Public ideas
Australia’s adaption to a world transformed
If you are ready for 70 minutes of challenging ideas you might want to watch one of Nicholas Gruen’s Uncomfortable collisions with reality YouTube clips, Rent seeking or competitive oligarchy?, an extended interview with Greg Smith, a former adviser to John Button.
That title doesn’t do the session full justice, because it is really about the world in which Australia has to make its way – the world transformed by Trump’s presidency.
The title refers to the American economy, an economy whose viability is threatened by the rise of China. If you applied old US-USSR way of thinking about the competition between communism and capitalism to this current conflict you would get it entirely wrong, however. Smith has a sharp insight into both the US and Chinese economies, which allows him to frame his analysis in terms of economic structure rather than expressed ideologies.
Most of the discussion is about the disruption to the world order precipitated by Trump’s re-election. Trump’s administration has made the first steps towards fascism, but that path is not inevitable: there could still be a reversion. But Australia has to be ready to make new economic and strategic alliances, preferably with other nations committed to economic openness and free trade. Maybe we should see Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 the same way as we saw the fall of Singapore in February 1942 – an event to which our government responded with a rapid reconfiguration of alliances and loyalties.
Smith wonders, however, if we have the state capacity to handle this change. The interview took place before our federal election. Albanese’s highly-publicised visit to China, his other post-election travels, and his shrugging off of criticisms that he has not yet met the US president, all suggest that his thinking is in line with Smith’s analysis of events.(A Pew Research Center poll, just published, reveals that a majority of Australians now say it is more important to have strong economic ties with China than with the United States. This is a sharp reversal of the findings of a similar poll in 2021.
What is a mandate?
Writing in The Saturday Paper constitutional and governance expert Jenny Hocking discusses what it means when a government claims to have a “mandate” to implement its policies, and even what it means when an opposition says it has a “mandate” to thwart the government’s program: Understanding Albanese’s mandate.
Spoiler. She rules out a large parliamentary majority as a sufficient condition for a government to claim a mandate. In fact her idea of what constitutes a mandate is quite tightly defined.