Other politics
The Liberal Party and net zero
It’s not about energy or the environment: it’s about a Trumpist grab for power within the party.
The Liberal Party’s decision to drop net zero is so politically and economically stupid that it’s hardly worth the effort of making a critical comment.
The party was committed to net zero in 2021. Four years later, with tumbling costs of renewable energy and stronger manifestations of the effect of global warming, the case for net zero by 2050 is even stronger.
The supposed issue is about the price of electricity. The party seems to have been convinced by its own lie about high electricity prices having resulted from the government’s commitment to renewable sources. But even if there were no target, the least costly way to provide electricity over the next 25 years is through a combination of low-cost renewable supply, storage, and demand management.
That is, unless we choose to use nuclear power as a means of decarbonizing electricity supply, or abandon climate responsibility and build coal and gas generators. The trouble with all three modes is that they are all high cost, and no businesses would invest in them without large government subsidies. That goes against the party’s stated commitment to reduce the price of electricity, and its general principle of preferring market measures to state interventions.
Those in the Parliamentary Liberal Party who can assess the politics and economics of the party’s stance on net zero must surely be dismayed. On Thursday morning’s Radio National Breakfast Senator Andrew McLachlan seems to have spoken for those few: “We should have a target”: Liberal senator reflects on net zero debate. It is notable that he comes from South Australia, the state that has made most progress in the energy transition. It is also notable that as a Senator he is effectively representing urban Australia, because in South Australia the Coalition holds none of the state’s 8 urban House of Representatives seats.
It's hard to believe that the divisions in the Liberal Party have anything to do with energy policy. If energy policy were the issue there would be policies relating to transport and agriculture. It would be criticizing the government for allowing networks and “retailers” to price-gouge electricity users.
The divisions are about something else. Some say it’s about undermining Sussan Ley, perhaps because she is a woman and perhaps because they seek a scapegoat to blame for poor polling. More likely they’re about re-gathering the forces of the populist right, who see politics as a mission to topple the illegitimate “Labor” government, regardless of the cost to the national interest, and establishing in Australia what Trump is establishing in the USA.
The Whitlam legacy
Remember the Whitlam government by its achievements, not by the treachery of men loyal to a foreign monarch.
The drama of the Dismissal has distracted us from the extraordinary achievements of the Whitlam government. Michelle Arrow of Macquarie University, has a short Conversation contribution reminding us of those achievements: Extraordinary and occasionally inept: before The Dismissal, the Whitlam government changed Australia forever.
She draws attention to some of those initiatives – universal primary health care, the end of White Australia, equal pay for women, land rights for indigenous Australians, the rejection of colonial symbolism, the promotion of Australian arts – the list could go on.
She doesn’t mention the extraordinary difficulties the Whitlam government had in achieving these breakthroughs, because during its brief time in office (3 years punctuated by a double-dissolution election) the postwar economic order – the 1944 Bretton Woods order – collapsed. It faced a hostile Senate where the Coalition and the DLP held a majority, and the Coalition, outraged that that the Australian people had voted out the country’s natural party of government, had plenty of fighting spirit.
She covers the Whitlam government’s main policy achievements, but it’s hard to capture in writing the extent of the social and political transformation that occurred over those three years.
By 1972 the Coalition, having been in office for 23 years, was tired and complacent. The world was changing around Australia, and at home there was pent-up demand for change, but the Coalition wasn’t listening. That’s why it’s an overstatement to label the Whitlam government as radical, when in fact much of its platform was catching up on what had been neglected.
In fact the incoming Fraser government, apart from being gripped by an obsessive desire to reinstate private health insurance, did little to demolish the Whitlam reforms.
Arrow’s conclusion captures the enduring nature of the Whitlam legacy:
Whitlam’s expansive national vision – democratic, fair and self-reliant – helped define the contours of contemporary Australia. His agenda for reform produced tangible improvements to the lives of millions of Australians. This policy impact is why Whitlam still matters.
How Australian democracy came about
We made our own way, relatively unencumbered by the baggage of Old World conventions.
“A radical experiment” is how Justin Wolfers described out democratic institutions in his Boyer Lecture (linked in the 1 November roundup).
Annabel Crabb complements Wolfers’ work by explaining how these institutions came about, in her Saturday Extra session with Nick Bryant, introducing her Civic Duty series, which started on Monday. Wolfers described them as “freaking amazing”; Crabb chooses “exotic, improbable, a baffling combination of attributes”.
Crabb explains that in some cases, such as the secret ballot, these institutions and practices developed because intelligent and serious-minded people in the colonies wanted to improve on the crude and rough voting model prevailing in England, while in other cases, such as preferential voting, it was almost by happenstance.
For example Australia was also the first place in the world to establish an independent electoral authority when the newly-appointed Sheriff of South Australia, William Boothby, had to quickly organize the colony’s 1856 election. He had a personal curiosity about electoral systems and some ideas of his own, and he was unencumbered by precedent, because this was the colony’s first parliamentary election.
She explains that our Constitution has little to say on electoral matters, except where they were relevant to states’ interests, reminding us that the main interest of our constitutionalists was about bringing the federation together. That’s why our democratic institutions rest more on convention, and High Court interpretations, rather than on constitutional statements of principle.
Crabb’s first Civic Duty television segment covers much the same ground as her Saturday Extra session, with the benefit of video displaying the huge and meticulously organized operation the Australian Electoral Commission undertakes at each election, in a country where the timing of the election is the prime minister’s choice, and where there is very little time before pre-poll voting starts. The physical scale of the operation is impressive.
What we think of democracy
We like democratic institutions when they’re kept at arm’s length from politicians.
You may have heard a short segment on Radio National’s AM program, Australians losing trust in democracy. The segment is mainly about the McKinnon Institute’s publication of the McKinnon Index – “An annual dashboard of democratic health”.
As an inaugural index it doesn’t tell us anything about whether we are losing trust in democracy: we have to wait a few years until it can generate meaningful time series, but it does have a large amount of comparative data, by age and region, about Australians’ attitudes to democracy’s institutions.
The Institute’s website is not easy to navigate, but it’s worthwhile to start with its main document which summarizes its findings. To mention some that stand out:
We have high trust in independent public institutions, such as the Australian Electoral Commission and the law courts. A little lower down the line come public servants, and further down the list come politicians and governments. Political parties occupy the very bottom of our trust scale.
We are a little more trusting of state governments than we are of the federal government, but not markedly so. This is revealing, because in the US, for example, there is a huge gap between people’s trust of the federal government (rock bottom) and their trust of state governments (low but better than trust for the federal government).
Our main reason for voting is to “influence decisions”, followed by “civic responsibility”. The weakest reason is to “support preferred party”. We could imagine asking those same questions in earlier times, when “support for preferred party” may have had a higher ranking.
People living in the big cities are more satisfied with democracy and public services than people living in non-metropolitan regions. On the ABC segment linked above is the suggestion that lower education, a feeling that their public services are poorer than those provided in the cities, and the decline of local media may be explanatory factors.
Young people show less support for democracy, are less interested in politics, and have less faith in electoral outcomes than older people, but they are more satisfied with public services than older people are. This hints at a transactional model of government.
Young people are much more likely to say they cannot be friends with people who hold opposing political views, and 9 percent of young men say they are prepared to support extreme political measures, including violence.
Australian voters explained
The “rusted on” voter is an endangered species: Labor should take note.
John Quiggin has a warning for Labor in his post What are “rusted-on” Labor voters thinking?
He goes through the reasons, four in all, why 35 percent of voters last May voted for Labor, and why another 20 percent directed their preferences to Labor. He identifies a core of people who have been consistently voting Labor, but they don’t seem to be “rusted on”. Labor, with help from an opposition determined to consign itself to irrelevance, may enjoy the status of the centrist “natural party of government”, but that’s not going to hold on to people “who actually care about policy outcomes”.
In this regard Quiggin’s analysis is supported by research conducted by the McKinnon Institute, linked in this roundup, which surveyed people to find their main reason for voting. The results, shown in the graph below, offers no comfort for politicians who believe that their party can hold on to a core of “rusted on” voters.
Nazis in Australia
The Nazis who came to Australia 80 years ago were even uglier than the thugs who turn up to demonstrate, but they dared not show their faces.
(Almost) every Australian was sickened by the sight of 60 or so black-clad men carrying Nazi symbols (and that colonial-era “Australian” flag) assembled outside the New South Wales Parliament – our country’s oldest parliamentary chambers.
The display was brazen in its offensiveness, in its insult to the efforts men and women of Australia have put into building the open, multicultural country we enjoy, where people can leave behind the ethnic and racial grievances of the places they have come from.
But at least they are shameless enough to show themselves in public, revealing by their small numbers just how isolated they are.
They are not the first Nazis to have appeared in Australia. Writing in The ConversationKristy Campion of Charles Sturt University describes Nazis in Australia in past times who would not have dared reveal themselves in public.
Her article A history of Australia’s Nazi hunters reveals a troubling tolerance for war criminals is a review of the book Nazis in Australia: The Special Investigations Unit, 1987-1994 – compiled by Graham Blewitt and edited by Mark Aarons.
The book is about dedicated Nazis, some of whom had committed horrendous war crimes, who came to Australia in the aftermath of Europe’s 1914-1945 war.
We weren’t as openly accommodating as Argentina, but we weren’t particularly diligent in tracking them down. It was only in the 1980s, when in cooperation with Nazi hunters in Germany and Israel, that the government established a “Special Investigations Unit” to track those who were still alive. The unit’s work was significant in signalling Australians’ disgust at Nazism, but in terms of prosecutions its success was limited: 30 years gives ample time for people to hide.
It is not surprising that Nazis came to Australia. The period after the war was one of turmoil, involving the urgent movement of millions of people. But as soon as the Nazis had been defeated in Germany the attention of western governments turned to the supposed threat of communism. Encouraged by national governments, during the Cold War security agencies became politicized, obsessed with supposed threats from the “left”, and blind to right-wing extremism.