Hong Kong, 18 March 2010
Why is that political nutters around the world love underlining?
Absolute vs relative understandings of ideology
One of the reasons Waleed Aly’s ‘Future of Conservatism’ essay goes wrong is that he thinks of political ideologies in absolute rather than relative terms.
To think of an ideology in absolute terms is to take a principle or idea its adherents support and make that its foundational principle or idea, from which all else must derive or be deemed philosophically inconsistent.
To think of an ideology in relative term, by contrast, considers these principles and ideas relative to the status quo and other political ideologies.
So relative to the status quo and social democracy, ‘neoliberalism’ could be considered the ideology of markets. ‘Absolute’ opposition to any other organising institution than markets is a non-existent political force in Australia. But compared to where we are, the ‘neoliberals’ are those most in favour of using markets more. Continue reading “Absolute vs relative understandings of ideology”
How many people read political blogs?
Pollytics blog today reports some Essential Research polling on news consumption. I was surprised that 15% of the people in the sample said they read blogs several times a week or daily, though the question does not directly ask if they get news/political analysis from blogs.
Question: How frequently do you read, listen to or watch the following?
The 2007 Australian Election Survey found that only 3% of people read political blogs during the campaign.
Despite the apparently increased readership, 55% of respondents rated their trust in what they read on blogs as ‘none’ or ‘not much’.
Waleed Aly’s ‘Future of Conservatism’
I’m not sure why the Quarterly Essay people asked Waleed Aly – or indeed anyone on the academic left except Judy Brett – to write an essay on the ‘future of conservatism’ (semi-coherent op-ed abridgement here). While Aly claims some sympathy for philosophical conservatism, with quotes from Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott duly produced, his understanding of the contemporary Australian right is too limited to say anything insightful about its current state or future prospects.
One of his arguments is that ‘conservatism’ (or neo-conservatism, as he calls its recent Australian version) has been too influenced by ‘neo-liberalism’. But his 25-page account of ‘neo-liberalism’ is the usual reductio ad absurdum stuff: markets as the only organising principle and the only arbiters of social value. Aly offers no evidence that anyone in Australia believes this, much less anyone influential. Indeed, he admits that his ‘theoretical account’ is ‘artificially absolute’. But this is not as he thinks because ‘political imperatives’ mean neo-liberalism only ever found ‘compromised expression’. It is because nobody believed in ‘neo-liberalism’ defined this way in the first place.
‘Conservatives’ agreed to market reforms for the same reason social democrats agreed to market reforms: as pragmatic measures to improve economic performance. Continue reading “Waleed Aly’s ‘Future of Conservatism’”
Is long service leave an anachronism?
As of close of business this afternoon, I am on long service leave. But is this an anachronistic institution?
Certainly long service leave’s historical rationale is no longer compelling. It began in South Australia and Victoria in the 1860s as a scheme that allowed civil servants 6-12 months leave to go home to Britain after 10 years service in the colonies. Given the lengthy transit times a substantial period off work was necessary to make the trip to Europe. Obviously this is no longer the case.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that long service leave became widespread in the private sector, and it is now a statutory right. No other country incorporates such a right into their labour market regulations.
Criticism of long service leave is not confined to free marketeers. Some people say that changes in labour market conditions towards more casual and contract employment mean that long service leave is less relevant. Continue reading “Is long service leave an anachronism?”
Does full-fare public transport deter international students?
International students have long campaigned for public transport fare concessions. I have argued before that this is based on a mistaken understanding of why Australian students receive cheaper fares, but I will concede that there is potentially an interesting debate here about the status of long-term but legally temporary residents in Australia. A massive increase in their numbers – principally international students and section 457 visa holders – during the Howard years creates issues we’ve never really had to think about before (I might post on this some other time).
While I can sympathise but not agree with the international students, I have no sympathy at all with the arguments made by my colleagues in the higher education sector.
An op-ed by La Trobe academic Anthony Jarvis in The Age uses the ‘financial burden’ of overseas study as a rationale for extending transport concessions. But surely the very high fees charged by universities are a far more significant burden. For example a La Trobe business course would cost an international student more than $18,000 a year, an 80% mark-up on what La Trobe gets for a domestic student. Continue reading “Does full-fare public transport deter international students?”
Are overlapping state and federal responsibilities a good thing?
An Essential Research poll published today on Pollytics blog is one of the most interesting I have seen on federalism:
Question: Do you think the following services should be mainly the responsibility of the Federal Government or State Governments?
I suggests that the Australian public is not quite as centralist as other polling can lead us to believe. The federal government does not have majority support for exclusively taking over any of the areas of traditional state responsibility – though they are ahead of the states on all but water supply. The interesting point in this poll is the significant support for joint state and federal responsibility. Continue reading “Are overlapping state and federal responsibilities a good thing?”
Familism meets feminism
Like big business and the some (most?) in the Coalition party room, I’m not keen on Tony Abbott’s ‘big new tax’ plan to fund an exceptionally generous income-maintaining parental leave policy.
On the other hand, I do think it is a natural evolution of recent Australian conservative thinking. As it put it in my ‘big government conservatism’ article a few years ago:
Modern conservatism.. does not actively discourage or prevent departures from the norm in social and family relationships. So no-fault divorce stays, [and] single parent benefits are retained … . Rather, modern conservatism uses the state’s financial resources to ‘support families in the choices they wish to make’, to ‘help families struggling with the challenges of modern life’.
What this means is the ‘familist’ state increasingly contributes to activities which were once the family’s responsibility. The massive expansion in the FTB scheme and the baby bonus under Howard, and the rapid expansion in childcare subsidies, are all part of this. Parental leave is a logical extension of this trend. Indeed, the social science case for full-time parenting in the first six months of a baby’s life is far stronger than the case for the FTB handouts.
Abbott defends his scheme in these evolutionary terms: Continue reading “Familism meets feminism”
Should the My University website be the My Higher Education website?
Yesterday Julia Gillard promised a My School companion, a My University website. There are already similar websites operating in the US and in the UK.
A My University website is a far better idea that the ‘performance funding’ policy foreshadowed last year, which will use much of the same data but hand out cash according to the DEEWR bureaucracy’s definition of ‘performance’. As I argued at the time, many of these measures do not clearly measure ‘performance’, or involve trade-offs that universities and students should decide on, not bureaucrats. If would-be students are given the data, they can determine what weight if any to give it.
The My University website concept needs to expand to include private providers of higher education. Continue reading “Should the My University website be the My Higher Education website?”
Is Australia an ‘arbitrary nation state’?
“That said, it should be recognised that immigration is here to benefit native Australians and not the other way round.”
Why do you think that? Do you simply have no concern for people not born within the borders of your pretty arbitrary nation state? If not, why should foreigners matter less than Australians?
– Robert Wiblin, 2 March.
Robert’s point is a challenge for political philosophies with universalist ambitions, such as some forms of liberalism and egalitarianism. States are part of these liberal and egalitarian theories, to protect or enforce rights, but they are not nation-states and the people in them have no particular nationality. Individual rights and entitlements derive from an individual’s status as a human (‘human rights’), not their membership of any smaller group.
So on these accounts, a purist classical liberal would have no easy ideological grounds for limting geographic movement, and a purist egalitarian would have no grounds for denying the claims of poor people throughout the world to material support. Certainly there would be significant personal costs to both classical liberals and egalitarians from such policies, but being born into a rich and successful country is a piece of very good luck that is morally arbitrary.
In practice, of course, few classical liberals or egalitarians pursue this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion. Continue reading “Is Australia an ‘arbitrary nation state’?”
Andrew Norton 