Australian Politics
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Left/Right policy switches
TIMOTHY LYNCH notes below that what were once conservative policies have become Leftist and vice versa. So is there any condistency in ideologies? There is but it is not at the policy level. The lasting Left/Right identities are at the psychological level. The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger. Applying those attitudes to differing life circumstances will produce different policy preferences
The first woman I ever loved was an eco-feminist. She was radicalised by the 1984 British miners’ strike, listened to Billy Bragg on a C90 cassette tape, marched for women’s rights, admired communist East Germany and refused on principle to visit the US. In the 33 years since she dumped me, I don’t think she ever has.
In those decades, the left of which she was a proud and, I thought, typical member has been transformed.
Barbara (name changed) would now march not to keep coalmines open but to close them. Bragg would be too old/white male/working class (and thus need decolonising). The women’s rights marches Barbara joined in the 1980s she would now condemn as anti-trans. Only her anti-Americanism – the second most durable hatred on the left, after anti-Semitism – would endure.
The right has switched, too. Not as completely as the left but in important ways we often elide. This transposition of left and right conditions much of our contemporary politics but goes mostly unremarked.
In the ’80s, the Conservatives effectively closed the British coal industry. Barbara sent the picketing men blankets and goodwill. Today, “beautiful, clean coal” (Donald Trump’s phrase) is deified by those on the right. It speaks to man’s independence from the forces of cold nature. Scott Morrison held aloft a lump in parliament.
In the 2020s, it is the left that has assumed the four-decade-old Conservative position.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen vilify coal. Like Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor, Thatcher’s head of the National Coal Board, Labor is plotting to throw every miner out of work.
Then, the right stood for middle-class values: marriage, family, low taxation, strong defences. Now, Australian Liberals trade on their working-class bona fides. In the US, Republicans tell defenestrated coalminers that they will be their voice. Democrats blame them for climate change. Barbara wept with the injustice of Thatcher’s assault on mining communities. Hillary Clinton now derides them as deplorables.
The right stood against the sexual revolution, free love and the consequences of the pill. Now it is the left that polices sex. Brittany Higgins, a young conservative woman (at least until Network Ten got to her), has become a poster child of the left’s obsession with sexual misconduct. The sex re-education programs on every university campus, warning of the perils of physical intimacy, are mandated by progressives, not by conservatives.
It used to be the religious right that told us to avoid sex. Now it is the cultural left. It was conservatives who criticised feminism. Now it is trans activists on the left. Indeed, it is Liberal women (such as Moira Deeming) who have paid the highest price for upholding a traditional conception of women’s rights. Many left-wing feminists have gone missing in action.
The left-right transposition is especially evident when it comes to race. It was small-C conservatives (often southern Democrats) in the US who wanted to maintain racial distinctions. Now it is the left that upholds race as the basic determinant of societal relations.
Conservative segregationists scoffed at Martin Luther King’s vision of a colourblind constitution. Now it is the left that condemns the reverend for his colour-blindness. We should hire, fire, promote and condemn based on race. MLK, left-wing anti-racists now tell us, was guilty of “content of character racism”.
Yes campaigners for the Indigenous voice wanted race written permanently into the Australian Constitution. No campaigners, representing most conservative voters, wanted it written out. When I was growing up near Leicester, then and still one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, the far right demanded rights for indigenous Brits. In modern-day Australia, it is the left that makes the equivalent claim for First Nations people.
In Britain, asserting “indigenous rights” is racist. Here it is anti-racist. I have never been able to hear an acknowledgment of country here without thinking how bizarre it would sound in the English Midlands. “Sovereignty was never ceded!” sounds like an anti-EU Brexit slogan.
Why this ideological transposition? Losing wars changes the loser. And the left lost the biggest in its history in 1989.
My year with Barbara began the night the Berlin Wall fell (the other 9/11: November 9). We drank Blue Smirnoff, she in bemused sorrow, me in joyous irony; vodka was one of the few things the Soviet Union did well.
That night, the left lost the key economic argument of the 20th century: command economies don’t work, free-market ones do. People crave the opportunities of the latter. They will flee the former when given the chance.
My bearded university lecturers spent the ensuing years in a state of deep agitation. For many, the fall of communism coincided with their own midlife crises. It was wonderful. Today, zealously held but weak arguments are protected by speech codes and de-platforming. Then, men and women who had backed the Soviet project were subject to debate. Many did not like it.
The game plan thereafter was to establish a leftist catechism, grounded in a cultural revolution, the challenging of which would be heresy.
This “long march through the institutions”, as Rudi Dutschke, the young disciple of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, described it, is reaching some sort of destination now. And what a scene of tedium and enervation it is.
Instead of debating big questions, we fly rainbow flags. Safe spaces have taken precedence over dangerous ideas.
When class war didn’t work, new kinds of oppression, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones, were found.
Climate, race and gender have replaced class as the source of left-wing fervour. These wars have been waged much more effectively. Their dialecticism – you are with us or against us, anti-racist or racist, pro-trans or transphobic – has enabled their colonisation of social media.
Marx claimed class war was inevitable. It proved not so. But culture war may well be. The US has been in a protracted one since Roe v Wade in 1973. Australia is flirting with its own version because of the voice debacle.
Climate denialism, structural racism, rape culture and transphobia. Collectively, these progressive priorities now have the quality of crisis. They are spectres haunting the West, to again adapt Marx’s rhetoric. Their negation now mobilises whole campuses and workplaces. Denying their salience, let alone standing against them, is hard to impossible.
In the US, if you want a university job, you will likely have to affirm, in writing and at interview, your contribution to their fighting. Australia is not quite there but we are inching closer. It is one of the forms of American cultural imperialism to which we are most susceptible.
I don’t know what Barbara would make of this transformation of the left. Sadly, dear reader, finding out would be a research project too far for me. I suspect she would be in sympathy with some of it. But much of it she would not recognise as the natural evolution from her 1989 platform.
She did teach me something vital, a lesson too few on the right imbibe. Those on the left are not bad people. They are not evil. But they are naive. They insist on realities that are fantasies. They seek final solutions to problems insoluble. They imagine better worlds while creating worse ones.
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It’s an underdog eat underdog world in the Sunshine State
In a post-Christmas press conference on Tuesday, Queensland’s shiny new Premier, Steven Miles, ducked and dodged a few questions on polling before leaving to see a man about a dog. Not just any dog. An underdog.
Nine months out from an election, the 46-year-old has decided that he and his government are “underdogs”. Taken literally, this means Miles believes Labor is unlikely to win the state election on October 31.
A poll conducted by UComms for The Courier-Mail, the first of its kind since Miles became Premier, shows Labor’s dire position has not changed since Annastacia Palaszczuk tapped the mat on December 10.
Outside Brisbane where it has been raining cats and dogs, the Labor Party appears even more on the snout. Thus begins the Premier Miles’s vainglorious descent into mathematical probabilities and animal metaphors.
Almost anything can happen in a two-horse race but, by definition, only horses can win. Dogs cannot, but the underdog is somehow a chance against the odds.
Why the political obsession with underdog status? Why is there perceived value in politics entering a contest as the least likely candidate or party to win? What potential advantage might be gained by portraying oneself as the ugliest cur in the pet shop?
Is Miles barking up the wrong tree or did the underdog eat his homework? He is desperately hosing down expectations after enjoying another oft-used political metaphor, the honeymoon.
Miles’s honeymoon was so short it made Britney Spears and Jason Alexander, who entered into a state of holy matrimony for just 55 hours in 2004, look like a breeding pair of rainbow lorikeets.
Labor sources were saying as early as May that Palaszczuk would be gone by Christmas and so it proved. In August Labor kingmaker and United Workers Union secretary Gary Bullock gave a “no comment” response to a question on whether he believed Palaszczuk should take Labor to the next election, and the end for the three-time election winner was nigh.
By any measure it was unseemly, with the UWU and the Australian Manufacturers Workers Union not only calling the shots but being seen to call the shots. Labor’s Queensland caucus is little more than a rubber stamp. Bullock and others might argue they don’t run Queensland but it is evident they pick the people who do and tell them how to do it.
Obviously, winning four elections in a row in Queensland is a Himalayan task, but replacing a winning premier with one who classifies himself as an underdog is not exactly the gold standard in succession management.
In 2019, Scott Morrison said it was “fairly clear” he and the Coalition were the underdogs to win that year’s federal election and we all know what happened there. As the votes rolled in on election night, Morrison eschewed canine symbolism and pronounced his victory “a miracle”.
He laid claim to being the underdog again last year but found himself outdogged by Anthony Albanese, who spent much of the campaign referring to himself and his party as the one true underdog. The federal election last year was a battle not only for the hearts and minds of voters but also a dogfight to prove who was the mangiest, puniest mutt on the block.
It’s unsurprising therefore that the underdog won, but then it is equally obvious that another underdog lost. Therein lies a statistical anomaly that provides no strong evidence that underdogs, by sporting definition outgunned, outsmarted and outmuscled, find themselves by some weird trick of the universe standing atop the podium.
But wait. Ahead of the Aston by-election in April, deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley clamoured to assume underdog status despite the fact the last time an opposition had conceded a seat to a government in a by-election was 100 years ago.
“So the Liberal Party will start this (by) election race as the clear underdog, we know that,” Ley said.
The Libs lost the seat with a neat 6 per cent swing against them.
Political communications remain mired in coded euphemism. In political terms an underdog is a political party that believes it is about to be taken to the cleaners and its parliamentary members understand it at a deep, instinctive, cellular level but lack the honesty to say it out loud.
Assuming underdog status in politics is becoming tiresome, a hackneyed regurgitation of language that made little sense when it was first used and makes even less now.
Surely we can do better than underdog. Where are the dark horses, the longshots? What ever happened to the rank outsider battling the odds? Where are the Davids bringing Goliaths to their knees? Where are the Bradburians who triumph by being the last man standing at the finish line? Let’s hear some Cinderella stories – the former greenkeeper out of nowhere about to become the Masters champion etc.
Winning four elections would be a remarkable feat. But Premier Miles has no right to refer to himself as an underdog. He has the keys to the state Treasury, with all the largesse therein to spread around. Roll out the barrel. Put some pork on your fork. He has access to media and news coverage that his opponent can only dream of. He has the ability to drive a political agenda, to shape policy discussions in Queensland.
Instead he clings to a form of passive victimhood. By the look of his polling he seems not to understand one other less well known rule of politics – that every dog does not have its day.
Not to mention that there’s a fine line between an underdog and just a dog.
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Industrial relations reforms will threaten jobs, says Kmart managing director Ian Bailey
Ian Bailey, the managing director of the nation’s largest department store chains Kmart and Target, says new industrial relations reforms will neither reduce complexity in the workplace nor deliver a kick to productivity in Australia.
Instead Mr Bailey says the federal government’s laws could threaten employment growth.
Participating in the The Australian’s 2024 CEO Survey, Mr Bailey said customers, from high-income earners to low-income households, were changing their shopping habits to reflect the rising cost of living.
He expected that in the year ahead the Australian economy would experience a small increase in unemployment and immigration would stabilise or even reduce slightly, which would offset the decline in individual spending levels and consumer expenditure tightening in 2024.
In the wake of the federal government just before Christmas winning legislative support for labour hire changes, new rights for union delegates and the criminalisation of wage theft following a surprise deal between the government and the Senate crossbench, Mr Bailey said other reforms on the agenda could do more harm than good.
“Much-needed industrial relations reforms are currently being contemplated. Unfortunately, the current proposed reforms will do little to reduce complexity in an already complex system, nor will they contribute to increased productivity in the wider economy – both of which are very much needed,” Mr Bailey told the survey.
“Undertaken correctly, we can return to an environment where effective bargaining between team members and employers delivers beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders, which should always be our starting point.
“As society and customer behaviour changes, this is important for businesses to evolve effectively.”
Mr Bailey underlined the importance of industrial relations reforms that also maintained flexibility in the workplace and for employers.
He said taking a casual job at Kmart or Target after school or while working through university or TAFE was how many Australians began their career – and it was a path that created economic opportunity for a diverse mix of people from across the full socio-economic spectrum.
“What we don’t want to see is reform that ends up resulting in fewer people being employed because we can’t offer the same flexibility or choice to team members,” he said.
“Casual positions are common in retail because they provide the flexibility needed for both the team member and the business.
“What’s important to us is ensuring that team members can still have the right to choose – at the same time as having clear and fair pathways for a team member to request a casual conversion to a permanent position. That balance is an important and constructive principle that is worth the investment of effort in getting right.”
Key Senate crossbenchers have declared the government’s changes to casual employment and the gig economy must not add more red tape for small business, as employers prepare to seek new amendments to Labor’s industrial relations bill.
Ahead of the government seeking to pass the second part of its Closing Loopholes Bill from February, Senator Jacqui Lambie said she would spend most of early January going over the workplace law changes “with a fine-tooth comb”.
“My worry with the more complex parts of the legislation is that our economy is fragile, and changes to casualisation and the ‘gig’ economy need to be carefully considered,” Senator Lambie said.
Turning to the broader economy, Mr Bailey said higher interest rates combined with inflation have had a “material impact on consumers” and many were experiencing these dynamics for the first time.
For these and other shoppers across the income spectrum they were focused on maintaining their lifestyles in the face of tougher economic conditions,” Mr Bailey said.
“With mortgage repayments and rent becoming a much larger cost, consumers are becoming increasingly creative to maintain the lifestyle they aspire to. In this context, value has become and will continue to be a critical driver for consumer spending. We are seeing this behaviour across all income levels in retail, which demonstrates that these same drivers are important for the vast majority of Australians.
“We are undoubtedly in a period of significant disruption due to the cost of living pressures facing Australian households, but with disruption comes the opportunity for significant innovation.
“New business models will emerge finding new ways to deliver value to customers and there is potential for material market share gains and losses.”
Of the national ambition to meet 2030 targets for a 43 per cent reduction in baseline emissions Mr Bailey said a successful energy transition would demand unprecedented levels of collaboration between governments, consumers and industry to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement.
“We all must play our part in that. We know this is an issue that matters to our customers, and our communities want to see real action on climate,” he said.
“Kmart is committed to achieving net-zero emission from our own operations from 2030, and 100 per cent of the electricity used in our own operations will be from renewable sources by July 2025.
“That will come from reducing energy use and using more energy efficient technologies across our stores and distribution centres, working with landlords to generate more energy from behind-the-metre solutions like solar panels, but also looking for ways to collaborate and create demand for greener services in our facilities, such as airconditioning systems with a lower emissions footprint.”
As for the contentious issue of staff working from home or requiring them to come back into the office, Kmart and Target was finding the right balance between flexibility and ensuring staff weren’t isolated at home, he said.
But Mr Bailey expected that workers would spend more time in the office in 2024.
“One of the positive things that came out of the pandemic was the opportunity to set a new operating rhythm – and facilitate greater flexibility amongst Australian workplaces,” Mr Bailey said.
“We also know that flexible work practices have a positive impact on diversity and inclusion, notably increasing engagement with female leaders and emerging talent. Equally, the isolation that can occur for those who work from home frequently is a real problem for mental health as well as the essential skill development required to progress careers.
“2024 will see an increase in the amount of time spent in the office and a greater clarity of the long-term ramifications of high levels of working from home for both individuals and businesses.”
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Problematical aged care "reforms": Expensive "mandates"
The residential aged care sector has greatly increased its use of short-term contract workers in a bid to fulfil Anthony Albanese’s stringent staffing reforms, rapidly escalating the cost burden on aged care providers and threatening their viability.
Providers’ reliance on expensive agency workers has quadrupled, with externally contracted staff employed by a third party now delivering 7.5 per cent of total direct care hours worked, compared with just 1.8 per cent in 2019.
The aged care industry is warning Labor’s push to get more nurses into residential homes is a “farce” and has become a “multimillion-dollar burden” for large providers which is focused on box ticking rather than improving the livelihoods of elderly residents.
The new figures emerged as workplace relations expert Andrew Stewart warned providers could be disadvantaged under the proposed industrial relations reforms as they would have less flexibility in managing their workforce.
Under the bill expected to come before parliament next February, Mr Stewart said some of the temporary workforce would have to be hired permanently, leading to increased insurance costs and superannuation payments.
Despite the Prime Minister’s promise before the May 2022 election to fix the aged care sector, The Australian can reveal a University of Technology Sydney report found Labor’s nursing targets were worsening the sector’s financial viability, with providers forced to pay up to 34 per cent more to recruit nurses.
The research conducted by UTS Ageing Research Collaborative before Labor’s staffing requirements were brought in in July also found only 45 per cent of homes were meeting the rule, well below the government’s figures of 86 per cent. Only a fifth of residential aged care facilities were meeting the direct care minutes target at the end of last financial year, just three months before the laws’ came into effect in October.
The report noted differences between the Department of Health and Aged Care and UTS figures might be because the university based its figure on quarterly data while the government’s were based on monthly reports.
The sector is scrambling to implement a suite of reforms including mandated minutes of care per resident, quality and safety standards, and full-time nursing requirements as it adjusts to a new funding model brought in last year as recommended by the aged care royal commission.
The overhaul comes as financial troubles plague the sector, with the latest figures from the Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the Aged Care Sector revealing 66 per cent of private providers were operating at losses.
On average, the financial position of homes had deteriorated, with homes losing $19.56 per resident per day at the end of last financial year compared with earning $2.51 per resident per day in 2019.
Residential facilities’ expenses increased higher than forecast, with the report noting administration costs surged by 14 per cent as providers raced to comply with the government’s new rules.
The new figures have prompted providers to criticise the government’s push to get more nurses into aged care homes as “a farce”. Aged Care Industry Association chief executive Peter Hoppo warned Labor was “fixated on counting minutes rather than reporting on outcomes”.
“It is extremely disappointing that, despite so much thought and effort going into improving aged care, we now have organisations fixated on counting minutes rather than reporting on outcomes,” Mr Hoppo said.
“We know that thousands more registered nurses are needed for providers to be able to meet their mandatory targets, and that number is only going to grow, which makes the whole situation a farce.”
Aged care provider Whiddon’s chief executive, Chris Mamarelis, warned the sector was now largely dependent on labour hire arrangements to meet 24/7 nursing targets and mandated care minutes, as he questioned why providers had to pursue a legislated target rather than improved care outcomes for residents.
Mr Mamarelis said Whiddon, which runs 19 homes mostly across NSW, paid 50 per cent more for agency staff but could pay up to 80 per cent in regional centres.
“Continued use of agency staff places more pressure on already-stretched resources, requiring ongoing on-boarding and training,” Mr Mamarelis said.
“For large providers, this is a multi million-dollar burden, remembering that we are essentially 100 per cent funded by the federal government.”
A spokeswoman for Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the government’s figures showed 88 per cent of facilities had a registered nurse on site at all times and that the UTS report was based only on a sample of providers rather than data from 97 per cent of aged care facilities. The government said it was committed to reducing the sector’s reliance on agency staff and believed its $11.3bn wage rise for aged care workers would help.
A government taskforce, chaired by Ms Wells, is scrutinising ways to make the sector more sustainable and has flagged support for making wealthier Australians pay more for their care. The UTS report welcomed the taskforce but warned “the transparency of its processes fell short of best practice”.
Opposition health and aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston called on the government to release a comprehensive care workforce strategy to address significant staffing challenges and help providers comply with tough regulations.
“Whilst this Labor government is on Christmas holidays, more and more aged care homes are going into the red despite providers desperately working around the clock to try and comply with expedited regulations that are forcing them into further financial difficulties,” Senator Ruston said. “This government promised to change the aged care sector, but over the past year we have seen 40 aged care homes forced to close, more than $2bn wiped from the aged care budget, home-care reforms pushed out to 2027 and a workforce shortage of 5122 registered nurses.”
Aged care expert Paul Sadler backed the figures produced by the University of Technology Sydney rather than the government’s targets. “We’ve seen a massive increase in agency workers in residential aged care and home care which has really been throughout the period of Covid then its continued to go up with the new staffing requirements,” Mr Sadler said.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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