How useful is ideology in political analysis?

February 8, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

In his much discussed, though little praised, essay in The Monthly Kevin Rudd attributes the global financial crisis to what he calls ‘neo-liberalism’, aka ‘free-market fundamentalism’, ‘extreme capitalism’, ‘economic liberalism’, ‘economic fundamentalism’, ‘Thatcherism’, and the ‘Washington Consensus’ (the PM’s political thesaurus was getting a good workout).

But how useful are ideologies in anlaysing politics? There are certainly rival explanatory theories. In journalism, as commenter Alan C complains, the focus tends to be on personalities and personal ambitions, downplaying other forces that are not so easily reduced to an easy-to-understand story. Yet if the media overplays personality as a force, it surely cannot be discounted entirely. Particular individuals do make things turn out differently, holding all other factors constant.

On both right and left, we see theories that put interests at the core of politics. Public choice theory on the right models political actors as self-interested; on this account (for example) public school teachers are not defenders of better education, but are instead just an interest group seeking higher salaries and easier working conditions.

On the left, the the substance of and differences between right-wing beliefs are deemed entirely or largely irrelevant, because these groups are seen just as defenders of corporate or other private interests. This is why Naomi Klein, for instance, can blur together neoliberalism, neoconservatism and corporatism. Norman Abjorensen is aware that liberals and conservatives differ, but on his account only on the means to their common end of the ‘protection of property interests’. Ideology is just empty rhetoric designed to make interest politics respectable.
Continue reading “How useful is ideology in political analysis?” →

Blog survey, comments

February 8, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

For bloggers only: Nick Gruen is conducting a survey. It has to be done today (ie Sunday 8 February).

For commenters: For some reason, comments are going into moderation when they have only one link (the settings say this should only happen with two or more links) and I am not getting emails warning me of this. Apologies to those who have been stuck in moderation. If your comment does not immediately appear, email me: andrew.norton4 AT gmail.com

Norman Abjorensen’s mess of a book

February 5, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

I’ve not thought much of Norman Abjorensen‘s work for a long time, but his latest book John Howard and the Conservative Tradition disappointed even my low expectations. It is a mess.

Abjorensen states himself to be in favour of popular sovereignty, and sees the efforts of liberals and conservatives to limit it to be their most important, from his perspective, feature. The great success of Australian conservatism, ‘has been to serve a ruling elite under a pretence of caring for all’. But after having run through some 19th century conservative resistance to the then maturing Australian democratic institutions, for the 20th century Abjorensen seems to have forgotten how he started. Much of the book is just a summary of the political lives and times of successive ‘conservative’ parliamentary leaders, with no particular emphasis on democratic developments or how the interests of the ‘ruling class’ were served.

In an unusual move, however, he has tacked on the end of the main text several previously published book reviews, and in one – on Clive Hamilton’s Silencing Dissent – the anti-democracy theme is developed. As I noted when that book was published, while the Howard government did not always deal ideally with its opponents, its overall account is tendentious. Vigorous debate continued throughout the Howard years, including constant and often vitriolic criticism of the government. And of course the democratic system smoothly removed the Howard government in 2007.
Continue reading “Norman Abjorensen’s mess of a book” →

Corporate pork watch

February 4, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Most of the arguments for political donations disclosure are process-oriented, but this issue needs to be put in a broader theory of good government. That a CEO may buy dinner with a Minister at a party fundraiser is of no consequence unless some kind of bad decision – eg one that favours the CEO’s company when there is no strong public policy case for doing so – flows from it.

However, the best evidence for such bad decisions is not the annual political donations disclosure but the spending announcements of the government. Why use a proxy when you can use the real thing?

As I have been noting recently, the people calling for greater donations disclosure are strangely uninterested in the public policy bad they are ostensibly trying to prevent. So I have decided to do their job for them and keep note of corporate pork on my blog. On the recent history of the Rudd government this may become a rather time-consuming task. I’ll start with the stories in today’s media and over time try to fill in the gaps from earlier decisions. A listing does not mean that the decision is an entirely bad one (though I suspect the bulk of them are bad).
Continue reading “Corporate pork watch” →

Australia’s workers no longer feel secure

February 3, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Last November, Australian workers were still confident that the GFC wasn’t going to affect their employment. Despite the bad international and stock market news, workers still mainly perceived that as bad news affecting other people.

An Auspoll survey released by the AWU this week suggests that this personal confidence is diminishing. While last year’s Morgan poll found 18% of respondents believing that they had a chance of unemployment, the Auspoll finds that 17% of workers are very concerned about their jobs and another 24% are concerned. The different question makes comparisons problematic, but that may be greater insecurity than the 32% in the Morgan series who were worried about their jobs at the peak of the early 1990s recession, though obviously actual unemployment is to date much lower than then.

On the optimistic side, while nearly a third of workers in 1992 feared that they would lose their jobs less than 10% did.

Shock, horror – ACTU campaign funded by unions

February 2, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Jamie Briggs is not the only person calling for electoral law reform that has already occurred. In today’s Crikey email they say:

…the role of third party activities must also be addressed. Nowhere in today’s figures will you see the cost of the union movement’s “Your Rights At Work” campaign, which was a major component in Labor’s victory.

But as The Age‘s report correctly noted, the political expenditure laws did require the ACTU to disclose the nearly $16 million they spent, mostly on the Your Rights at Work campaign. While this is of some interest to close followers of politics, it is hard to see why the ACTU should have to disclose it. That the ACTU was campaigning strongly on this issue was not exactly a secret. And who would have guessed that union donations paid for it?

GetUp! dislosed $1.3 million in expenditure, but less than $200,000 in donations, reflecting its large donor base. Their biggest single donors were Lonely Planet travel guide founders Maureen and Anthony Wheeler, who gave $82,500. More discreetly, $50,000 came from Jagen, the investment vehicle of the Liberman family. While lefties often like to parade their ‘social conscience’, it is hard to see why GetUp! should be forced to reveal this information. It does not tell us anything we need to know about GetUp!’s campaigns.

This data plus the political party donations also disclosed today shows that the left massively outspends the right in modern politics. It is not surprising – but not to their credit – that Liberal politicians want to throw as many bureaucratic obstacles in the left’s financial path as is possible. It is much less clear why Labor is going along with it, except that they been caught up in the groupthink surrounding this issue.

Is the rise of private schooling due to ‘neoliberalism’?

January 31, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Three pages into School Choice: How Parents Negotiate the New School Market in Australia, its authors tells us that in developing their argument ‘we are responsive to two books by Michael Pusey’. This is not a good start. As usual in discussing ‘neoliberalism’, the views of those who might plausibly be described as ‘neoliberals’ are not discussed in any detail, with passing mentions of arguments from the CIS and the Menzies Research Centre, accompanied by a grudging concession that the Howard government never followed the logic of these organisations’ arguments to ‘the end’.

Pusey has long argued that ‘economic rationalism’/ neoliberalism was an essentially alien ideology imposed on unwilling citizens. And the authors of School Choice – Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor, and Geoffrey Sherington – pursue that logic to some extent in noting parents who felt that they had had to make a school choice, when really they would have preferred just to send their kids to a ‘quality’ local school.

But a much stronger case can be made that school choice has deep roots in Australian history and politics, and that while there is a distinctive ‘neoliberal’ set of arguments these are not what has given this issue political momentum.
Continue reading “Is the rise of private schooling due to ‘neoliberalism’?” →

GDP and well-being

January 28, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 22 Comments

One irritating feature of the subjective well-being research is its preoccupation with GDP, or rather its preoccupation with what it thinks is our preoccupation with measuring production. It’s there again in the new economic foundation‘s recent National Accounts of Well-Being: Bringing real wealth onto the balance sheet.

The proposition that GDP cannot be used as an all-purpose proxy for societal well-being is a banality, not a critique. Nobody who believes that it is such a proxy is cited in this publication, and for good reason: nobody of any intellectual or political signficance (and quite possibly nobody at all) believes this to be the case. It is one of a vast number of statistical series collected and used in policy. Government policy is more likely to reduce than increase GDP through regulation and taxation steering resources away from their most productive uses.

The main point of National Accounts is to call for more regular collection of statistics on well-being, broadly defined. They’ve made a start with (in conjuction with Cambridge University) an interesting survey taking a multi-faceted look at well-being around Europe.
Continue reading “GDP and well-being” →

Educational apartheid?

January 25, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

In yet another of her articles attacking private schools, Jane Caro puts the shift to private schools as down to:

largely anxious middle-class parents who want to separate their kids from the mad, the bad and the sad (and, it seems, the ethnically diverse)

Having a somewhat traditional view of what constitutes good parenting, I think wanting to shield kids from the mad and the bad is worthy of praise rather than condemnation. (And if Caro thinks that a selling point of public schools is the opportunity to spend 5 days a week with mad and bad kids she is not the greatest advocate for her cause.)

Caro’s evidence for concern about ethnic diversity is a re-hash of last year’s white flight stories about white kids leaving schools with large Indigenous enrolments. As I pointed out at the time, if this is happening it probably has more to do with actual social and educational dysfunction among Indigenous students than prejudice.

But what of ethnic diversity in schools more generally? Since the white flight post last year, I have examined 2006 school attended census data on this issue. I used language spoken at home rather than ancestry as a proxy for ethnic diversity, to focus on the groups most likely to be weakly assimilated.
Continue reading “Educational apartheid?” →