Daydreaming Left is in for a surprise: This is a contest for the centre, not the extremes

An editorial from "The Australian" below:

THERE is the real election campaign in which a centre-left challenger is fighting to regain the middle ground from a centre-right pragmatist. And then there's the fantasy election in which a left-liberal socialist is fighting to end 11 dark years of despotic rule by a scheming far-right culture-warrior. Having spent the last decade miscasting John Howard as immoral and mendacious, the intellectual Left is now compounding its mistake by portraying his likely successor as a social crusader on a mission to restore morality to public life.

Kevin Rudd has spent the past eleven months signing himself up to Mr Howard's policy agenda, but the fantasists from the Left have refused to believe him, recreating instead an Opposition Leader from a parallel universe. In an essay in The Monthly, Robert Manne details the manifesto of the fantasy Labor leader. "If Rudd is elected, the kind of mimetic foreign policy that followed our blank-cheque endorsement of the US in every twist and turn of policy in its war on terror, which led us into the catastrophe of Iraq, will be reversed," Manne muses. "If Rudd is elected, the industrial relations laws will be softened and humanised ... universities will most likely be more generously funded ... some elements of the former independence of the public service and of the former vigour of the parliament (may) be revived ... the gulf between the government and the country's creative artists will be bridged." Well dream on.

The banal truth is that Howard's Australia was never the nightmare of the Left's imaginings and Rudd's Australia would not be the liberal utopia of its dreams. In the areas where there is some substance behind its attacks, the politicisation of the public service, for example, their criticisms would equally apply to earlier governments of both persuasions and it is unlikely that Rudd, who cut his governmental teeth in the Goss administration, will be likely to turn the tide.

The most obvious failings and missed opportunities of the Howard era are conveniently ignored, the growth of big government, for example. There again, for all Labor finance spokesman Lindsay Tanner's talk of razor gangs, it is hard to imagine that the welfare promises, tax deductions, committees and commissions offered by Rudd's Labor will help facilitate a contraction in the public service.

These must be dull times for the class warriors who refuse to accept that the use-by date on Das Kapital is well and truly passed. Kevin Rudd does not look like Che Guevara and, prudently for a candidate who sees popular election rather than a proletarian uprising as a route to power, he is fundamentally conservative. He is delivering on his promise in an interview with The Weekend Australian's Christine Jackman earlier this year to "mess with Howard's mind", but his secret has been to outflank the Prime Minister on the Right rather than attack him from the Left. As Paul Kelly writes in a major profile of Mr Rudd in The Weekend Australian Magazine today, there has never been another Labor leader like him. He is dedicated to his Christian faith, trained as a Mandarin-speaking technocrat and is married to a businesswoman who runs a global company.

The tongue-in-cheek description of Mr Rudd as a politician who joined the wrong party may be a little harsh, but the fact is that his ascension to the leadership has brought the two major parties closer together on policy than at any time since World War II. His success may well have been a factor in persuading Mr Howard to modify his own position on Work Choices, climate change and reconciliation as he struggles to maintain his grip on the middle ground.

A sober analysis of the Howard years, however, does not support the portrayal of the Prime Minister as a culture warrior. If indeed he has been waging war against the insidious forces of liberalism entrenched in universities, public broadcasters and publishing houses, Mr Howard has lost. As Christopher Pearson wryly observes elsewhere in these columns, Australia's universities are still, in effect, 37 publicly funded leftist think tanks. No fair-minded listener of Radio National or viewer of The 7.30 Report would conclude that Mr Howard's culture offensive, real or imagined, has made any more progress at the ABC.

Of course, we may be wrong about Mr Rudd. He may turn out to be the most convincing actor ever to walk the Australian political stage and once in office might reveal his true identity as a starry-eyed activist waiting to unleash a Whitlamesque program of social reform.

Prime minister Rudd may withdraw Australia from the ANZUS alliance, shut down the coalmines, declare Australia a republic, make gay marriage compulsory and transform the nation into a wind-powered, mung-bean-eating Arcadia. But we think not. And while The Weekend Australian is not foolhardy enough to call the result of an election which is still four weeks away, we will make one prediction. The agenda of a Rudd government is likely to be much closer to the position advocated in the editorial columns of this newspaper than the outdated, soft-left manifesto supported by our broadsheet rivals.

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Foolish failure to attack Leftist capture of the institutions

By Christopher Pearson

On Thursday The Australian's foreign editor Greg Sheridan devoted a column to the latest manifestations of the zeitgeist. While recognising that the Coalition may still win the election, he argued that it "has comprehensively lost the culture wars". Despite some tactical victories, he concluded: "This could turn out to have been a very hollow period of conservative government indeed, and our culture may move quite sharply in ways we cannot now imagine."

The most telling part of Sheridan's critique is his targeting of the "utterly unreformed" ABC. As he says, "no one seriously even argues that the ABC is balanced or unbiased, merely that it balances the Howard Government, or the commercial media, or some such. Yet every year the Government has given it generous budget increases, so the ABC world view is stronger."

Starving the national broadcaster of funds is a policy with some obvious attractions, but I doubt it's the best way of correcting the problems of "staff capture" and entrenched ultra-leftism. Well-resourced networks are far likelier to attract staff who are highly professional and don't make a habit of grinding ideological axes if the upper echelon of management has a mind to recruit them. A better-resourced ABC would also have been better able to offer packages to recalcitrants in middle management and the twilight zone of Radio National.

The unreconstructed ABC has remained a delinquent institution for lack of reforming zeal from its leadership. John Howard has to wear the responsibility for having appointed as its chairman Donald McDonald, who plainly wasn't tough-minded enough to resist the blandishments of its old guard. To make matters worse, the Prime Minister gave him a second five-year term.

If the chairman, the board and the managing director had all steadily insisted on higher professional standards, the ABC could have been a far more healthily pluralistic institution. For example, it is inconceivable that Michael Brissenden, political editor of The 7.30 Report, would have felt at liberty to resile from an agreement with Peter Costello's office about off-the-record remarks a year earlier, on the flimsiest of excuses, or that Kerry O'Brien, the show's presenter, would have sanctioned his behaviour. Nor would Media Watch have felt able to turn a blind eye.

Sheridan says the Coalition "has governed against the relentless opposition of the big institutions in our society: the media ... the public service and the universities. It has at times outmanoeuvred these institutions; it has not reformed them." The ABC and SBS are more obviously susceptible to reform than commercial media, and I'd have thought that from a conservative point of view the lighter the regulation of privately owned media, the better. The public service and tertiary education are very different kettles of fish.

The era when public servants routinely gave ministers advice without fear or favour is long gone and it's hard to imagine how sufficient levels of mutual trust and an apolitical bureaucracy could be restored. While the best career public servants are formidable operators and still have a sense of esprit de corps, there are an awful lot who chose the public service primarily as a sheltered workshop and are damned if they'll leave this side of retirement.

In terms of reining in the public sector, Howard started off by at least temporarily reducing its size and hiring a few private-sector managers capable of inspiring terror. In future, most departments should have a Max Moore-Wilton clone at or near the top. Apart from that, perhaps the best the next Coalition government could do by way of reform would be to resolve anew to cut burgeoning staff numbers and outsource where it makes sense, to get out of the habit of rewarding proven incompetence, to further foster the development of evidence-based policy and to put more people with private-sector experience in charge of service delivery.

Reform of the universities is, as Sheridan says, an important task the Coalition has largely squibbed. There have been some welcome developments, notably in freeing up the fast-growing private tertiary sector and providing funding through FEE-HELP for its students. Compulsory student union fees have been abolished and don't look likely to be reintroduced. But, as Keith Windschuttle is fond of saying, the Government still has a poisonous relationship with what are in effect 37 publicly funded leftist think tanks trying with varying degrees of enthusiasm to achieve its end.

Perhaps there should have been more initiatives along the lines of encouraging Carnegie Mellon to open a campus in Adelaide. Perhaps there should have been more weighting of funds to benefit empirical disciplines at the expense of the heavily politicised: cultural studies, history, politics, media studies and the like. Making the students who are the main beneficiaries of any course of study contribute more towards the cost was unpopular but right in principle. It fits with the ethos of the emerging enterprise culture, rather than the culture of entitlement, and it's a wholesome change to encourage young people to invest in themselves and their futures.

Sheridan thinks the Coalition "has on occasion been clever at arousing a popular backlash against elite opinion on this or that subject. But it has not changed elite opinion. And in the end it appears that it is impossible to govern permanently against elite opinion. Elite opinion shapes popular opinion." This strikes me as rather a melodramatic way to characterise the situation and I think he's selling the long-term legacy of the Howard Government short.

Elite opinion is by no means a homogeneous entity, unless your definition of the elite excludes anyone who's not a latte-sipping, inner-urban dwelling admirer of Robert Manne. Nor, almost by definition, are the latte-sippers amenable to having their minds changed, least of all by conservative governments. The views of this narrowly defined elite are only one of the many factors that influence popular opinion and it seems to me he overrates their importance.

Take, for example, the broad economic argument that the Government mounts regularly and the emergence of the enterprise culture, which is superseding the older lackadaisical values of the lucky country. There is no turning back for the hundreds of thousands of new small businesses and the enterprising people who've gone out and got themselves an Australian Business Number. Elite opinion can be as dismissive as it likes, but the experience of being your own boss and doing well by working hard changes people profoundly and most often permanently. These are people who've been persuaded of the virtues of free enterprise. To the extent that they consider voting for Kevin Rudd, it is only because he seems to stand for them too.

Elite opinion, narrowly conceived, passionately supports public-sector schools, even if many of the elite choose to send their children to private schools. About 40 per cent of senior secondary students in Victoria attend non-government schools because parents have good reason to believe they do a better job. There are similar, seemingly irreversible, trends in every state. Rudd's embrace of the existing private school funding formula for the foreseeable future is proof that this is another front of the culture wars where the Coalition is winning the argument hands down.

One area in which the Howard Government may reasonably have expected to change elite opinion is the war over teaching spelling, literacy and numeracy. It's understandable that latte-sippers would have conscientious objections to teaching history as narrative, complete with dates, but you'd think any elite worthy of the name would want the next generation to have a good grounding in the fundamentals. In fact I'm sure quite a lot of them do, some more sotto voce than others. But it is popular opinion that has shifted firmly behind a back-to-basics approach and explains the new bipartisan consensus. It was instructive to hear The Age's political editor Michelle Grattan professing herself amazed that Howard should have chosen that theme at the end of the debate with Rudd and suggests to me that he's more in touch with public opinion than she realises.

During the course of the past week Rudd was asked about his attitude to gay marriage. He was howled down for opposing any change to the law that would allow it and for upholding the traditional view that marriage was strictly for heterosexuals. Were he to win the election, it's conceivable that he might change his stance. But because Howard and his ministers very effectively harnessed popular opinion against legalising same-sex marriage, Rudd would risk alienating a crucial blue-collar, socially conservative constituency that is far less committed to him than the latte-sippers, who have no one else but the Greens to vote for.

Sheridan is worried "our culture may move quite sharply in ways we cannot now imagine" and I suppose it's always on the cards. Part of Howard's unacknowledged achievement has been in general terms a matter of keeping things on an even keel. Sometimes that's a more considerable accomplishment than it seems. Take the case of the intervention in the Northern Territory. Its ultimate justification was putting a stop to the astonishing incidence of child abuse, including sexual abuse, in remote communities. It was an appeal based on a confident assessment of the decency and common sense of middle Australia. While Labor decided to support it, no one in the political class imagines Labor would have initiated it.

Last week Marion Scrymgour, the NT's indigenous Community Services Minister, labelled the intervention an example of a "vicious new McCarthyism" and "a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life". Her rhetoric epitomised the elite view of matters, but one of her indigenous parliamentary colleagues, Alison Anderson, rebuked her in no uncertain terms. She said abusers were sick people who had no rights and "this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get things right". Now that it has gained bipartisan support, I can't see the new spirit of pragmatic conservatism in Aboriginal affairs dissipating anytime soon.

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Suburbs attacked because the middle-class hates plumbers in big houses

Comment by Michael Duffy. When I lived in Sydney, the electrician I used for maintenance jobs on my properties lived in Vaucluse -- an elite suburb. But he was very clever at his job and a fast worker so he earned it fair and square

Sixty years ago this month something happened on Long Island near New York that was to help shape Australian cities. It deserves to be better known. The first homeowners moved into Levittown, a 17,000-residence housing estate built by Bill Levitt. Essentially, Levitt applied the principles of Henry Ford's production line to housing. In the process he brought prices down so much that suburbia became available to the working class. This did more than perhaps anything else to democratise the prosperity of the postwar economic boom.

Of course, Levitt couldn't put a house on a production line. So what he did was bring the production line to the house. He broke up the construction process into several dozen separate tasks. Then he broke up his workforce into teams, each specialising in just one task. Each team would do its job on one lot and then move on to the next house and do it again. (Levittown had just three house designs.)

When those around him refused to share his passion for cutting costs, he simply went around them. The unions didn't like his work practices so he hired non-union labour and paid them top dollar. When suppliers wouldn't give him satisfactory discounts for his bulk purchases he bought forests and timber mills and nail factories to supply himself. He reformed conveyancing practices to help low-income clients who had never been able to afford a lawyer before.

As a result of the innovations Levitt and other developers introduced, house prices tumbled. At a time when the average manufacturing worker was earning $US2400 a year, Levitt was selling a basic Cape Cod for $US7990. He went on to build other large housing estates, providing decent accommodation for hundreds of thousands of (white) working class Americans and inspiring developers in other countries, including Australia.

Another legacy of his success was the vitriolic criticism he attracted from intellectuals, people such as academics, writers, professionals, and government policy experts. The negative attitude to the outer suburbs that formed then has persisted to this day.

Lewis Mumford, the most respected writer on cities of his time, was particularly contemptuous. He said Levittown was socially "backward", inhabited by "people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould manufactured in the same central metropolis." This criticism of suburbia was to be repeated by thousands of intellectuals around the world from then to now. The grounds for the criticism have changed a bit over time, with environmentalism now providing the flavour, but the level of hostility has been pretty consistent.

A persisting feature of the criticisms of the intellectuals is that most have been mere assertions without basis in fact, and have been proved wrong once anybody bothered to test them. Eventually a sociologist named Herbert Gans went to live in one of Levitt's estates and published a book called The Levittowners in 1967, disproving just about all the assertions of Mumford and the other critics. He found there was a rich diversity of human beings living there - but his findings were largely ignored by the intellectuals, who continued to be unable to see beyond the buildings to the people living in them.

A similar blindness affects much criticism of so-called suburban sprawl today. For years it has been asserted by intellectuals that the outer suburbs, compared with areas closer to the city, are socially and environmentally inferior. There are now numerous studies disproving this (for example, the recent one showing lower density improves sociability, by Jan Brueckner and colleagues at the University of California), yet the intellectuals continue to assert it. Why so?

It comes down to self-interest. First, jobs: most of the criticism of sprawl is used to justify an alternative vision of the city where intellectuals of various kinds would play a strong role in planning and regulation. The media is happy to promote this view because a planned city, with all the reports and regulations and formalised disputes this entails, is much easier to report on than a city made of the spontaneous decisions of thousands of individuals.

Another reason for the persistent anger is middle-class status anxiety. Most intellectuals are members of the middle class, which defines itself in part by possession of an old inner-city pad or a nice house and garden in an inner-ring suburb. To see mere tradesmen in the 1980s acquiring bigger houses than those owned by many lawyers and academics sent a shiver through the middle class, and helped create an audience for absurd criticisms of prole housing, of the sort embodied in the term McMansion.

Does any of this matter? I suspect it does. I believe that over time the relentless criticism of the new suburbs helped create the intellectual and then the political environment in which governments were able to impose massive levies and taxes on new homes for the first time in history. This was one of the worst cases of intergenerational inequity this country has seen, and did much to produce the housing affordability crisis we face today. I suspect governments were able to get away with this only because the intellectuals had denigrated new suburbs to the point where they had almost no defenders among the ranks of the powerful and the influential.

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