Reality bites the psychotic Left

By refusing to face modern realities, the Australian Left has dealt itself out of the national debate. Lack of reality contact is the defining mark of psychosis

FOR evidence, if any more were needed, that the intellectual Left has become completely divorced from reality, turn to page 14 of the latest edition of The Monthly, where Clive Hamilton describes the therapeutic effect of bushfires at Christmas. "As the orgy of spending reaches a climax we begin to wonder whether we have become decadent," the Australia Institute executive director writes. "The firies who battle the elements on our behalf remind us of our 'true' selves."

Since Mr Hamilton and his neo-Arcadian cohorts contend that affluence is a bad thing, 13 years of consecutive economic growth must be driving them nuts. Indeed much of the work emanating from Mr Hamilton's left-wing think tank fits the dictionary definition of the word psychosis: "marked by distorted perceptions of reality". This is the institute after all that believes in a vast corporate conspiracy to stall action on climate change, accuses David Jones and Myers of "corporate pedophilia" and claims that Australia is becoming an increasingly authoritarian state where dissidents are silenced.

This last thesis, expounded at length in Silencing Dissent published earlier this year, would seem difficult to sustain at a time when the marketplace of ideas has never been so crowded. In newspaper opinion sections and magazines and on radio and televisions and increasingly online, Australians are engaged in intelligent conversation about the issues of the day great and small. Blogs and internet chat rooms have given everyone a seat at the debating table. Technology has lowered the barriers to publishing. A host of new periodicals online and in print including The Monthly, New Matilda and The Australian's own Australian Literary Review are providing new platforms for discussion while established journals such as Quadrant and the Griffith Review are reaching new readers and providing a home for new writers. The queues outside venues at this year's Sydney Writers Festival, record attendances at similar writers festivals around the country and new events such as next month's Adelaide Festival of Ideas are public expressions of a confident, mature democracy in which informed debate flourishes.

It is hard to reconcile these objective facts with the commentary taking place in the parallel universe inhabited by disaffected intellectuals who insist that critics are gagged in the gulag they like to call "John Howard's Australia". In his contribution to Silencing Dissent, Robert Manne claimed the nation was headed on "the increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the political culture" under Mr Howard.

The hallmark of the disaffected intellectuals is their hyperbole, as evidenced from the latest tract to appear from the "silenced" Left, David Marr's Quarterly Essay, His Masters Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate under Howard. As David Burchell pointed out in The Weekend Australian, Marr wants us to believe that Mr Howard's influence over the national psyche is so intense that just about every act of suppression in our public life is somehow attributable to the Prime Minister.

The silencing of dissent thesis tells us more about the current health of the cultural Left than it does about the health of the nation. While the Left is still fighting the intellectual battles of the 1970s, the rest of the world has moved on. Progressive only in their own, inflated self image, the commentariat finds itself stranded on the outer fringes of the national debate, stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac without the courage or confidence to retrace its steps. Their voices have not been silenced, they have simply lost their relevance. While the mainstream debate is conducted elsewhere, the progressives are stuck in the corner, muttering darkly among themselves. Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they are rebels without a cause still trapped in dialectical Marxist maze.

Irritatingly, the marginalisation of the self-styled progressives has only served to reinforce their unshakable belief in their own moral superiority. This conceit informs the kind of rigid political correctness that shuts down debate. To question multiculturalism is racist, to suggest that Aborigines would have a better future if they were participating in the mainstream economy is assimilationist. To challenge the precepts of political Islam is to demonise Muslims and to demonise any minority group is failure to recognise the superior virtue of the oppressed.

The only acceptable prejudice is anti-Americanism, which gives today's left-wingers some strange bedfellows from Cuba's Fidel Castro to the fanatical Islamists in the middle east. As Nick Cohen points out in his incisive book What's Left?, it used to be the conservatives who made excuses for fascism. "Now liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements," he writes. "Give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally."

Closely related to their hatred of the US is their contempt for capitalism. The impact of the modern share-owning democracy has yet to dawn on them. Corporations no longer answer to the bourgeoisie, they answer to shareholders -- ordinary people who are now stakeholders, either directly or through the $1 trillion in superannuation. Karl Marx's dream has been fulfilled now that the workers truly do control the means of production.

On one of the burning topics of the day, climate change, this profound hatred of capitalism has led them down another philosophical dead end which advocates a romantic vision of suffering for a cause. Rather than objectively assess the realities of climate change and the practical task ahead they advocate symbolic, but ultimately futile, penance. By persisting with a misguided campaign to turn back the clock and demonise the Howard Government for not being harsh enough, once again, the debate has passed them by. Kyoto is giving way to a new global compact at which the US and Australia are at the centre. As research into clean coal technology for electricity generation looks set to become not just a reality but much quicker than even optimists had expected, those who advocate a return to dark nights and cold showers again look foolish.

In their retreat from modernity, the wrongly named progressives part company with Marxism which, despite its fatal flaws, was at least grounded in the spirit of the enlightenment, progress through scientific inquiry. Today's Left has allowed itself to become trapped in a parallel universe, out of touch and far removed from the mainstream where the real Australian discourse takes place. It is not just a geographical divide, though it is true the Left tends to be at its strongest in the latte belt and tertiary institutions. It is a class divide between an elite on one side and the mass of ordinary people on the other. It is not just Mr Howard they hate but Mr Average, as Marr's telling reference to Patrick White's return to Australia from Europe makes plain. White later recalled, "it was the exaltation of the average that made me panic most" and for Marr Mr Howard is "the exalter of the average". The Australian Left's reluctance to make the effort to understand Mr Howard's popular appeal is one of its most fundamental failings of the past 11 years. In the Left's narrative, Mr Howard has won four elections through a combination of luck and duplicity and on each occasion the electorate was too lazy or too stupid to make the right call. Only members of the intellectual elite are smart enough not to be fooled by Mr Howard's trickery. This threadbare analysis has helped consign the Labor Party to Opposition since 1996.

While the disconnection has certainly expanded over the past decade, all is not lost. There is a way back, a way to overcome the tyranny of distance between the Left's world and the real world. Left thinkers elsewhere in the world have moved on and cut themselves back into the cultural debate. In Britain the reformed Left has signed up to the Euston Manifesto, which aims to draw a line "between forces on the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values". In France, left-wing thinker Bernard Henri Levy has been bitterly critical of those who believe "that Islamism can be embraced and put in the service of the Left" while Medecins Sans Frontieres founder Bernard Kouchner, a fierce advocate of humanitarian intervention, has been appointed Foreign Minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy. The way forward for the Left in Australia is to acknowledge that the politics of the outsider is an adolescent phase and develop soundly based, intelligent arguments that will earn them a place at the table of national debate.

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Jobs are not just luck

Low unemployment is an inconvenient truth for unions (The ACTU is Australia's equivalent of Britain's TUC or America's AFL-CIO)

THE ACTU's ham-fisted attempts in discussions in the International Labour Organisation to silence Australian government official James Smythe revealed an inconvenient truth about the union movement. Trade unionists care more about their membership than they do about the unemployed.

Mr Smythe wanted to raise Australia's stellar jobs creation performance and unemployment levels that have reached a 33-year low. Unemployment has declined to 4.2 per cent and more than 90 per cent of the 358,700 new jobs created since Work Choices are full-time. The ACTU international representative at the ILO made the startling claim that jobs growth was not relevant to a discussion of Work Choices legislation.

But record low unemployment is not an accident, or as the ALP claims merely a reflection of the global boom times. If it were true that unemployment has nothing to do with government policies, then how to explain a country such as France, which has had chronically high unemployment since the 1970s. The French electorate is convinced that government policy has something to do with it and has given newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy a convincing majority on a platform of tackling unemployment by trying to get rid of the arthritic rigidities of French labour laws. Australia's jobs creation record is one that France and many other highly regulated European economies can only dream of.

This has not happened overnight. As former prime minister Paul Keating pointed out on ABC-TV's Lateline last Thursday, the transformation of the Australian labour market started with his reforms in 1993 and have continued up to the present day. The introduction of AWAs has given employers and employees a framework for direct, uncomplicated negotiations and the repeal of unfair dismissal laws has given employers, particularly in small business, the confidence to take on new staff, knowing that they will not be forced into costly legal proceedings if, for whatever reason, they need to reduce staff at some point in the future.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Business Council of Australia feel strongly enough about the damage Labor's proposed changes might do to the economy to pay for an advertising blitz. The ads paid for by the employer organisations will acknowledge reforms undertaken by both Mr Keating and John Howard. ALP parliamentarians and union activists were outraged that Australian businesses might pay for an advertising campaign and threatened business that there might be consequences. That position smacks of rank hypocrisy and thuggery. Why should unionists be privileged to put forward their viewpoint while employers hold their tongue?

Union advertising in Australia has focused on "your rights at work". But more fundamental than rights at work is the right to work at all and unions have a very poor record in protecting the rights of those who want to move from welfare to the workplace.

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State cancer care in crisis

SECRET waiting lists have revealed how Queensland Health consistently exposes cancer victims to deadly treatment delays. Internal hospital documents show hundreds of victims are routinely forced to wait more than three times longer than recommended for potentially life-saving radiation treatment. The "Report on Delay for Treatment" documents show there has been little or no improvement since The Courier-Mail obtained the same figures 10 months ago.

At the time, Health Minister Stephen Robertson downplayed the figures as a week-to-week prospect and insisted the Government was addressing the problem. There is now growing concern in Queensland's hospitals that efforts to address the radiation therapy waiting times have failed.

Coalition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek yesterday said there was clearly an ongoing problem the Government must urgently address. "People are dying in our system because of these poor services," he said.

According to the figures for the Princess Alexandra, Mater and Townsville hospitals, priority-two patients, who have been diagnosed with aggressive cancers and internal bleeding, are now waiting up to 49 days for radiation treatment. Queensland Health's recommended maximum waiting time is 14 days to avoid "a significant adverse effect on outcomes". Priority-three patients, who predominantly suffer breast and prostate cancers, are waiting up to 69 days for treatment. The recommended maximum waiting time is 28 days. The Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital was the only cancer-treating facility in Queensland at or below recommended treatment times.

However, hospital sources said this was because of a shortage of oncologists to refer patients for treatment. A Queensland Health spokesman admitted therapy waiting times were yet to show improvement. "Despite an overall improvement in elective surgery waiting times through the $10 billion health action plan, radiation therapy waiting times continue to be exacerbated by a national shortage of specialist nursing staff and oncologists," he said. The spokesman said Queensland Health would continue to pursue radiation professionals to reduce waiting times.

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Political posturing about fuel prices in Australia too

THE only way the Government can cut the price of petrol is to reduce its tax and excise, the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) says. Following last week's petrol spike, which saw the price in Sydney peak at to $1.43 cents a litre, Labor said it would establish a national petrol commission to monitor and investigate price gouging. Prime Minister John Howard has promised to meet the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission watchdog (ACCC) this week to offer it more powers.

RACV spokesman David Cumming dismissed both plans and said the only way fuel prices would drop would be to cut petrol tax and excise. "This is pure window-dressing, both parties are trying to avoid the fact that we are being ripped off by the Government," Mr Cumming said on ABC radio. "We are being ripped off by the tax on the tax and by the very high excise we pay in this country."

Mr Cumming said a price commissioner and the ACCC could not interfere on pricing because the fuel market was not regulated. "The ACCC already has the powers in relation to collusion," he said. "They can tighten up their powers on collusion if they wish to but if we are talking about the bottom-line which is the pump price ... what you do is you get rid of the tax on the tax and you look at bringing down the excise.

"You have to ask yourself why are we paying 38.1 cents per litre excise when only 8 cents of that money goes back into roads and the rest basically goes into the surplus of the Federal Government. "The only thing the Government or the Opposition can do is to look at the taxes, they don't want to talk about taxes."

NRMA president Alan Evans said he believed there had been collusion between fuel companies but in the form of an unwritten understanding to match prices. "The NRMA has been pursuing for over two years more power for the ACCC because we have seen what has been going on with oil prices. We know motorists are being ripped off," he said on ABC radio. "Finally, after two years of solid work we are getting some action from both the Government and the Opposition. Now we will make sure that both of them live up to their commitments."

Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia executive manager David Moir said he welcomed the ability for someone to lift the veil and look at the deals and arrangements and profit margins. "Then, hopefully, that will mean that people are charging normal profits but not getting into price gouging," he said on ABC radio.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel has urged the Government to introduce jail sentences for price-fixing. Mr Samuel said the process of introducing jail sentences for hardcore cartel activity was important. "It changes the cost-benefit analysis very significantly," Mr Samuel said. "If you get caught now you will face penalties and fines, not five years' jail."

Federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd yesterday proposed appointing a petrol commissioner within the ACCC to oversee petrol prices.

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