Public ideas
George Monbiot on neoliberalism – and much else
Last week, in the context of the EU elections, we provided a link to a discussion on Late Night Live between Phillip Adams and George Monbiot.
Monbiot’s cover of the elections was in the first 13 minutes. In the rest of the 54-minute session he went on to cover the coming UK election (July 4), the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, and the rise of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is the topic of his book, a cooperative venture with filmmaker Peter Hutchison, The invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism & how it came to control your life.
His history of neoliberalism covers the same ground that many others have covered – its emergence in reaction to Roosevelt’s New Deal, the forces that shaped the ideas of Austrian intellectuals fleeing totalitarianism, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the ultra-rich. But he adds the challenging idea that neoliberalism is presented and justified not as an ideology, but as a natural order, as if, to use Margaret Thatcher’s aphorism, there is no alternative. Ideologies, such as socialism or capitalism are conditional, subject to sceptical analysis, but a “natural order” is beyond dispute, and does not have to present a reasoned case for its dominance. That perspective goes some way to explaining why advocates of “small government” don’t feel that they need to present any reasoning or evidence to support their case: it’s just self-evident.
In his discussion of democracy’s shortcomings, he covers the claim, so often used by politicians, that the party that won an election has a “mandate” for the whole package of its policy platform. A moment’s thought about the narrowness of most election victories, and the broad nature of parties’ platforms, should lead us to resist claims of “mandates”.
It would be better, perhaps, if we could vote for parties on the basis of their principles, rather than on their often higgledy-piggledy platforms. These platforms have generally arisen from compromises between party factions, or deals with interest groups. (In the case of Australia’s Labor government that seems to have resulted in a little bit of socialism here, a little bit of free enterprise there, without any unifying principle.)
He also goes on to discuss political-economic arrangements in terms of systems theory. They are interactively complex ecosystems, in which certain behaviours may be emergent, but which cannot be modelled or analysed in the way economists and political scientists attempt. Such complex systems are unpredictable, and capable of significant and rapid shifts from one state to another.
Motivated ignorance – if you don’t know, make sure you don’t find out
In British folklore there is an apocryphal story about Admiral Nelson having deliberately held a telescope to his blind eye so that he could not see the commanding admiral’s order to withdraw from engagement with the Danish/French/Spanish/Germans or whatever other European power Britain was fighting at the time.
It may or may not be true, but it is certainly an example of what Peter Wehner, writing in The Atlantic, calls “motivated ignorance”: The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters. He writes:
Motivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity.
Understanding this phenomenon is important for those who see the solution to public policy problems in terms of information and education.
In fact, it may be the most knowledgeable, who have invested a great deal of effort into understanding a particular perspective of a phenomenon, who are most prone to the confirmation bias and are fearful of turning to information that may upset their Weltanschauung.
Our democracy needs a public broadcaster – a national campfire – more than ever
Those Australians who remember Redmond Barry know him as the judge who sentenced Ned Kelly to death, rather than as one who shaped Australia as a civilized society.
As a classically educated liberal, he understood that without libraries and universities and galleries and hospitals and all the other wonderful foundational institutions he built and served, the rebellious, populist energy that pervaded the colony might produce a state that was unenlightened, unequal and unfree. As we know to our cost today, populism often leads to disaster.
That’s a quote from the Redmond Barry Lecture, delivered by ABC Chair Kim Williams, in the State Library of Victoria – a building, an institution in fact, that owes its existence to Barry.
Any summary of Williams’ lecture would do it injustice: it’s worth reading in full. It runs almost seamlessly through five parts.
First, an account of Redmond Barry’s life and contribution to the colony, a contribution that was to be passed on to the young nation in the following century.
Second, a warning of the populist threat to democracy:
[Barry] would have understood the threat now posed by the dark, digitally-enabled populist forces that are at war with civilised values and human freedom across the globe.
Third, the digital challenge:
Like Redmond Barry, we too are living through an era of worrying populist challenge to the good society. … Digital technology is enabling one of the largest transfers of power in human history – from traditional authorities to consumers (who I prefer to call citizens). … But it is also leading to the rise of “dark forces” that make this transfer of power to citizens a potentially perilous undertaking, with dangerous consequences for our freedoms and our democracy.
Fourth, a challenge to the national broadcaster, a crucial institution in a society where the traditional media has been diminished, to take a stronger role:
The ability to create public, democratic, digital order is a matter of survival for all of us.
Fifth, some practical guidance for the ABC, that he collates under eight points. He concludes with a plea for more funding, on the basis of the de-facto greater burden placed on the national broadcaster as commercial media have been in retreat.
Let’s examine that a little further.
The ABC receives just over $1.0 billion of pubic funding a year.
Before people start asking how we can possibly afford that, let’s put $1 billion into perspective. This year, Australians will spend $30 billion on advertising. Of that, $15 billion is spent in media directly competing with the ABC.[1]
That $30 billion is akin to a sales tax, costing every Australian more than $1000 a year. Like the GST we cannot avoid it: it’s built into the price of everything we buy. But there the comparison with the GST ends, for while the GST does something useful – it funds schools, hospitals, roads and other state government services – advertising simply encourages us to spend on stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have, contributing to our inflation and debt problems.
Williams reminded his audience that authoritarian regimes find public broadcasters inconvenient. In 2018 the Liberal Federal Council voted to privatise the ABC, a push that was supported by the Institute of Public Affairs. The IPA repeated this call in 2021.
The “soft” alternative to privatisation is simply to cut its funding, which is easily achieved by freezing its appropriation in nominal terms and letting inflation do the job.
A related aspect of Williams’ lectures concerns the way the national broadcaster should handle matters of partisan politics. He is quite clear about the threat of Trumpian post-truth tactics, while cautiously avoiding directly confronting the issue in the Australian context.
But there is a great deal to be noted in his view of the broadcaster’s positive role where he says:
Frankly more ambition is required to refresh a sense and understanding of Australia’s great national institutions – our parliaments, our courts, our regulators and public policy processes.
If Australians had that understanding, they would not have been so easily swayed by the way the “No” campaign in the Voice referendum exploited the public’s ignorance of the Constitution to spread their “if you don’t know, vote no” campaign. The same applies to the lies spread about the government’s handling of non-citizens who have committed serious crimes: those lies would be ignored by a public who understood the separation of powers.
Over the following ten months or less the ABC will be operating in an increasingly pre-election period. In election periods the ABC has tended to interpret its standards on impartiality in terms of “balance” between the main parties. It was easy when there were two parties, and even when the duopoly was supplemented with one or two small left or right parties, but it’s all become much more complex over the last few elections, with independents holding many seats and other independents mounting serious campaigns.
More difficult for journalists is the basic rule in those standards relating to dealing with political perspectives, where it is stated “Do not unduly favour one perspective over another”.
In this address Williams has made clear his view on the cancel culture, the revision of history, suppression of freedom of expression and of civil rights. He is clearly favouring one perspective over another – a favouritism which would meet with agreement from most liberals, including Redmond Barry where he refers to:
The need to cherish and support our great public institutions, including our media institutions, to keep our enlightened, liberal-democratic society strong in the face of old and new threats. To provide the structures that can support reason, truth, freedom of speech, mutual understanding, culture, creativity, and national solidarity. And to create a national story that knits Australians together, so we can face the future with confidence.
How are ABC journalists to react when the candidates in one party reject the idea of “reason” and “truth”, choose polarization over “mutual understanding”, concoct a story based on confected identities that tear the country apart rather than “knits Australians together”, trash democratic institutions, and urge Australians to be fearful of the future rather than facing it “with confidence”?
1. Statista reports that in 2024 total advertising in Australia is to be $US19.65 billion, which comes to $A29.77 billion. Of this, $A 5.67 billion is for media entirely separate from the ABC – cinema, digital classified, digital messaging, outdoor, and influencer. Another $A9.11 billion is attached to search advertising. That still leaves $A15.00 billion in areas directly competing with the ABC. ↩