on a toll road when you can rat-run?
The economists’ ideal solution is comprehensive road user charging, such charging covering all construction and maintenance costs, as well as externalities relating to pollution and congestion.
Levinson’s approach is more pragmatic. It involves bringing Sydney’s existing toll roads into public ownership, and managing them as a sub-system in a way that optimizes their contribution to the larger system of Sydney’s road network. That could involve higher or lower tolls, or even free travel, depending on the time of day and congestion.
Anther case of the costly legacy of privatization.
Don’t forget freight
It is notable that most discussions about urban road congestion and pollution is about “cars”. In fact our roads are used by buses, heavy trucks and light delivery vehicles, and the pollution from these sources is growing much faster than pollution from cars.
Phil Laird has drawn our attention to work by researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology: Why electric beats hydrogen in the race to decarbonise freight vehicles in Australia. In part it’s about whether hydrogen or electric is the better path for de-carbonizing freight transport. All things considered, using life-cycle costing, the researchers come down in favour of electric trucks.
The main point in relation to urban development is that one should consider all vehicles and transport needs, not just passenger cars.
High rise or green space? There need not be a conflict
Just a few decades ago Australian cities were characterised by a combination of single house suburban blocks, interspersed with two and three-storey blocks of “flats”, generally not worthy of the upmarket descriptor “apartments”.
That has all changed, in a short time, and now there is an emphasis on densification, particularly around urban rail systems. Our cities are starting to look more like Hong Kong and less like Los Angeles.
In a Conversation contribution – How to ensure higher-density housing developments still have enough space for residents’ recreation needs – Anthony Veal of Sydney’s University of Technology and Awais Piracha of Western Sydney University outline how open spaces and other recreational needs can be incorporated into urban planning. Approaches have to be far more systems-oriented than traditional approaches such as plot ratios, or specifications such as X hectares of open space per 1000 population.
Housing as a right
Chris Martin of the University of New South Wales, writing in The Conversation, describes a bill introduced by independent federal parliamentarians Kylea Tink and David Pocock which would see housing considered as a fundamental human right for all Australians and would require the government to create a ten-year national housing and homelessness plan: A new bill is proposing a human right to housing. How would this work?.
It’s hardly radical: a housing and homelessness plan is one part of Labor’s election promises. But it would be a significant step towards our understanding of housing as a basic need, rather than as a vehicle for financial speculation, and rather than as something for governments to spend money on when fiscal circumstances permit.