Trevor Cook

Peter Martin's devastating summary of Hockey's record

2009-11-29T18:47:51+11:00

As Workplace Minister he oversaw a system that couldn't even tell employers what they had to pay...
He spent $585,000 a day promoting at "fairness test" that at the time wasn't being applied...
He commissioned economic modelling with terms of reference so rigged it was never released,
He said young people were perfectly capable of negotiating pay with their employers, but repeatedly refused to appear in front of an audience of them to defend the claim...
As Human Services Minister in charge of a $1 billion plus information technology project he eschewed a pilot declaring pilots were “for planes, not for technology"...
He called for tenders for two IT projects each worth hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of submitting the legislation to parliament (a process that caught the attention of the Audit Office) and spent $3 million advertising a program before it had Senate approval (which it never got)...
As Shadow Treasurer his record has been mixed.

via petermartin.blogspot.com

Luckily for the country, as martin notes, the likelihood of Hockey become PM is slight.

It shows however, how bereft of real talent the Liberal Party is.

I think Martin is being kind to Abbott.

Turnbull's really the only one they have who has a chance of rivaling Rudd

McGahern's non-fiction published

2009-11-29T07:40:10+11:00

No better person could have launched John McGahern’s posthumously published non-fiction collection Love of the World than short-story writer Claire Keegan.
Given how Joyce features in this anthology of essays, reviews and speeches, there was also something perfect about the setting at the launch on Tuesday night – the Old Physics Theatre in Newman House on St Stephen’s Green where Joyce once studied.
Given that Keegan is so often referred to as McGahern’s successor in the history of the Irish short story, it’s a surprise to discover that she hardly knew him. “I didn’t know John. I once sat next to him at a pleasant dinner, and later ran into him in Paris, where he wished me well with my stories. He was deeply humorous and very much present. I wrote to him after That They May Face the Rising Sun came out, and he very kindly wrote back and thanked me. That was all.’’

via www.irishtimes.com

I'm looking forward to getting a copy of this one

Her majesty wants urgent action on climate change

2009-11-28T08:35:13+11:00

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — Queen Elizabeth II opened the Commonwealth summit Friday with a plea to leaders to act on global warming, which she called a threat to millions of people worldwide.

via www.canada.com

The Minchen/Abetz/Abbott/Joyce knuckle draggers are now opposed to the position of the Commonwealth and the monarch - as well as a large majority of the Australian population

Can the Liberal Party survive?

2009-11-28T07:18:59+11:00

In the first decade after Federation, the conservative forces (Deakin's protectionists and Reid's free traders) opted for fusion in the face of the growing electoral and parliamentary strength of the Labor party.

The formation of the Country Party in 1922 introduced a clear rural interest, and took votes from the ALP and bolstered the conservative position outside the capital cities.

For most of the twentieth century, the conservative side has also been bolstered by the three major splits in the ALP over sectarianism and ideology, spread across WW1, the Depression and the 1950s.

Nevertheless, the clear division in Australian politics has been Labor versus anti (or non) Labor for much of the last century.

But now that the ALP has moved to the centre, adopted economic rationalism (for the most part), emphasises equality of opportunity (rather than outcomes) and downplayed its links with (and the influence of) its union base does a labor / anti-labor split make any sense anymore.

The sectarianism that underlined this division has also dissolved, so much so that the Liberal leadership is overwhelmingly catholic - Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews among others - a situation that was unthinkable a few decades ago when the Liberals were the party of protestantism.

The class divide has also fallen away, Liberal MPs are now less likely than ever to be the product of elite private schools while Labor MPs are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of university education.

This week we have seen the Liberal Party 'base' rage against the idea of a Liberal leader supporting a Labor policy, this tapped into a deeper rage against the disappearing rationale for the continued existence of the old Liberal Party of middle-class, socially-conservative, private school, protestants.

Just as much of the Coalition partner's base raged against the efforts to move the Country Party towards a National Party, and rushed off to follow Pauline Hanson.

Yet, disastrously for the Liberal Party, this base, whipped to a frenzy by the likes of Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt, are only a small sliver of the voting support the Liberals need to be a serious challenge, as today's Newspoll confirms.

What this week's exercise has shown is that the Liberal Party has lost its way. Its right wing has become more right wing and more reactionary than genuinely conservative. They are Bushite republicans with a dose of Hansonism thrown in. The left of the party has become more politically, culturally and intellectually sophisticated just as the Minchin, Abetz and Abbott forces have been dragging the party in the opposite direction.

Right-wing cheerleader columnists like Miranda Devine do the their best to paper over the backwardness of the Minchin forces, even trying to boost fruit bats like Cory Bernard i:

Bernardi has emerged as the most promising rising star in politics for years. He is a clear thinker, articulate, with conviction and courage.

This is her example of his clear thinking:

"We are a party of smaller government, lower taxation, supporting families and free enterprise. The ETS compromises all these core principles … We are not moving to the right. [We're] trying to support core Liberal principles.

This is nonsensical stuff. For a start, the second sentence doesn't follow from the first. What's more they are principles the Rudd government would happily sign up too. He is not making any sort of meaningful distinction at all.

In addition, they are not actually principles at all. No-one wants government to be any bigger, and taxation any higher, than it has to be. The question, in this instance, is whether you think the government should take action on climate change? And, if so how should it do it. The alternative to the ETS, one I have some sympathy with, is a straight out carbon tax and government subsidies program. Bernardi has no 'smaller government, lower taxation' option because there isn't one.

When Bernardi talks about families he is going against Liberal principles because he sees this as his opportunity, like many of the Liberal right do, to interfere in our lives in the name of 'family life'. Liberalism should be about more freedom not less.

Far from being the intellectual star Devine would like you like to think he is, Bernardi is a knuckle dragger. Devine is also keen to portray Abbott as an 'intellectual', surely that tag would imply some capacity to hold a position for more than a few months, but Tony unfortunately only holds strong positions when it comes to controlling women's lives and bodies. Otherwise his opinions seem to move with the prevailing winds.

The Liberal Party is tearing itself apart, many of the participants, and their activist cheer leaders like Bolt, Jones and Devine, are divorced from political reality - exactly what happens when parties self-destruct.

All this is great news for the non-conservative parties. At any climate change double dissolution, or normal election, the ALP and Greens vote will go up, as might the National vote, we will see a plethora of conservative independents and the Liberal Party will slump badly, especially in the major cities.

It would set the platform for a long-term ALP government, how long will depend on how long it takes the conservatives to find a rationale beyond the hollow platitudes of the Cory Bernardis of this world.

Blog Tribute #1, Reading Matters: The Leavetaking, by John McGahern « KevinfromCanada

2009-11-27T07:52:16+11:00

So as KfC approaches its first anniversary — and the 2009 “catch up” season begins — I’ve opted for a mini-project. It is a tribute to some of the bloggers whom I followed before I got into this most enjoyable hobby and will feature novels that came to my attention through their thoughts and comments. First up is Reading Matters, the literary blog of kimbofo, an ex-pat Australian, a journalist based in London (tweet, tweet — and that is not a reference to Twitter) and a frequent visitor to Ireland (it is amazing what love does when it comes to travel). She lives in a constricted flat in that wonderful city (space is a major issue for any devoted reader in London and kimbofo certainly shares her challenges — the picture above is her recently posted TBR pile), so that makes her my current expert on matters ranging from the West End to Kensington and even Bloomsbury, since she visits there often — they are important literary neighborhoods, so that is no mean recommendation. I appreciate that expertise very much (please, kimbofo, could you find the shop where Henry James purchased “the golden bowl”? — I know it is near Great Russell Street). If you don’t already know, kimbofo is also the blogging world’s leading expert — and advocate — of John McGahern, the outstanding Irish novelist who died just three years ago. I’d always been reluctant to try McGahern (he seemed just too Irish by description); it was kimbofo on her blog and in comments at John Self’s The Asylum who convinced me he deserved attention. I started with his best known work — Amongst Women — and loved it (you can find my review here and kimbofo’s here). I resolved to read more.

via kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com

Kimbofo introduced me to John McGahern - I'll always be grateful

Partyroom showdown - my piece on Unleashed

2009-11-24T09:33:47+11:00

This morning the Coalition will decide whether or not it will support an emissions reduction scheme. Does Malcolm Turnbull have the votes? Will Kevin Andrews or Tony Abbott walk out of the meeting with the leadership firmly in their grasp? Will Nick Minchin put a win on the scoreboard for climate denialism? Opposition is difficult enough without self-destructive ideological battles. So what then could Minchin, the clever strategist, hope to achieve, asks Trevor Cook.

"The only possible rational explanation for Minchin's behaviour is that he has a long-term plan for his party which does not involve Malcolm Turnbull and which is premised on the notion that it is better to lose than to win with a moderate like Turnbull at the helm. That, of course, is the sort of loser thinking that characterises long-term Oppositions.

via www.abc.net.au

Subscribe to the SMH? Not even if they paid me

2009-11-23T11:50:36+11:00

The latest offer (in a flyer in Saturday's paper) from this once great newspaper seems tempting.

20 weeks, seven days a week (including Sun-Herald) for just $59. Just 42 cents a copy or thereabouts.

Not convinced? They'll give you a voucher for 100 bucks worth of wine from their wine club.

Sounds like a no-brainer.

I'm kind of nostalgic about newspaper deliveries.

My wife and I used to get every newspaper every day in Canberra.

We had a great newsagent, he even took me to a Raiders game one time to thank me for being such a great customer.

I loved it, but those days are gone.

I stopped getting deliveries when we returned to Sydney in 1996.

Our local newsagent doesn't do customer service.

He suggested if I didn't like the time the papers arrived (after I left for work) then I should just cancel my deliveries.

I did that's 12 years ago.

Now we've got the Internet.

And the SMH seems to have slipped back in quality.

I used to look forward to reading the Spectrum section, now it looks like its competing with a supermarket magazine.

And the newsagent is still there and still grumpy.

I couldn't bear having to negotiate with him about late deliveries, and suspensions if I'm away.

Plus the gym gives the SMH away for free.

Even then I don't bother getting it everytime I go.

The past is just the past.

And no amount of discounts and giveaways can bring it back.

Mike Rann and the new puritanism

2009-11-23T08:01:10+11:00

There doesn't appear to be anything illegal in the revelations on TV last night by the spurned girlfriend. If the 'allegations' are true, they contain little more than suggestions of some minor inappropriateness. And nothing that wold lead us to question Rann's capacity or suitability to be Premier.

Why then is it so interesting? Why is the woman's story worth a lot of money?

Part of it I guess is our growing obsession, as a society, with the private behaviours of famous people and part of it is the fact that Rann has initially denied it (since Watergate the big story has always been the coverup).

But beyond that I think that there is a growing puritanism (the new puritanism?) which endorses the idea that our private behaviours are appropriate matters for public examination and intervention. We see this in regular moral panics about teenagers and alcohol, when government statistics suggest that dangerous drinking by teenagers has been stable or falling over recent years and that the behaviours of their parents are more of a worry. The story with road safety follows similar patterns. We also see it in the 'obesity epidemic' and a desire to blame it all on fast foods etc.

Often this new puritanism is justified on the grounds of cost i.e. obesity costs billions, excessive alcohol consumption costs billions. But this obviously doesn't apply in Rann's case.

Another reason might be that our media, presumably reflecting the public, finds it far easier to cover politics as if it was, as someone said, politics showbiz for ugly people. An affair is easy to report and to consume. Far easier than, say, the workings of an ETS.

We've seen a lot more of this 'politics as amusing soap opera' stuff in recent years. This type of coverage used to be clearly separated and labeled as comedy. But just as commentary has been allowed to leach into reportage, so too has the ironic, satirical and prurient been allowed to get mixed up with reportage and analysis.

The passing of Studs Terkel

2009-11-21T07:17:14+11:00

Originally posted 1 November 2008

I am a very big fan of Studs Terkel I devoured many of his books when I was young. Not only was he a fantastic oral historian with a real empathy with everyday Americans and a tremendous ability to bring them alive on paper but Terkel was also a great expert on the blues of Chicago, in particular, the incomparable Mahalia Jackson and Big Bill Broonzy. For me Terkel represented the best in American life. The NY Times has a great obit:

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home there. He was 96.

Read the rest …

I like this quote from the obit: “In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.” That’s it, he treated them as people, he relished his time with them, they weren’t just subjects for study.

But there’s also some sadness, an incorrigible, unwavering lefty, Terkel was very much looking forward to seeing Obama win next Tuesday. He told theHuffington Post:

Studs Terkel has been a conscience for America, for decades before Barack Obama was born. In fact he’s eleven years older than Obama’s grandma! He was at the freedom marches in the North and South and he always interviewed people about race- in fact he“wrote the book” on it. Studs did his part to make this a more just nation. Now, the way things are going, it looks like the 96-year-old man, rooting for the 47-year-old, may witness another big step in American history.
“I’m very excited by the idea of a black guy in the White House, that’s very exciting,” Studs said as we said goodbye. “I just wish he was more progressive!”

Good on ya, Studs, a life well-lived.

Update. Here is the audio of an interview Studs did in 2005 with Democracy Now.

Book review: Who really won the 2007 election?

2009-11-21T07:06:07+11:00

Originally posted 7 January 2009

Christine Jackman, “Inside Kevin 07″, Melbourne University Press, 2008.

Kathie Muir, “Worth Fighting For: Inside the your rights at work campaign”, UNSW Press, 2008.

There were two campaigns against the Howard Government in the run-up to the last election: the ALP campaign and the ACTU campaign.

These books complement each other insomuch as they provide ‘insider’ accounts of these interlocking but in many ways separate and differing campaigns. Much of the content of each book is based on interviews with participants and both books suffer a bit from being captured by the people their authors interviewed.

Muir, a former union official now an academic, is unabashedly a fan of the union movement and of the Your Rights at Work campaign. In the preface she describes her approach as ’standpoint research’ or ‘engaged journalism’ but nevertheless independent and critical. Although her book is easy to read (’accessible’ in publisher jargon) and a valuable source for anyone interested in contemporary political campaigning, it falls well short of its claim to be a critical assessment.

Muir pretty much always goes with the inflated claims for the campaign made by her union informants from senior ACTU level all they way to grassroots activists. In addition, Muir’s chapter on the Government’s campaign is noticeably weak, reflecting perhaps a lack of access to the other side of politics.

Christine Jackman, a News Limited journalist, provides a much racier account. She brings a novelistic flavour to the exercise which unfortunately rarely rises above the “It was a dark and stormy night” variety. There are descriptions of one ALP official ‘pacing the grimy streets of inner-city Sydney at dawn’ and so on.

In some ways, these books provide very different world views. Muir’s account is full of touching accounts of the ennobling effects on ordinary people of their participation (often after life-long political passivity) in a great and historic campaign. In Muir’s universe, there is a lot of emphasis on ordinary people having conversations about the issues. Happily, the campaign has helped to re-invigorate the union movement and to empower a new generation of activists.

From the union leadership, John Robertson, then Unions NSW, now part of the Rees Government, is quoted in both books talking about re-inventing politics, re-engaging people and so on (see Jackman, p. 129). Robertson was apparently attracted to Rudd’s similar desire to re-invent politics. Much of this re-invention seems little more than a reversion to older (pre-Accord) styles of union activity. Muir quoted officials being amazed at how happy their members are to talk to them (well d’oh).

Jackman’s world, however, is populated with battle-hardened campaigners who believe that winning is (just about) everything. Her ‘characters’ often talk like they are in a ‘Cliff Hardy’ novel: “Oh f*ck. Oh f*ck” (p2). Another character (p194) is from the Left: “the side of the party most protective of its ideological purity – but being pure of heart and out of power had lost its appeal by 2007″. Many of Jackman’s ‘insights’ are similarly tired and lame e.g. on p.105 she tells us “But in politics, perception and mood are at least as powerful as reality”. There you go.

Both books confirm some significant changes in the union movement’s role in politics, and this is the real value of these books for me anyway. The union movement:

has to be a political power in it’s own right and can not rely on the ALP to secure its agendas
is more of an interest group than a class-based movement albeit the largest and richest in Australia, this reflects the way ordinary people think about unions as much as anything else and a growing move towards individualism and away from collectivism
recognises that campaigning solely on workplace issues doesn’t work, these issues have to be linked to people’s family and community concerns
campaigning on behalf of ‘vulnerable’ workers is much more effective than talking about wages and conditions for the better-paid

So who won the election?

Both books put a strong case for believing that Work Choices was the issue, along with a general mood for change, that brought about Howard’s downfall. And no-one seriously doubts that the union campaign did a lot to make Work Choices a potent issue.

But did it as one activist in Muir’s book says ‘hand ALP victory on a plate’? If it did, of course, then Jackman’s cast of brilliant campaigners were really doing nothing more than playing an unbeatable hand.

Jackman’s insiders make it clear that they had to distance the ALP from the unions. People believe in rights at work and not union power. Mark Arbib, now a Senator says (p137):

“We did a lot of things that unions were hostile to and still very much resent. But it was part of trying to find a way through, to find a balance. It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to say, “here is Betsy the old sacred cow now let’s go slit her throat”.’

It is pretty clear that the ALP strategists saw the union campaign as generating a ‘protest vote’ at best (p128), one that may or may not deliver victory. They believed that the opportunity was there but that the party couldn’t win without a leadership change (p.53). With Rudd as the new, fresh leader (notably without union links) the campaigners had their chance to finally beat Howard. A lot of the campaign was about convincing voters that they could trust Rudd.

Tim Gartrell, then ALP National Secretary, was in charge of the ALP campaign. He gets a lot of coverage in Jackman’s book. In Muir’s book he gets just one mention, right at the end (p.206) where Muir points out that the ALP, including Gartrell, did not give the unions and their campaign any credit for Rudd’s victory. Despite this Muir says the union activists know that “It was the unionists wot won it”.

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