Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
The bits in the middle
Jon Faine is the host of the morning show (8:30am to midday) on ABC Melbourne radio. I listen to him regularly – so much so that I have withdrawal symptoms when away from
To cut to the chase, last Wednesday his guests for the Conversation Hour (11:00am to midday) were Rodney Syme and Bob Carr, with George Megalogenis from the Australian as co-host. It was a really good session. The guests were spruiking their latest books (Syme: A good death: An argument for voluntary euthanasia, and Carr: My reading life), which I must acquire when I have some spare cash, and both of which may inspire pieces for Webdiary. However, it was the initial conversation with George Megalogenis that caught my attention, so much so that as soon as the program was finished I dashed to the local bookstore to buy Megalogenis’s just-released revised edition of The longest decade. I spent the next couple of days reading it (as well as listening to a CD of Keith Jarrett performing Handel’s keyboard suites that I wickedly purchased at the same time).
I am not going to review the book: that has already been done on Webdiary and elsewhere. What I am going to do is to present an extract from the final chapter – indeed, from the last page of the book. In my opinion, Megalogenis has captured the essence of both Howard’s success and his defeat – I have highlighted what to me are his key insights.
Revenge of the working family (Chapter 18:The longest decade (revised edition), by George Megalogenis. Scribe, 2008)
…
Howard never really understood the responsibility he had for the debts that households assumed on his watch. His mortgage belt was more exposed than any generation before it – which is why small movements in interest rates, or in pay and conditions, raised community stress-levels to government-changing levels. In the final week of the campaign, Labor polled voters on economic management, but extended the usual question to ask which party they trusted to manage the economy on their behalf. Labor won that one. The coup was sealed on election day when the suburb of Fountain Gate, the outer-Melbourne housing estate where the ‘Kath & Kim’ show was set, swung to Labor by 11 per cent. To paraphrase Kim, voters wanted ‘effluence with equity’.
The one constant about democracy is that the job description for the national government never changes. Government is meant to provide security and public infrastructure, to correct for market failure, and to avoid telling people how to live their lives. Keating over-reached by ignoring the latter; Howard over-reached by ignoring the bits in the middle. The warning signs were there all along. Health, education, child care, and the environment remained Labor issues even when Howard seemed unbeatable.
The public expected more of the government than Howard was willing to give. He thought that returning the surplus was more important than investing it.
Yet Australians were no more willing to take the final reform step in 2007, in the 17th year of recovery, than they had been in 1993, barely two years after the recession ‘we had to have’ when Keating won his only election. The lesson of both campaigns was the same, but it took two elections to reaffirm it: Australians do not want the government to withdraw completely from society. The most important task now for the post Keating-Howard era of politicians is to figure out where the national government should reassert itself.
 |
|
 |
 |
| © 2005-2011, Webdiary Pty Ltd |
| Disclaimer: | This site is home to many debates, and the views expressed on this site are not necessarily those of the site editors. Contributors submit comments on their own responsibility: if you believe that a comment is incorrect or offensive in any way, please submit a comment to that effect and we will make corrections or deletions as necessary. |
Basically, it's basics.
What does the society want the government to do?
I think that updating infrastructure and services might be a priority; ironically, particularly in the areas that are state responsibilities. Health, education, transport. People look to the government to provide in these areas.
Media focus on shortages of doctors, nurses, beds, services, does not engender a feeling that one is living in a prosperous country, or that one can turn to the health system with any kind of confidence (of course, in fact, most often one can, I am told).
Public transport - well, what can one say? It seems to reflect what is said to be the government view, that public transport is for the bottom of the barrel, for those with no other option ... and such people should be grateful for what they can get. A public transport system that has people, at the end of a day's work, standing from Sydney to Gosford - two hours? two and a half? - is not doing a good job. A contrast of the gracious "Spirit of Progress" of the past, with the rattletrap XPTs demonstrates this change of attitude.
Which attitude seems to be creeping / to have crept into public schools: they are for those lesser who cannot afford private, and thereby prove that they have inferior genes. Fortunately, the teachers are putting up a bit of a fight on their behalf: by results, in some cases.
There is no point at all in telling people how well off they are, and what a good job that the government is doing, when these three areas, such foundations of daily life, are so demonstrably lacking. And these fundamental areas are where the ordinary citizen feels -and is? - powerless. Perhaps he then goes out to buy a plasma TV, in a futile attempt to make his life happier. People are being given cake when they want bread.
But, where do you think the national government should reassert itself, Fiona?
Is nudity obscene?
If one of the job descriptions of a democratic government is to avoid telling people how to live their lives, how do we explain this police raid?
Has nudity become a crime?
The definintion of pornography: obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit.
Is the human body now obscene?
Three definintions of obscene:
1. offensive to morality or decency.
2. causing uncontrolled sexual desire.
3. abominable, disgusting or repulsive.
If anyone has a problem with child or adult nudity they have a problem, not the nude child or the nude adult.
Would we now put a fig leave over Michelangelo's David?
Does the state have the right to determine artistic merit?
I wonder where we are heading as a society when we feel guilt when we look at a child's body. I have a love of photography but now I feel guilty if I take a photo of a child, or even if I pause for a while when walking past a children's playground.
The human body is beautiful and has been the subject of art for thousands of years. Is aboriginal art pornographic? It often depicts human genitalia.
Is our moral fortitude so weak that we need a police force to decide what is art and what is not?
Time is running out.
Professor James Hansen in ScienceAlert today.
Time is running out and the Rudd Government has wasted another year. The market system is failing as more money is invested in coal and other fossil fuels and not enough in renewable energies. We need government intervention now. Do our kids have to take to the streets to draw attention to this terrible market failure?
Running out
John Pratt, it seems as though the biggest flop in the Rudd frontbench is Garrett. This is his latest contribution:
I think years of loud music and drugs have addled his brain.
Doing just what he planned...
But I sense that Rudd will withdraw from society, Fiona, in exactly the same way. He is going through the motions of consulting with the people, but then doing exactly what he planned to do in the first place. In fact he seems to me to be even going further than Howard on some issues. And while he says he is open to the views of the public I am beginning to think that is just words. Time will tell and I intend to push a bit myself to see just how prepared he is to listen.
Don't forget Four Corners tonight on the carers issue.
What goes up just might come down
"The most important task now for the post Keating-Howard era of politicians is to figure out where the national government should reassert itself."
What might be termed 'market failure' in such areas as housing, education and health is the failure of 'market forces' to step in and provide what government used to provide: decent affordable services for people on average incomes or below.
The Federal Government is the only government in Australia with real power to tax, and to tax evenly across the nation. Thus it would seem there is no alternative but for that government to provide these services by the following simple mechanism: (1) establish the likely cost; (2) raise the necessary funds through taxation (3) short-term borrow in the event of budget shortfalls.
Income tax used to be preferred by the Labor and left side of politics because it could be set up on a sliding scale to enable the richest to pay more than the poorest, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of income. However, since the rise and rise of the tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax minimisation industries (and today it usually takes a highly paid legal specialist to find the subtle distinctions between these) for those who can afford the services of a good lawyer and accountant, the paying of income tax has become an optional activity.
The easiest and most direct way for a federal government to raise the necessary money for the abovementioned essential services is via periodic adjustment up or down of the GST. The GST can only be evaded or avoided by shopping offshore and getting the goods back home by smuggling, or else if the Customs service at points of entry does not enforce its own regulations. Otherwise, one grins and pays it.
As Eric Janszen said:
Whatever good it may have done, 'economic rationalism' has given the country a foreign debt that stands today at a record $600 billion. That is, around $27,000 for every man, woman and child in the population. On the face of it, if the foreign banks which lent it to the local banks ever start calling it in, there will be more than a pinch of hell to pay.