Nuclear Security and Strategic Analyses Dr Marko Beljac

Australia Moves to the Left: The 2010 Federal Election

The following is also posted at my Maxim international relations blog at The Analyst.

For the first time since 1945 Australian public opinion is to the left of the Australian Labor Party. The Labor Party has leaked votes to the Greens. Three conservative, but state-interventionist minded, independents seemingly hold the balance of power in the House. The Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate. The informal vote increased sharply.

Neither of the political groupings that now appear to hold the balance of power in both houses of parliament are devotees of neoliberalism. Never during the neoliberal era in Australia has such a course of events transpired.

This is all a tad ironic, or sad for many labour movement activists and supporters, because Julia Gillard was able to assume high office only after ditching the beliefs she held when she was a part of the Victorian Socialist Forum. A nominally left wing Prime Minister may well lose office because, in part, she moved too far to the right on key issues such as global warming and was not able to, or did not want to, embed the fiscal stimulus and national broadband narratives within a broader narrative focused on the poverty of free market fundamentalism. When she ousted Kevin Rudd she had actually praised John Howard and Peter Costello for continuing neoliberal free market reforms!

Which Julia is the "real" Julia? The Julia of the Socialist Forum? The Julia before she became PM? The Julia after the first week of the election campaign? I don't know, and neither do most Australians it would seem.

The Australian Labor Party is a party in crisis. It is perceived as a party that stands for nothing, believes in nothing, that is dominated by apparatchiks and hacks who live for the political process and so on. I believe these perceptions to be accurate ones. The Labor Party has slowly evolved from being a mass based political party, intimately connected to broader social movements, to being an electoral machine, much like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US.

A labour/social democratic party that allows itself to lose its social base is a party that is always vulnerable to a coordinated assault from capital. The rise of Abbottman is indeed one of the most extraordinary in Australian political history. However, the rise of Abottman was largely manufactured by very powerful establishment forces, aided and abetted by a compliant corporate media. This has been the case from the conservative coup against Malcolm Turnbull all the way up to yesterday's election.

It is said that Labor lost votes in NSW and QLD because state governments there are on the nose. This obscures the fact that brand Labor is on the nose in NSW and QLD for many of the same underlying reasons that brand Labor was on the nose federally. It was the eerie affinity between the soulless Labor brand in these states and the federal brand that Abbottman's spin doctors were able to exploit. This cannot be ignored.

A labour based party deeply connected with its social base can withstand establishment assaults. The ALP of a Chifley, an Evatt, a Calwell, for instance, had it much tougher. The establishment would regularly line up against Labor en mass. But their primary vote didn't sink to Gillard like lows. One reason is because they had a social movement underneath them acting as a solid line of self defence. To be sure Chifley, Evatt and Calwell lost elections, but from 1949 to 1972 labour did not lose. It held the line.

Despite the power of the rich elites, that lie behind the manufactured rise of Abbottman, it is by no means clear that they have carried the day. I tend to think that they haven't. I think this would still be accurate even should Abbottman form a government. Whatever agenda they have covertly mapped out for Abbottman cannot be readily implemented by a minority government, given the balance of power in Parliament.

The Parliament of Australia is no longer controlled by the cash upped elites.

During the neoliberal era the ALP has fretted away its connection to broadly based popular and social movements. More valued was the "policy adviser", the "stacker", the "media and communications officer", the advertising "guru" and the like. From such stuff a progressive party of social reform is not made. The Abbottman assault could have been comfortably checked and parried by a labour movement with deeper connections to the community.

The same observations apply to the trade union movement. The union movement, under the aegis of The Accord, played a critical role in bringing about neoliberalism. It was the union movement that delivered wage restraint in the context of lower levels of industrial disputation. Whilst the rich were hamming it up, whilst profits were rising, the unions disciplined the working class and, furthermore, delivered wage restraint. The union movement is no less dominated by apparatchiks and factional operatives than the Labor Party. Without a truly grassroots based unionism, that takes away the power of the union bosses, labour based politics in Australia will remain in crisis.

Much has been written about affluent leftists supporting the Greens in the inner city. But consider. My electorate is one of the safest Labor seats in Parliament, namely Gorton. In total the Greens vote in Gorton was less than the state wide vote for the Greens. This tends to reinforce the stereotype. However, a lot of that was due to a lower Greens vote in Caroline Springs and Cairnlea. This is the more affluent McMansions end of the electorate. The Greens vote in places like Deer Park (my booth) and Kings Park was just about on a par with the average Greens vote.

Labor is leaking votes to the Greens even in working class booths. That tells you something, no? OK, that's just my electorate. But I have looked at Swan in Western Australia, which I know a little bit about, and the same shows up in places like Bentley and Victoria Park. These are some of the working class booths that gave the seat, famously, to Kim Beazley in 1993.

I look forward to writing some more about these issues and the election.

In short, I think that Australia has moved to the left in this election, that Abbottman was pushed by powerful establishment based forces, he might well form a minority government, and the ALP is a party that is in crisis.

A Delusion of Grandeur: Kevin Rudd in Politics

If Graham Freudenberg was able to write of Gough Whitlam's political career that it exhibited “a certain grandeur”, then for Kevin Rudd we might speak of “a delusion of grandeur.”

Many of his most vocal supporters shared in this delusion. For instance his lead cheerleader amongst the Australian intelligentsia, Robert Manne, even went so far as state that Rudd's critics did not seem to understand that the colossus from Griffith was “an intellectual in politics,” who was “struggling” to simultaneously both “understand and change” the world. No self respecting philosopher king can take seriously Marx's clarion call in the Theses on Feuerbach.

For Rudd ,and Manne, such an injunction is too modest by half.

Rudd seems to have seen himself as some sort of philosopher king with a Hawkian “special relationship” with the Australian people to boot. His political legitimacy and authority resided in his own personality and talent.

This delusion of grandeur proved to be his undoing.

How else to explain his claim that he did not owe his leadership to the ALP? How else to explain the sheer contempt that he showed the party during the course of his leadership? For example, by coming and going as he pleased at the last ALP national conference? By announcing on radio, well away from the conference, that its resolutions, especially on tax reform, are irrelevant? Not even Paul Keating would have displayed such brazen contempt.

By sidelining cabinet, even to the extent of exiting cabinet meetings to attend to petty media interviews? How else to explain the extraordinary level of centralisation that he vested in the leader's office, against more than a century's worth of Labor tradition that places primacy upon the parliamentary party?

He treated both the Labor Party and the Labour movement with contempt. He did so because of his grandiloquent view of himself, but his leadership was based on nothing else other than high standing in the polls. When those polls turned against him so did the party he viewed as an irrelevant appendage.

He was not able to see this until the end. Such are the delusions of grandeur.

A good deal of commentary has focused on the manner in which Rudd was replaced as leader.

Attention has been especially drawn to the role of factional and union power brokers in his ousting and the efficient manner in which they organised his “assassination.” This aspect of the Rudd downfall has been best encapsulated by Mark Latham and Paul Kelly. Writing in the The Australian Financial Review Latham observed that (AFR, 25 June 2010, p24), “the leadership of Australia's oldest political party has become a transit lounge, controlled by poll and media obsessed appartchiks.”

Latham surely has a point.

The ascension of Gillard did not follow on from policy or ideological differences. This is not a political party that is struggling with its soul, with its policy direction, with its goals and visions, and so has changed its leader. “Our princess” Julia Gillard was seen as a better prospect at the next election. So the powers that be helped to elevate her to the leadership.

Commenting upon the Latham thesis Kelly states in The Australian today that the Rudd ouster, “reveals a party governed not by ideas but powerful interests that span networks of factional, trade union, family and special interest group connections that thrive on the patronage, finances and appointments that only incumbency can deliver.”

That is also true. However, it is possible to overcook this view.

What Latham and Kelly state is surely correct. But there were more issues and, crucially, more players involved. There is a widespread view amongst the Left side of Australian politics that Tony Abbott, and those around him, are rabid right wing extremists. It would be a disaster for progressive politics in Australia should the Liberal Party win the next election. This has played an important element in the change of leader.

The focus on factions and so on is important, but it should not obscure this part of the equation.

Perhaps the most important institutional factor in the demise of Kevin Rudd was big business. It is big business that, ultimately, determines the leadership of the Labor Party. One reason why the corporate media turned viciously against Mark Latham is because big business did not trust him.

To be sure, as Robert Manne pointed out, up until then Latham was the most right wing Labor leader in history. However, Latham always had the dangerous class warrior lurking within him. I saw it. I perceived it. I liked it. But, the rich saw it, they perceived it, they did not like it.

At times his use of the idiom of class sounded almost Marxian. He would not give big business a trusted place in his office. He would, in short, not “consult.” The big end of town did not trust him and so it was easy for the corporate media to portray him as an unhinged nut.

This has happened many times to Labor in the neoliberal era. Recall, for example, the role of the corporate media and the big mining interests in the ouster of Gough Whitlam and Rex Connor. It is not ideological orthodoxy that big business seeks from the ALP. It is important that Labor tends to its interests. Because of the party's roots in the Australian working class the ALP always represents a risk for corporate Australia.

The main function that the faction system in the ALP serves is to take away the risk of democracy that the rich at all times face.

Consider the case of Bob Hawke. The so called “Hawke ascendancy” and his own “special relationship” with the Australian people was a corporate media fiction. Throughout the 1970s the corporate media pushed the Hawke bandwagon, which was resisted by the Labor caucus almost until the 1983 election.

In office Bob Hawke did not disappoint his corporate patrons. For the rich the Hawke era was a veritable bonanza. But Hawke was ousted precisely because of his adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy. He was successfully challenged by Paul Keating during the depths of the 1990-1991 recession, the one “we had to have.”

Throughout this deep recession Hawke was maintaining neoliberal orthodoxy. Keating, by contrast, was brazenly abandoning neoliberal austerity in favour of fiscal stimulus and loose monetary policy. Keating understood that when the rich get in trouble they want the nanny state to bail them out.

Hawke didn't and so the corporate media, reflecting the consensus of big business, turned on Hawke and the rest is history.

They made Hawke and then they broke him.

Rudd seemed to understand that “the Latham debacle” represented big business disciplining the Labor Party into proper behaviour. Under Rudd's leadership the door for big business was widely opened. Commentary at the time reflected how much better the relationship between the Labor leader's office and big business was when Rudd took over the leadership. Prior to the 2007 election meetings with business leaders were frequent, even formalised on a weekly basis.

Compare that with the relationship that Rudd has had with big business in recent times.

Though his tax reform policies were designed to assist corporate Australia as a whole, though he has extended a helping hand to the financial services industry, though he ditched the ETS to mollify big business, none of that was enough. When the mining industry turned on him because of his minor infringement after announcing the resource super profits tax, which is what the tax is, big business was loathe to come to his defence. Laurie Oakes has spoken of a “disastrous” meeting with the Business Council of Australia days prior to his ouster.

Comments and analyses on Rudd and the Rudd style in the corporate media thereby recently became frequent. The Rudd “brand” was rendered toxic by precisely those who helped to craft it in the first place. The mining industry decided that it would destroy Rudd and destroy him they did. The change over has been fulsomely praised by all of Australia's peak business bodies. The ascent of Julia Gillard comes with the promise that they will be “consulted” better, as if they have not hitherto been consulted enough already.

In other words, Gillard knows her place unlike the grandiloquent Rudd.

Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd lost the leadership of the Labor Party because they lost the confidence of corporate Australia. How is that Rudd was able to forget the lessons that corporate Australia dished out to the Labor Party during “the Latham debacle?”

This owed to his delusion of grandeur. He saw himself as striding the Australian political stage on the back of his own unique vision, drive and capability. However, a minor infringement against those who really run the country, the big moneyed interests, was very much the big nail that was driven into his political coffin.

Corporate Australia has brought Kevin Rudd back down to Earth with a thud. It is indeed ironic that this is just as it was with Mark Latham. The element of the delusion of grandeur in Rudd's case immediately brings to mind Marx's refrain in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Quite.

The emphasis on the factions and patronage is thereby only half the story. The Labor Party's power brokers do seek office in order to dispense patronage and thereby secure institutional prerogatives. But they understand that this can only be achieved by looking after the needs of big business. If they lose touch with corporate Australia they lose elections.

One interesting aspect to the latest developments in Canberra is the announced departure of the socialist minister for deregulation, Lindsay Tanner. He was widely praised in the corporate media following his announcement. In fact, he earned high praise too from financial market economists for his commitment to economic rationalist orthodoxy.

Tanner was a person who, in his maiden speech to parliament, declared himself to be a socialist. His departure from parliament is now mourned by financial market economists, who shall miss his economic rationalist zeal. This has been taken as praise, but such valedictories by financial market economists are a fitting end to Lindsay Tanner's career.

Good riddance, Comrade Tanner. Don't ever come back.

Why We Have to Save Kevin Rudd from Oblivion

This is a post from my The Vile Maxim blog that I also post here given the importance of the issue.

I can’t stand Kevin Rudd. I have always believed that Rudd is exactly as Mark Latham described him in his diaries. Recent events have borne this out, and the Latham view is now widely shared in Australia although its provenance continues to be denied. When Rudd was flying sky high in the polls I had called him a “flaky” and so on. I had also characterised his standing in the polls as Labor’s “asset price bubble.”

The bubble, never based on substance or “the fundamentals”, has now well and truly burst just as the country prepares for a federal election. This is a disaster for the progressive side of Australian politics. Rudd needs to be saved from oblivion. Now is not the time for progressives and progressive commentators to sink the boot into Rudd. I say this as someone who, accurately, had characterised Robert Manne as an intellectual with a proclivity to kiss Rudd’s arse. So, at least I have some credibility on this issue.

Now is the time for progressives to call time out on putting the boot into Rudd.

This is because the only realistic alternative would be very bad for progressive politics in this country. Tony Abbott, and all those pushing his cart, are rabid extremists probably on the same wavelength as the right wing of the Republican Party in the US. If Rudd sinks into oblivion then it is clear that an Abbott led Liberal Party will come into office. The Abbottites promise to turn the clock back to rabid neoliberal labour market reforms, to cut public spending more than Labor, to dither on climate change, to pander to the mining lobby, to take the lead in Oruzgan province in Afghanistan and so on.

People of a progressive bent need to think of such matters as the federal election approaches. Despite Rudd’s cynical essay criticising neoliberalism his government has operated well within the dominant neoliberal consensus. But the level of commitment to neoliberal programs exhibited by Labor and the Liberal Party is not the same. The different levels of commitment largely flow on from institutional imperatives. The debate on the Resource Super Profits Tax is a case in point.

The debate on the RSPT largely focuses on the impost, real or imagined, that the tax will have on cashed up resource corporations. The Rudd Government largely structures the argument for the tax on, what are largely uncontroversial in other contexts, mutual obligation grounds. The resources of Australia belong to the people of Australia and the people ought to get a fairer share of the gains that those resources accrue. The debate simply assumes that the second, crucial part of the argument, is accurate.

However, the proceeds of the RSPT are meant to finance a cut in the corporate tax rate, to support changes to superannuation that are effusively welcomed by the financial services industry, still making “super profits” despite the GFC, and to fund infrastructure developments to aid corporate activities (including resource corporations).

The RSPT is not to be used to fund active labour market programmes to skill up the unskilled and the long term unemployed for what Ken Henry believes will be a coming skills shortage. That’s avoided because a tight labour market, absent skills migration, will lead to better wages for the Australian population. Ken Henry doesn’t want that, big business doesn’t want that and neither does Rudd Labor.

The Rudd policy is largely beneficial for the corporate sector in Australia as a whole. That is why opposition in the corporate media to the RSPT is not uniform. The Government’s backflip on the ETS might need to be seen, partly, in this context too. Backing up on the ETS probably was a preemptive sweetener for the resources sector. We should notice that resource corporations do not complain about the investment uncertainty that this decision on the ETS, that tends to their interests poses, poses for energy companies.

At the same time Rudd Labor has announced a tightening of the state’s “mutual obligation” provisions directed towards the long term unemployed. Unlike Clive Palmer and Twiggie Forrest whose rejection of mutual obligation is given wide coverage in the corporate media; this has been ignored in the orgy of commentary that focuses on the tender needs of the super rich. There will be no Rudd backflip on mutual obligation for social welfare recipients nor any high level consultations with their representatives, unlike for the billion dollar resource corporations.

In a previous essay, written after Labor’s decision on the parallel importing of books, I had argued that the rich will not tolerate the slightest deviation from Labor. The rich are greedy and thereby fickle. Despite their many, many millions those two fat shits, Palmer and Forrest, just want more and more. Labor is being disciplined into proper behaviour by the rich.

Although all this remains true, and more could be said about such matters, nonetheless Abbott would be much worse. With Abott all the distorting affects of the 2000s resource boom will repeat. This would follow if a similar boom should repeat, which is by no means a certainty as many commentators suppose. Under Abbott the vile maxim will continue. Under Adam Smith’s “vile maxim of the masters of mankind” the proceeds of any commodity prices boom are to be distributed inequitably, as it was when the Liberal Party was in office. Under Abbott resource corporations will win, but Australia will lose just like under Howard.

If progressive commentators are serious about taking into account the moral consequences of their actions then it follows that a unilateral ceasefire with Rudd and the ALP is now very much in order.

The issue here is not Rudd. I couldn’t care less about Rudd. The issue is the real people all around Australia who will suffer should Rudd lose office. Besides if Rudd were to be turfed now no group in Australia would be happier than the Murdoch press. The ALP should not allow the leadership of the party to be determined in the offices of Rupert Murdoch’s minions.