Geoff Robinson

Finally my book When the Labor Party Dreams: class, politics and policy in New South Wales 1930-32 is on the way with a likely publication date of September (cover picture of a 1932 Lang rally shown). Some early comments:

The ‘Big Fella’ and his Dismissal are a cornerstone of Labor lore, but have never been subjected to a forensic examination of this kind. Geoff Robinson’s analysis of the Lang government, its policies, supporters and opponents, stands as a model of political history.                - Professor Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne.
A radical revisionist account of a traumatic historical period and an iconic figure in Australian political history. Dr Robinson offers a more detailed and sophisticated account of how the Lang government governed, its electoral support and policies than ever before. The book has considerable relevance to contemporary political debates as we search for new social democratic approaches to deal with the impact of globalisation. - Professor Ray Markey, Auckland University of Technology.

More information and order details are available here.

Media reports suggest that Mitt Romney is currently McCain’s most likely Vice-Presidential pick. This would be popular with conservatives and Bush-ites. But during the Republican primary battle Romney persistently fared very poorly particularly against Obama, this was one reason why he lost as Republicans voted for the most electable candidate. See here, here. Romney would hamper McCain’s efforts to present himself as distinct from the hard right. He adds nothing to the ticket. It is true that vice-presidential picks have little impact but it is puzzling that Romney’s unpopularity is ignored by his boosters. If he was so wonderful why did he lose to McCain?

What are we to make of Labor’s poor showing in the Gippsland by-election? On one hand not a great deal, voters today are more volatile and more inclined to express their concerns of the moment to the pollster or at the ballot box. Politicians today regularly record record levels of public approval or disapproval, and these figures make good copy, but do today’s politicians actually attract stronger emotions than those of an earlier and more polarized age? We can conclude that voters are particularly sensitive to issues of living standards. The slightest hint of a GST-induced economic slowdown in 2001 sent Howard’s poll support plunging, but the definition of ‘living standards’ is ambiguous, George Megalogenis argues that the early 1990s recession had surprisingly little political impact due to wage growth for the employed, falling interest rates and increases in household wealth. The shift towards indirect taxation has weakened the perceived impact of taxation on living standards. Fuel taxes are however a uniquely visible indirect tax (Monica Prasad cites British evidence for this back even in the 1970s). Let’s accept the conventional narrative on Labor 1983-96: that due to Keating’s brilliance Labor successfully persuaded voters to accept a program of economic reform that in the short-term placed pressure on living standards (and this was after the Liberals enjoyed a false dawn at the 1984 election with their skillful ‘populist’ campaign). Voters will accept falls in living standards if they believe that good times will follow, Adam Przeworski models this for post-Communist transition in his Democracy and the Market (an early anticipation of the argument could be found in Bukharin’s work on the transition period). The challenges of contemporary ecological modernisation are the same as economic modernisation in 1983-96 (contrary to Micheal Pusey’s argument). But the economic reform agenda was often presented as an end in itself rather than a means to an end: sustainable economic growth and there is a lesson here for the promoters of ecological modernisation. The question is does Labor have a figure who could enunciate and drive this new reform agenda as successfully as Keating did?

My forthcoming paper on Indian Communism examines the divergent roads that Communists took after the revolutions of 1989 in their struggle to maintain political relevance. One option was ‘national socialism’ a strongly nationalist and statist position that often involved alliance with far-right nationalist forces that were once bitter anti-Communists. The Serbian Socialist Party of Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this strategy. Although this strategy could yield short term political dividends it was ultimately self-defeating as newer political forces, less encumbered by the Communist past, proved better able to seize the nationalist ground, such as the Serb Radicals. The Serbian Socialists plunged to 5.6% at the 2007 legislative elections perilously close to the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation, whilst the Radicals polled 28.6%. In 1990 the Socialists had polled 28.8%. The Socialists responded to their decline by a shift away from their nationalist past and an attempt to present themselves as a mainstream centre-left party. At the May 2008 elections their vote increased to 7.9%. Now they have agreedto join the pro-European parties in a coalition government opposed to their old nationalist allies. There is no future for post-Communists outside of a capitalist and democratic Europe. A bit sad for the true believers in Slobodan Milosevic as the defender of socialism and in the Socialists as defenders of Orthodox Christian nationalism. Perhaps the Socialists will split as traditionalists such as Mihajlo Markovic depart.

After a reasonable show of covering the primaries the Australian media are proving inept on covering the emerging presidential campaign. The Australian carries on from its record last year of ignoring unfavourable (for the conservative side) polls in favour of ‘more profound’ evidence, although in a sign of panic they can also be dismissed as evidence of voter irrationality. There are areas where Obama needs to work, his lead on being better to mange the economy could be bigger for example. But FiveThirtyEight is correct to argue that Obama starts from a much stronger position than previous Democrats such as Kerry and in particular Michael Dukakis whose huge early lead in 1988 collapsed.  Argues Nate Silver:

The way that the Republicans achieved that big swing in 1988, assisted by a couple of significant gaffes from the Dukakis campaign, was to portray Dukakis as too liberal for the American mainstream. The same basic strategic template was employed against John Kerry in 2004. However, this strategy is unlikely to work in 2008. How come? Barack Obama is already perceived as being very liberal. In a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted last week, 67 percent of likely voters described Obama as liberal, including 36 percent who described him as very liberal. By contrast, only 45 percent of voters described John Kerry as liberal in May of 2004, and 53 percent by November, 2004.,,But Obama is winning. It may be that the primary fault line in this election is not liberal versus conservative, but change versus experience. Voters might think that Barack Obama is slightly further from them ideologically than is John McCain — but they might also think that the country has been governed for eight years by a conservative, and that this governance has failed…It may also be that voters are more conservative in theory than in practice. According to Rasmussen, 36 percent of voters describe themselves as conservative as opposed to 25 percent who say that they are liberal. This figure is not all that different from 2004, when 34 percent of voters said they were conservative and 21 percent liberal in exit polling. But if you look at the specific issues that loom largest in this campaign, the liberal position on things like pulling out from Iraq, implementing some kind of national health care policy, and increasing environmental regulation each poll at roughly 70/30 majorities…Either way, this is a significant problem for the Republicans. If their strategy is to say “Hey! Hey! Barack Obama is a liberal!”, the American public’s reaction is likely to be “Well, no shit! We’re voting for him anyway.”..if the Republicans attempt to recycle the 1988 or 2004 playbooks, they will probably not find the results to their liking. And if McCain at any point refers to Obama as a “Card-carrying member of the ACLU”, you can be pretty sure that this election is over.

The Liberal campaign about evil trade union officials is the functional equivalent of the emerging Republican campaign.

The alliance between the Liberal and National parties is often seen as unique in its durability and closeness. At the upcoming Australasian Political Studies Association conference Brian Costar has a paper whose abstract argues that:

The Australia variant may not closely resemble the coalitions of Europe and elsewhere, but it is, nevertheless, a coalition and deserves to be studied as such. To borrow a fauna analogy, Australia’s coalitions are like another uniquely antipodean creature, the platypus. The two parties are organizationally discrete and occasional attempts (the latest in 2008) to blend them provokes conflict between and within them. Electoral competition has often been fierce and the alliance (especially in the states) has not always proved permanent. At the same time, the Australian coalition form of government has distinctive characteristics: the alliance is always between the same two parties and there are no ‘socialist’ coalitions; the alliance is often, but not always, maintained even when the parties are in Opposition; the closeness of the relationship between them waxes and wanes over time and place; and the ‘minimal winning’ formulation does not apply, with ‘surplus majority coalitions’ commonplace, but less so ‘undersized/minority coalitions’.

It would be interesting to compare the Australian Coalition to the case of the Indian Left. The decline of Congress and the rise of the Hinduvata right has encouraged very close cooperation among the Indian Marxist left, whereas in the 1970s the left was divided with the Communist Party of India aligning itself with Congress, as the presumed vehicle of the national bourgeoisie, against the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM). In recent years the CPM has come to dominate the Indian Left coalitions to the same extent as the Liberals dominate the Australian Coalition. But the policies of the CPM have generated increasing doubts among the smaller left parties in particular the Revolutionary Socialist Party and Forward Bloc.  The growing Maoist movement in India exercises a pull on the RSP, rather like One Nation did on the Nationals. The CPM is offended by RSP criticism and RSP sympathy towards the Maoists. Could the Indian Left coalition break up? It seems unlikely as the CPM is so dominant that in a first past the post electoral system it could crush its smaller left rivals. In Australia the Nationals are in a stronger position electorally but compared to India the Australian Coalition is more ideologically homogeneous. Even when National leaders talk of disbanding the formal Coalition they retain a commitment to ‘non-Labor’ co-operation. The CPM has sought to make opposition to Hinduvata a binding force but with less success.

Things must be bad for Australian conservatives when their favourite newspaper The Australian editorialises on the great days when Pauline Hanson and One Nation were a political force. This is an exercise in intellectual conservative pseudo-populist fantasies. It declares that:

it is necessary to recognise two big misrepresentations that have been made about the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The first misunderstanding that was given a great deal of weight in the media is that One Nation’s primary concerns were racially based. In reality, One Nation was more an expression of downward envy about what was mistakenly seen as more generous government assistance for “insiders”, including immigrants and Aborigines. The second mistake is the belief that John Howard slew the One Nation dragon by stealing its political ground…the Left’s attitude to the poor, under-educated One Nation voters became one of contempt rather than a desire to help lift them from poverty.

Whatever you think of One Nation, and I think their policies were uniformly disastrous, their voters at least deserve the respect of being taken at face value. This conservative nostalgia seems odd when it recalled that One Nation almost tipped John Howard out in 1998 and that in Queensland where One Nation was most influential its political legacy has been to make Labor  the natural party of government. It is true that a race-based and ethno-centric politics can be advantageous for the political right, but it extremely difficult to run such a politics from opposition. In the late 1980s the Liberals flirted with a racial appeal but it repelled more voters than it attracted. In 1996-98 One Nation, not the Liberals, were driving the race debate. A basic principle of politics is that oppositions win elections by mounting a broad non-polarising appeal to appear as better providers of consenaual collective goods: rising incomes, community safety, better services etc. In 1996 the Liberals made gains across the social spectrum, Howard did not win by a strategy of racial polarization. After 1996 both the left and the right would spin their myths. The right would count it as a populist revolt against the dreaded elites the left would see an empowerment of Anglo-Saxon racism etc. The race debates of the late 1980s and 1990s spiralled out of the Liberals’ control and alienated middle-ground voters. The intellectual right was attracted towards Geoffrey Blainey in the 1980s and Pauline Hanson in the 1990s, and fantasied that they spoke for an imagined silent majority, but they did not. The US provides a similar example. There the radical right has set the immigration agenda, but their rhetoric about Mexican reconquests of the south-west and the Hispanic peril is so extreme that it alienates voters who might be susceptible to a softer ethno-centric appeal, whilst at the same time it mobilises the Hispanic population against the Republicans. Ditto for Australia, if the Australian right allows the immigration agenda to be set by John Stone, David Flint, the Cronulla rioters and Camden protesters it will condemn itself to permanent opposition. What may occur in Australia (as it has in the US) is that the activist base of the right is imprisoned in an echo-chamber of delusion imagining that it speaks for a majority. We saw this with the trade union bogey at the 2007 election. It is apparent with the US Republicans who devote vast attention to making Nancy Pelosi a bogey women to completley no effect.

A collection of platitudes by Craig Emerson. I was struck by the following statement:

Governments must not imprison the disadvantaged by subjugating them to the state, robbing them of self-esteem and condemning them to a life of dependency; governments must liberate them by providing opportunity for all in a truly fair society. Let us not make the disadvantaged the experiments of social engineers yearning for a different social order but lacking the stomach to practise it in their own lives. It is this social experimentation of romanticising traditional life in the harsh outback that has caused Australia’s most vulnerable - indigenous people - to be trapped in misery.

I doubt indigenous people in remote areas are passive bearers of an ideology imported from outside. is the argument that all indigenous land grants should be reversed and indigenous people arrested as trespassers on Crown land? is it that activity tests should be enforced for remote indigenous people? It is all words without meaning, the ‘right’ can outdo the ‘left’ in throwing around terms without meaning. In fact a romantic belief in rural life must be as deeply held by many especially white farmers as much as indigenous people. It is 20 years since the bottom third of broadacre farms made a profit (see graph above) and it is only rarely that farm returns amount for half of broadacre farm incomes (see graph above). Both these graphs are from the Productivity Commission’s Trends in Australian Agriculture. How are these farmers ‘trapped’?

Consumer confidence has fallen to a 15 year low. The shift from a society of savers to one of borrowers was a notable feature of the Howard years. It is nicely illustrated by these two graphs (which I used in a class last week) from this Parliamentary Library Paper. Governments have become savers as consumers has spent. Will governments become spenders again? Labor might feel more at home in such an environment, but how might Labor spend? I explained to my students the need to increase output to resolve inflation in the long-term. Coincidentally, as always happens, I then read a relevant book; Carles Boix’s Political Parties, Growth & Equality. It’s a fascinating book which argues that major divergences in economic policy persist between conservative and social democratic strategies. European Social Democrats have outdone conservatives in their commitment to surplus budgeting and public savings and even tight monetary policy (particularly where unions are so weak as to rule out corporatism) but social democrats have prioritised public investment in physical and human capital whilst conservatives have emphasised the encouragement of private sector entrepreneuralism. A key part of the book is an analysis of the Spanish Socialist 1982-96 experience compared to Thatcherism. Boix diverges from those such as Geoff Eley who saw Spanish Socialism as exemplifying a ’socialism without workers’. Boix argues that the Spanish socialist government exemplified this supply-side social democracy. Media comment on the politics of economic policy in Australia is often dismal, but Paul Kelly (whose work shows signs of improving from his dire Howard-era commentary) has highlighted Labor’s nation building ambitions. The analysis of Rudd’s economic policy will also pose challenges for the left which when it thinks about economics is largely influenced by a nostaglia for 1980s corporatism, but the economic future will clearly be one of labour market decentralisation and a inflation-focused central bank.

It has been a long time since I scraped through equity but I do recall the doctrines of ‘undue influence’ and ‘unconscionable conduct’: if one party enters a contract with another where there is a particular relationship of trust and confidence between the parties. As Mason J put it in Commercial Bank of Australia v. Amadio:

Historically, courts have exercised jurisdiction to set aside contracts and other dealings on a variety of equitable grounds. They include fraud, misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty, undue influence and unconscionable conduct. In one sense they all constitute species of unconscionable conduct on the part of a party who stands to receive a benefit under a transaction which, in the eye of equity, cannot be enforced because to do so would be inconsistent with equity and good conscience. But relief on the ground of “unconscionable conduct” is usually taken to refer to the class of case in which a party makes unconscientious use of his superior position or bargaining power to the detriment of a party who suffers from some special disability or is placed in some special situation of disadvantage, e.g., a catching bargain with an expectant heir or an unfair contract made by taking advantage of a person who is seriously affected by intoxicating drink. Although unconscionable conduct in this narrow sense bears some resemblance to the doctrine of undue influence, there is a difference between the two. In the latter the will of the innocent party is not independent and voluntary because it is overborne. In the former the will of the innocent party, even if independent and voluntary, is the result of the disadvantageous position in which he is placed and of the other party unconscientiously taking advantage of that position.

This legal concept concept seems very relevant to the current negotiations between the US and the Iraqi government for a long-term security agreement. Says Patrick Cockburn:

Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country…Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government…The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down.

American policy claims to support a ‘free, democratic, pluralistic, federal, and unified Iraq’. Yet it clear that although Iraq has a democratically elected parliament it does not have a sovereign government. The real governing power in Iraq is the United States and its allies. The US government is in such a strong bargaining position versus the Iraqi government that any decision reached by the Iraqi government cannot plausibly be regarded as the expression of sovereign and democratic will of the Iraqi people. it is invalid on the same grounds as that of a victimised party in a case of unconscionable conduct. Recall how Weimar democracy was crippled by the Treaty of Versailles? Who can now doubt that the best decision for the victors of 1918 to have supported would have been the establishment of a fully sovereign and democratic Germany? Arab commentators have raised parallels between American ambitions and the security linkages between Britian and the Hashemite Iraq kingdom after its nominal independence from 1930. Hashemite Iraq had elections based on a universal male franchise (see its Constitution ) but this was a facade, all it achieved was to pave the way for the post-1958 dictatorships.