Lindsay Tanner may well have been beaten in his seat by the Greens anyway, but his leaving is a real blow to Labor. Tanner was always one of the most able ALP pollies at a time when quality was steadily diminishing. Although he passed through the union/ALP finishing school, he was unusually intelligent and able to keep the big picture in mind. He made his abilities known through a couple of readable books.
One can only wonder what might have been if Tanner had become leader instead of Latham, but he never seemed to want the job badly enough. This is probably to his credit, and a comment on the nature of politics these days.
We can only hope he finds something useful to do now and continues to put his talent to work, and he doesn't further embarrass the ALP old boys club by jumping on the corporate gravy train.
At first blush, the move on Rudd looks like a return to the bad old days of the ALP when right wing union robots all but ran the party. Union alpha-bots like Bill Shorten, Paul Howes and the like are always full of their own great potential, although they typically make unusually incompetent politicians. In the meantime, they can really do some damage to everyone else.
Strangely, Howes' main message was about Rudd's incapacity to get his message across. In other words, the media and polls had moved against him. Whatever Rudd's real failings and Gillard's real abilities, dumping a first term PM because the polls were against him would pretty much wreck the ALP. Any time a PM took a decision that was even temporarily unpoular, they would be looking over their shoulder. Since the ALP's political role has always been reform, which is always risky, it would place any Labor leader under the sword of Damocles on a permanent basis.
And of course the worst Liberal leader ever, a man with little control over his need to damage others to soothe his inner demons, grins his manic grin as he watches the carnage and plots more years of lost time.
The next Oz election will probably revolve around the new mining tax, industrial relations, immigration and the other usual issues. But Peak Oil will be lurking in the background and may generate some heat. Lloyds and Chatham House just released a report warning of problems for business as oil shortages occur following on the recent estimate of troubles in 3-5 years by the Pentagon.
As much as Peak Oil will cause trouble for households as car and some power costs rise, it will have a serious impact on key economic sectors, especially mining and agriculture. In fact, Peak Oil would present much greater challenges to miners than any sort of super-profits tax. They rely on cheap oil for exploration, production and transport to buyers. So perhaps the miners would be better off trying to get the Government to pay attention to this matter rather than avoiding further taxation.
Of course Oz does have access to substantial gas reserves, although most of them are offshore. However, if they are locked up in long term contracts with overseas buyers making the gas available for domestic use may be tricky.
This blog has been taken over by yours truly to comment on Australian politics and culture. I don't promise to always be accurate, but at least I'll be interesting.
Oz desperately needs cogent political analysis of any kind, and especially in the mass media. So I have high hopes when a serious new current affairs program comes along, and of course it is always only going to be on the ABC or SBS. The commercials are too busy with cooking contests or survival shows to bother with such stuff.
You can see the logic of Q&A - try to break up the stone wall approach by pollies by having a participating audience and a few other notables. But it only works sometimes. The first problem is Tony Jones's tendency to go for the nice sound bite ( to appear on next week's promo) instead of real insight. The next problem is just how dull the pollies are. Our political class are really boring, toeing the party line at all times and giving as little as possible away about the actual stuff of politics. Watching Peter Garrett, who used to leap about and emote like mad up front of Midnight Oil, bite his tongue and say as little as possible except in broad abstractions was painful. And most of the non-pollies are so careful to say nothing contentious they are mostly useless as well. And finally there is the audience: although some of the questions are OK, the tweets just confirm that most Oztralians are morons - and this is the bunch that watchs current affairs on the ABC!
The Henry tax review is perhaps the most serious attempt to understand structural changes to the Oz political economy of recent times. Henry recognised some important home truths about the Oz economy and taxation. First, under conditions of globalisation taxation of mobile assets was increasingly difficult, and so taxation of immobile assets (like mineral ores) made sense. And secondly, the economy had to factor in the growing costs of environmental destruction.
Recognition of the unavoidable problem of environmental degradation, the material conditions within which the economy operates, is a signal event in the shift from purely ideological economics, based in notions of ideal conditions and behaviour, to an economics of the real world. Global warming, peak oil and pollution disasters make a nonsense of neo-liberal notions of investment and profit.
But the question is: what comes next? Will we see a new age of strong government and mixed economies, or a new grass roots economics that somehow factors in real costs at the most basic levels of supply and demand?
Life in australia is changing fast. A country that was once seen as an unqualified success is changing in almost every way. The days when social cohesion was paramount have gone and now the country is increasingly shaped by market forces. These market forces are themselves shaped by events overseas, and so Australians have less and less say over how the country works.
These chages are affecting everything, from kid's language to sports to tax policy.
In this blog I'll comment on these things and try to make sense of current events as incidents within an unfolding logic of change.
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