Geoff Robinson

Malcolm Turnbull’s basic problem is that like John Howard Mark I he is out of step with his own party. Howard won the Liberal leadership in 1985 due to missteps by Andrew peacock rather than any strong base of support. Turnbull, once Peter Costello was gone, was the only credible candidate once Brendan Nelson fell over. Howard had to deal with a party formed in the Menzies-Fraser image and Turnbull has to deal with a party formed in John Howard’s image, Howard was to the right of his party, Turnbull to its left. It is difficult for a leader out of step with his party, electoral success can sustain such a leader and Tony Blair was an example of this but in opposition it is very difficult. Turnbull’s bravado is the functional equivalent of Howard’s comments on Asian immigration: an aggressive attempt to impose his stamp on politics. Turnbull won’t win the next election and he won’t remain Liberal leader. But perhaps like John Howard he can recover. Voters always saw Howard as a possible PM, unlike Alexander Downer, and once Labor was past its use-by date Howard could led the Liberals to victory. Eventually Labor will be unpopular and Turnbull would be a credible alternative PM. Will he have the patience and discipline to learn as did Howard? Will the Liberals eventually reshape themselves back to the Menzies-Fraser tradition? or will Turnbull be the contemporary equivalent of john Elliott? Currently however Kevin Rudd like John Howard is getting his opponents mad. Paul Kelly is insightful on the basis of Liberal fears of Labor’s ‘corporatism’, curiously these recall not the Whitlam spectre that some Liberals evoke but rather the anti-Hawke arguments of Katherine West, the would-be Geoffrey Blainey of Australian political science.

Mathew Yglesias on the Senate:

The supermajority—and, more broadly, the extreme difficulty of moving legislation—makes it easier for elected officials to make contradictory commitments to various people. Consider that as long as Democrats clearly didn’t have the votes to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, they could promise labor law reform to unions while also reassuring business that no such law was going pass. After the election suddenly there were sixty members who’d promised to vote for EFCA, which created an awkward situation for those members who, in fact, preferred to do what business wanted and killed it. They had to flip-flop in a not-very-pretty way and anger a lot of people. If it took 67 votes to move a bill, they would have been in much better shape, loyal friends to Wal-Mart and the AFL-CIO alike. This kind of thing is why I think it’s important to pay more attention to institutional and process issues than most people do. We’ll never elect a legislature of angels, but people’s incentives and desires can play out in better or worse ways according to the context.

More and more convinced each day of the importance of this. It is an insight championed by scholars of American Political Development.  What reforms to institutions and processes might we propose in Australia? The existing Australian literature on constitutional reform and the republic does not really engage with this.

Interesting paper on US independent voters from Pew (via Political Wire):

The proportion of independents now equals its highest level in 70 years. Owing to defections from the Republican Party, independents are more conservative on several key issues than in the past. While they like and approve of Barack Obama, as a group independents are more skittish than they were two years ago about expanding the social safety net and are reluctant backers of greater government involvement in the private sector. Yet at the same time, they continue to more closely parallel the views of Democrats rather than Republicans on the most divisive core beliefs on social values, religion and national security.

This does suggest that economic rather than social conservatism is the best Republican option. Malcolm Turnbull has shown the way.

Sean Wilentz won few friends with his aggressive championing of Hillary Clinton last year but I like this description of the historical project:

The radical historians who came out of the ‘60s had a very strong idea, and it was something that influenced my work as well—that history is not made by the presidents, it’s made by the paupers. So you read a book like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and it’s history, topsy-turvy. Everything that was popular is now less important. Everything that was bad is now good. Everything is just twisted around. Your heroes are now villains. That’s what happens if you concentrate too hard on one aspect of things. And you can’t understand how politics works in this country by doing that, nor can you understand politics in this country simply by writing a biography of Thomas Jefferson. As interesting and endlessly fascinating as that is that he’s being pushed, pulled, and finding all kinds of things, and changing by forces that are outside of his control… Read the rest of this entry »

Gosta Esping-Andersen developed the concept of ’social democratic decomposition’. Inspired by the differential success of the anti-tax populist right in Scandinavia in the 1970s he argued that the policies of a social democratic party in government could impact not only on its day to day popularity but more fundamentally on the party’s social base. Adam Przeworski also argued that parties do not just reflect class mobilisations but help to create them. The British Labour debacle (rivaled in recent history only by the collapse of the Polish left)  represents this decomposition in an extreme form. Where to begin? Gordon Brown, like Nathan Rees, seems a routine middle of the road of road Labor politician, but he has been handled an impossible task. Tony Blair and his acolytes believed with amazing hubris that they had by themselves resolved all of the previous dilemmas of left-wing thought and that most of the heritage of democratic socialism could be junked as simply wrong, they had found the magic synthesis of all political dichotomies. Whatever Rudd’s flaws he is not a member of this cult (whose memory is kept alive in Australia by the likes of Micheal Costa and David Burchill). The Rudd-Gillard ALP will eventually lose, perhaps even fairly badly given the increasing volatility of the electorate, but Australian Labor should escape the British fate.

Finished reading Manning Clark’s 1950 Select Documents in Australian History 1788-1850. There’s always value in reading original documents and it is a concern that undergraduate history programs don’t encourage this. Notable to see the changing political ideologies at work in the UK, the rise of utilitarianism undercut support for transportation as its consequences for convicts were seen as too unpredictable to provide a rational disincentive to crime. The exclusive critique of what they saw as government favouritism towards emancipists and their complaints about the dangers of democracy in Australia. These are key early expressions of conservative political thought in Australia. The failure of caste distinction to emerge between the descendants of convicts and free settlers even although there were times when this appeared quite likely.

Violence against Indian students in Australia has attracted growing attention, it is undertaken for the purposes of robbery but also includes a distinct racial element. The PhD thesis by far-right activist Jim Saleam contains an interesting discussion of anti-Asian skinhead violence in the 1980s and 1990s. This violence was fictionalised in Romper Stomper. Could we see the attackers of Indian students, skinheads and the Cronulla rioters as representing a continuing thread of radical right activism?

The recent controversy about MPs expense claims in the UK has inspired calls, mostly from the informed great and good of the liberal-left for ‘parliamentary reform’. Some of these proposals are worthwhile in themselves such as proportional representation, but it is difficult their relevance to the current debate. It is a persistent theme of much politics commentary to complain about the decline of parliament. It is a theme in Contemporary Australian Politics which I currently teach. I don’t doubt that more could be done to involve MPs in scrutiny of Executive decisions, work such as John Uhr’s Deliberative Democracy in Australia shed light on this question. But this is not the core role of parliament, for parliament is a very expensive and inefficient tool for executive scrutiny. How many ombudspersons and investigative agencies could be paid for from the cost of parliament? The problem is that the role of MPs is ill-defined, the absense of a clear role encourages low morale, misconduct and in local government, as seen in Brimbank, interference in routine administrative decisions. Indeed Brimbank shows that parliamentary reformers should be careful what they wish for, similar problems can emerge in community organisations such as student unions and indigenous co-operatives. Nor is a utopia of MPs freely voting according to their conscience compatible with democracy. What we need to consider is the role of MPs as party members under party government, how effectively do they operate within their party caucus? Rather than imaging some partyless neo-Burkean utopia we would be better advised to improve the internal working of political parties in government and to open this up for broader participation by MPs and party supporters outside Parliament. Some of Penny Sharpe’s comments here touch on this.