The Australian's attacks on the Labor-Green alliance continues to gather pace. Mostly it's a fear campaign.

The latest comes from Robert Carling, a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in his Tax policy devised by party that is green with envy.

Carling says that the Greens would back-pedal on the economic reforms that have helped deliver 18 years' uninterrupted economic growth and greatly enhanced living standards. He adds:

The Greens' tax policy, if taken literally, paints them as a party of "tax and spend" and as a party that is more interested in redistributing wealth than encouraging its creation. Their tax policy is green from envy. The main parties should be very cautious in courting Green support to form a government. Those 1.25 million voters may or may not have voted for less economic growth and lower living standards, but we can be confident the others did not.

The Canberra Press Gallery do go on about a hung Parliament. They cannot seem to accept that the vote in the general election was pretty well 50-50, that the number of seats in the House of Representatives reflects that, and that the politicians need to work with what they've got to form a workable minority government. What is difficult to understand?

Forming a workable minority government means forming coalitions for the right of centre and the left of centre parties in the context of emerging problems. It means different political voices to the two old dogs driven to barking and desire to one eat one another other, by their political unconscious.

One strand of Mark Thompson's McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival was his reply to James Murdoch's lecture the year before in which he attacked the BBC (for its dominance) and public broadcasting.

Thompson, the BBC director general, pointed out that with News Corp's likely purchase of the 61% of BSkyB it doesn't already own, it would own and control close to 50% of the national press (Sun, Times, News of the World and Sunday Times) and Britain's biggest commercial broadcaster – Sky would have created a concentration of media ownership across newspapers, TV and publishing more significant than anything to be found in any other major market. As Thompson pointed out, this would not be allowed in the USA or Australia.

Dominance is what Australia's existing cross-media ownership rules were designed specifically to prevent. No one company is to be allowed to have significant press holdings and a major stake in Australia's major commercial broadcaster. After the shakeout in free-to-air commercial television the laws now function to prevent a Murdoch empire with the run of the press and a commanding position in commercial TV.

The United States has announced that it is ending combat operations in Iraq. Obama is delivering on a campaign promise to wind down America's involvement in Iraq. That war was based on lies about the threat from weapons of mass destruction. The result was rendition, arbitrary detention and torture and catastrophe in Iraq.

So what was achieved by the neo-con invasion of Iraq that has cost the US around $700 billion or more, and resulted in the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, 2 million internally displaced Iraqis, more than 4,500 coalition deaths, a dysfunctional Iraqi government, few basic services such as electricity and water, and bombed out urban centres?

Juan Cole says:

How many Iraqis were killed in all this violence is controversial. It should be remembered that hundreds of thousands also died because of dirty water and lack of medical care, since many physicians and nurses fled the constant clashes. Surely the total death toll attributable to the US invasion and occupation, and the Iraqi reaction to them, is in the hundreds of thousands. Millions have been wounded. Some 4 million Iraqis were displaced, some 2.7 million of them inside the country, and most remain homeless. Iraq is a country of widows and orphans, of the unemployed and the displaced.

Whilst conservatives rediscover the liberal principles of federalism and continue to denounce green populism the Independent member for Dennison, is talking good political sense.

Andrew Wilkie says that his core position is that wants Tasmania's only acute care hospital (The Royal Hobart) to be refurbished and the laws governing poker machines reformed. He adds that in the last few months the Labor government has been neither stable, competent or ethical and he's yet to be persuaded that the opposition can do any better. They must do better.

These are not the words either the ALP or the Coalition would want to hear from Wilkie, who seems to be modeling himself on Brian Harradine's conception of the role of an Independent.

One negative aspect of urban planning undertaken by our state governments is the way that their transport planning has for decades been focused on building more roads while applying the tourniquet to a moribund public transport network. As a consequence there there has been a negative reaction to urban congestion --meaning gridlock--- and the state government's habitually respond by building more freeways, increasingly with tolls.

They don't seem to get the scenario that if you build new roads then more people drive and they drive overwhelmingly with four empty seats in the car. They allow urban sprawl to continue and make such infrequent invest in public transport and bike ways that there is zero public transport improvement apart from extra buses and few delineated cycleways on central roads into the CBD. State governments and their urban transport planners are in love with the Los Angeles-style spaghetti junction system of flyovers and ramps that is part of the suburbia, automobiles and car culture nexus.

Conservatives (free minds and free markets) are onto the suburbia, automobiles and car culture issue. They are wheeling out their classic form of right-wing argumentation that begins with a set of erroneous assumptions about the current state of affairs in our country, then proceeds to make use of either/or binaries, and generally ignores both the substance or merit of the ‘arguments’ they decisively refute.

If globalization is here to stay (and it is given the global reach of many corporations), then should we be investing in human capital rather than subsidizing Australian firms? Isn't the former option --investing in people--- a better one to keep the Australian economy competitive than the latter one?

The big idea of centre-left political economy, which was popularised by Robert Reich in the early 1990s—is that globalisation would benefit almost everyone, so long as governments in rich countries equip their citizens with the education and skills needed to switch into growth sectors, and away from the low-skilled work that is emigrating to poorer countries. The well- being and the standard of living of societies in the twenty-first century will depend to a large extent on the skills and insights of their citizens.

It is worth returning to the argument in the light of the limits of Labor's "education revolution" that concentrated on national tests, memorisation, apprenticeships and its computers in schools program. The significance of the latter can be seen if we turn to Reich's The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, where Reich divided jobs into three broad categories for assessing their contribution to new the global economy. These are "symbolic- analytic" services, routine production services, and "in-person" services.

The first of these is carried out by what Reich calls "symbolic analysts" engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants and other "mind workers" who engage in processing information and symbols for a living. These individuals, which make up roughly twenty percent of the labor force, occupy a privileged position in that they can sell their services in the global economy. They are well-educated and will occupy an even more advantageous position in society in the future.

Unsurprisingly, many in the Canberra Press Gallery cannot see beyond the two party system.That is liberal democracy for them, so they just dismiss the situation by saying that a new election would be the best way out of our federal political imbroglio; or they dump on the Independents.

There is not much thinking through about what has happened in terms of a challenge to the two party system or what it means for Australian democracy. Australia's political culture is not about to change.

The position of George Megalogenis is more thoughtful than simply saying that minority government is a minefield or a gridlock. In his Divided we stand column, he says that Australian society fractured along lines of state, age and sex.

In his Both parties need a new look before the next poll in The Australian Arthur Sinodinos briefly sketches a big picture around the recent federal election. He says:

The alleged "Greenslide" should be kept in perspective. The main parties still got at least 85 per cent of the total vote. The Greens and independents do not have a coherent strategy for government. Nothing that would replace the economic modernisation project of the past three decades.

The Howard credo of economic liberalism and social conservatism attempted to smooth the passage of reform by promoting social cohesion in the face of change. This combination works best in the upper half of the country. The southern states seem to be more socially liberal and economically conservative. Commonwealth assistance accounts for more than half of state income in Tasmania. This quasi-welfare dependency is reinforcing the drift to the Greens, with their aggressive opposition to growth policies and focus on wealth redistribution and new age issues.

There is a lot of commentary around the new politics due to the emergence of a multi-party democracy, the three regional Independents holding the balance of power in the House of Representatives and a minority government with some form of coalition. The promise emerging from this balance of power situation is parliamentary reform, better public services in health and education, more economic development for regional Australia and a more sustainable economy.

My own fear is that what will eventuate is a closure of this possibility, due to a minority Liberal government returning to power with the support of the Nationals and the regional Independents. That means three years of the economics of austerity based on the politics of fear constructed around the crushing government debt and financial catastrophe scenario that will bring ruin.

This is a politics of neo-liberalism's free markets and small government economics that uses Johan Norberg's recent book Financial Fiasco as a road map. A politics designed to make the world safe for bankers and brokers in the citadels of capitalism.

A recent editorial in The Australian --Nation sends a message to its political class--- calls for a renewal of politics based on its standard talking point of equating minority governments with uncertainty and instability. How then does The Australian understand and conceptutalize the new politics?

Like others it understands the new politics in terms of a tectonic shock to the two party system. It says:

the election has delivered a severe shock to the predominantly two-party system that has served the nation well since federation. In itself, the breaking down of rusted-on, tribal voting patterns of the past is no bad thing. A modern, technically savvy and more politically literate nation is always going to question the old verities. But both major parties are paying the price of underestimating voters and for taking their loyalty for granted.

We have a period of political uncertainty until the Australian Electoral Commission counts the postal and pre-polls votes in the three seats in doubt--Hasluck, Denison and Brisbane-- in the context of the possibility of the global economy entering a double-dip recession.

The three country Independents (Katter, Windsor and Oakeshott) are now in the centre of the political stage, and we now know that whichever party forms government it will not have a clear majority in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Amidst all the furious political spin of the moment few are addressing the implications of this political shift and the possibilities for reform to address long-term policy issues:

The three independents are different political voices in that they are talking about political process, public policy, discussing ideas and acting in terms of the public interest rather than politics being driven by short-term, poll-driven politics. Will the country Independents be able to reform Parliament enough so that it actually debates public policy instead of uttering the mind-numbing demonizing the other side as partisan slogans?

It may not happen, but it will be good if it does. A hung parliament, which means that neither major party deserves to govern, coupled to strong independents determined to change things for the better, may mean improved political governance. A hung House of Representatives and minor parties holding balance of power in senate should ensure greater check on executive power.

Though tougher times are coming to Australia, a hung parliament with strong independents, in the context of market failure of the self-regulating financial system and subsequent global recession, could result in a reform of the Australian parliament and an improvement in the functioning of our liberal democracy. We may even get better policy outcomes.

What has been disclosed by the result of the 2010 election is that the political establishment has been put on notice. The politicians have been placed on trial because citizens, in giving neither political party a majority of seats, have forced the politicians of different persuasions to start to talk to each other in fresh ways about how to govern the country.

There is a general sense that the institutions of liberal democracy are antiquated, unrepresentative, and undemocratic. They are not working, and like Question Time, they have become an embarrassing farce that is celebrated as political theatre.

To the ballot boxes we go today after a boring and inane campaign. I've gone for green rather than red or blue. My priority is a Green Senate to ensure a check on executive power, then Labor in the House of Representatives because the national broadband network represents the future. I voted Liberal over Labor in the Senate to block the mandatory internet filter, as this is the religious right's form of censorship.

Though negativity ruled the campaign, the polls say that The Greens are riding a wave to the Senate, whilst the Liberals will struggle to gain the 17 seats they need to bring back the Howard years, and return us to the glory days of peace, security and prosperity through savage budget cuts.

In the National Times Lenore Taylor says that this election campaign:

has been a showdown between major parties, neither of which had many broad policy offerings, neither of which had a cohesive vision and a full suite of policies, and both of which have been running an essentially negative message. It has been a fascinating, rollicking, roller-coaster ride of photo opportunities, without most of the substantive bits that are supposed to come in between.

The 2010 election is almost over. The newspapers are coming out with their latest opinion polls, the horse race commentators are making their final call, all the politicians are saying that it is too close to call, and the analysts are saying which marginal seats will be won and lost.

Now is a good time to think about filling the vacuum with what has been noticeably missing-----good progressive policy ideas. We sure need these, especially with a ‘quarry economy’, peak oil and climate change. Empowered as consumers yet disenfranchised as citizens, we confront an ALP that has been hollowed out by the apparatchiks to become a technocratic shell that is unable to deal with substantive policy issues in an effective manner.

The excellent Centre for Policy Development has published an e-book entitled More than Luck: Ideas Australia Needs. The Introduction says:

A stasis has settled over government and opposition in Australia. We need to change the game....the present stasis isn’t simply the product of the people at the top of the political food chain. The current Labor government is a symptom of a broader political system that no longer seems to know or care what issues are important, even crucial, let alone how to begin to address them. A system bogged down in its own cultures...Is...the media... caught up in the logic of old politics which necessitates a straightforward political and popularity contest and an electorate driven by the hip-pocket, and is unable to canvas a more complex narrative? It often seems as if our major parties don’t trust voters to look beyond narrow self-interest – even when opinion polls and research groups tell them otherwise. Rather than focus on what politicians can do to improve people’s lives, the media focuses on personalities. Politics is usually reported as if it were a horse race. Journalism lives for the leadership contest and little else.

The 2010 federal election is not characterized by big reform promises from the political parties, or the leaders of our political parties providing a vision for the future. As the boring election campaign draws to a close we can look back and ask: 'what has the election been about beyond the advertising, spin, manufactured images and the cautious policy announcements targeted to marginal electorates'? Can we discern what Australian citizens are concerned about?

In The west can see its future on planet Australia in the Financial Times John McTernan, a political secretary to Tony Blair and a thinker-in-residence for the Australian state of Victoria, identifies the three main issues of the 2010 federal election. These are climate change; an underlying anxiety about threats to Australia’s living standards, expressed most prominently through concerns about migration; and an underlying unease about Australia’s place in the world.

McTernan sums up the 2010 federal election thus:

Whoever wins on Saturday, these issues at first seem very Australian pre-occupations. But they represent a toxic and introspective political mix. The desire to enjoy growth while defending our lifestyles against outsiders, accepting climate change intellectually while rejecting its implications for our behaviour, and a nagging concern about the rise of China – all are issues which will quickly move up the agenda in Europe and North America. Eventually what’s going on down under could turn our world upside down too.

In Don't blame Latham for highlighting home truths in the National Times Peter Costello says that the Labor base is drifting away because it does not see this as a successful government:

Labor's primary vote is at 38 per cent. Last election it was 43.3 per cent. About 700,000 voters have left in three years. If Labor is re-elected, it will be on Green preferences. In fact the election is being fought between two coalitions - the Liberal-National one and the Labor-Green one. The Greens will deliver more votes to their coalition partners than the Nationals will to theirs.

Though Costello's main point stands--- the election is being fought between two coalitions - the Liberal-National one and the Labor-Green one, and the Greens will deliver more votes to their coalition partners than the Nationals will to theirs--- he doesn't mention the lack of action on climate change. Yet the decline in Labor's fortunes began with the abandonment of the ETS.

I watched Tony Abbott on the ABC's Q+ A last night. I was curious as to what he would, as a conservative, say on the welfare state and on Australia's digital futures. This was my criteria of judgment.

Though Abbott put in a professional, workman like performance as a compassionate conservative, the audience did not warm to him, as happened with Julie Gillard in the previous Q + A. Part of the problem was Abbott's ignorance, especially in his response to a national broadband network. He acknowledged that broadband services are going to be incredibly important for our future. So he has stepped outside his conservative base with its traditional social values, dislike of change, its risk averse approach to life and like to follow rules and the path most travelled.

Having rejected the stance of the digital laggards Abbott then said wireless would be do the job required:

I think, though, that the best result is much more likely to be achieved by competitive markets than by a government monopoly and, sure, high speed fibre is very, very important but most of the people who you see making use of these services at the moment are doing it via wireless technology. I mean, all of the people who are using their Blackberry's or their iPhones for Facebook. All of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotel rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable.

In an op-ed in The Australian entitled ALP's knight is a thief in rusty armour the economic historian Niall Ferguson challenges Labor's economic narrative that the Keynesian style fiscal stimulus injected by the Rudd Labor government saved Australia from a much more serious recession.

In doing so he is challenging Labors claims about its good economic management:

Australia has dodged a global economic crisis and it has emerged with low unemployment, inflation under control and interest rates still well below their historical levels. Ferguson's argument is that there are more plausible explanations for Australia's relative out performance of the other western governments during the global downturn or recession arising from the global economic crisis. This is the core of his case.

How plausible is it?

An English cartoon about the conservative heritage---but Margaret Thatcher is a touchstone for Australian conservative ideologues and their dislike of ghastly foreigners. Gillard Labor's "moving forward", was designed to suggest that the Coalition's politics and morality are regressive, misogynist and a little too religious.

The starting point of the Coalition conservatives in this election is private sector good, public sector bad. The right simply cannot abide publicly funded institutions, even ones that manifestly contribute to Britain’s social, economic and cultural welfare. If it’s funded by taxation, they start from the assumption that something is profoundly wrong.

The Coalition have also returned to Treasury think circa 1920: namely the notion that public spending is crowding out private investment, and that if public spending is cut the private sector will rush to take up the slack.

The normal way to cover an election is to cover campaign strategy, attack ads, candidate gaffes and poll numbers. Political journalism during an election campaign is limited to the day-to-day reporting of events in the campaign. The journalists highlight the cut and thrust of what the leaders are up to all day, and who is winning in terms of getting the best exposure in the media headlines. This construct is what we call news, which is then commented upon. The increasing reference to The Greens is what is new.

Ben Eltham in The longing for engagement at the ABC's The Drum says that:

The lack of attention to serious policy issues seems to have been one of the most common complaints about the 2010 federal election. Voters seem apathetic, the media cynical, politicians clueless. Above all, the dominant theme seems to be disengagement: between politicians and voters, between politicians and the media, and between the media and voters...No wonder, then, that the best election coverage of this campaign is to be found on an advertising show: the ABC1's Gruen Nation. When substantive policies are thin on the ground, when great moral challenges are cause for delay and procrastination, and when even the audience at a campaign debate can be accused of being biased, it's not surprising that the most insightful political analysis comes from a panel of ad-men.

Much to my surprise Tony Abbott has done an excellent job in enabling the Coalition to unify the conservative base (with climate change and boats of refugees) have a fighting chance in this election. The tactics of negation to gain support in the middle of the electoral ground have worked a charm in both spooking Labor, and achieving a shift in the primary vote. All credit to Abbott, despite the scrambling campaigning by Labor.

This has placed the Coalition in the lead at the primary vote level:

Abbott's public image has been remoulded so that he now looks safe, sensible, and a man of the people. That is some turnaround from the "madmonk" by the image makers and Liberal powerbrokers. Is the Coalition ready to govern?

The consensus is that this federal election is similar to what happened in the recent elections in South Australia. In that state the published opinion polls showed a big a swing against Rann Labor. However, when the votes were in Labor retained government in Adelaide, primarily because the Coalition were out-campaigned in the marginals by Labor.

I have mentioned the conservative deficit hawks before---in this post on the new austerity and election scripts + mantras who denounce and decry the government’s “irresponsible” and “unsustainable” fiscal policy.

These neo-liberals defend the proposition that they don’t want to have government intervention in economic affairs unless it benefits them. They preach austerity as the solution to recession. The way to prosperity is through austerity by scaling back social spending in order to “stabilize” economies by a balanced budget. This is to be achieved by impoverishing labour, slashing wages, and reducing social spending.

A wave of fiscal austerity is rushing over in South Australia. The deficit hawks are well and truly in control. The Rann Labor Government has set up a Sustainable Budget Commission to assist the Labor Government to move the State’s finances back to a sustainable position following the global financial crisis in order to maintain the state's AAA credit rating.

At that time the State Government was expecting a sharp decline in tax revenue as a result of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but since then the fears about a major hit to budget revenues have been replaced by forecasts of growth rather than decline.

There are substantive policy policy differences in this election and the national broadband network is one example. The Coalition's recently announced telecommunications policy explicitly rejects the national broadband network, which which they have labelled “reckless” and a “white elephant”.

Why it has chosen to fight the National Broadband Network as a major election issue is beyond me. In its place the Coalition's cheaper broadband plan ($6.25 billion) composes four separate aspects, and makes wireless technology the centre of its "affordable" broadband strategy.

* $2.75 billion of public funding and an additional $750 million private funding on building an open access, optical fibre backhaul network
* $750 million on “fixed broadband optimisation” with a focus on upgrading telephone exchanges without existing ADSL2+ capabilities
* $1 billion public grant funding and additional, undisclosed private funding for building a wireless network for rural and regional area
* $1 billion on building a metropolitan wireless network focused on outer metropolitan areas

If politics in a neo-liberal world has become a manufactured reality little different from a reality TV show, then we citizens in a democracy do have to be sceptical of politician's promises. Our experience of politics is of a simulation of reality.

In this world that is ours the advertising slogan has become reality. The simulacrum ("likeness or similarity") is no longer a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: what Jean Baudrillard termed the hyperreal. In this manufactured world of surfaces the carefully manufactured image is reality.

The Advertiser is reporting that the ALP is making a commitment to buying back all the water required to save the River Murray. Gillard says:

We anticipate that by the time the Murray-Darling Basin plan comes into effect (in 2014) federal Labor's buybacks and infrastructure investment will have already delivered much of what the rivers will require to be sustainable. If re-elected, we will bridge any remaining gap between what has been returned and what is required to be sustainable. A Labor government will do this by continuing to buy back water each year beyond 2014 until it had returned all the water the Murray-Darling Basin Authority determined the rivers needed in the final basin plan, due next year. Any buybacks will be subject to the availability of water for purchase from willing sellers. Now, farmers can move forward with confidence knowing they will have options to sell their entitlements when the basin plan comes into force.

Everybody has been hanging during the election campaign out waiting for that unscripted moment of excess that bursts the boundaries of the tightly controlled election campaigning, with its set pieces, talking points, controlled glossy appearances and media commentary concerned with the candy floss surfaces and the the repetition compulsion of politics as soap opera.

An excess in the form of a touch of wildness that ruptures the surfaces and shows the tensions and seething passion that indicated the political unconscious of politics. This tension threatens politics as soap opera and by exceeding it, pushes politics beyond itself thereby opening politics up.

Bill Leak has made a couple of attempts at representing a transgressive excess to a politics as a carefully manufactured marketing reality. He highlights the madness and violence that gestures towards sacrifice as a central social gesture:

The postmodern moment of excess for me is Mark Latham's stage managed intervention as a journalist for Channel Nine. Insignificant in itself, that moment of physicality or bodily intrusion has opened up the expression of the fear and loathing of politics for us to see.

The neo-liberal mode of governance, which emerged out of the critique and assault on regulated welfare capitalism and works at a number of levels has become the economic commonsense of our time. The bipartisan consensus on neoliberalism is now sufficiently deeply entrenched that there's almost no public discussion as to how it has transformed our society; or how it will continue to transform Australia in the future.

The taxi driver account which has passed into everyday usage: get the state off our backs, why should people get welfare for doing nothing, and the market knows best. Underpinning this commonsense is a suspicion of the state, the stress on freedom, a belief in entrepreneurship, and the capacity of individuals to do what’s best for themselves. Market relations are the only relations recognized as real.

The paradox is that for all the talk of economic growth and prosperity from the long global wave we have increasing inequality; for all the talk of change, innovation and digital technological utopianism we have a deep conservatism and conformity.

A quote from a comment on a post by Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing on claims by the editor of the Financial Times defending newspaper paywalls whilst attacking the old slogan that information wants to be free:

I suggest that much of today's media like to refer to as "journalism" resembles that craft much in the same way that a McDonald's meal resembles a healthy diet. Which means that even when distributed free, much of the corporate spam that some would pass as journalism is overpriced and indeed harmful.

It's taken a while but the Christian fundamentalists have entered the election with their message about moral decline, threats to the Christian way of life, concerns about a godless atheism, that are coupled to attacks on human rights and The Greens. This doesn't dissuade the ALP from courting the evangelical vote in the Sunshine State.

Although the Australian Christian Lobby gives the appearance of having moved from the political right to a centre right position Australia for them, it would seem, is a Christian society founded on Christian values. Human rights liberalism is the enemy. It represents unlicensed freedom. Presumably, licensed freedom stands for regulation and censorship designed to protect Christian values and beliefs. That means teaching scripture not ethics in schools.

There is no separation between Church and State here, given the support for the presence of religious institutions within government. The tacit assumption is that the country was founded by Christians as a Christian Nation, hence their opposition to the secular culture of liberal democracy. Hence the opposition to the liberal concept of the separation between Church and State.

Petty misses the really big elephant in the room that the major political parties are steadfastly ignoring. This is the building of new coal fired stations that emit greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming, which in turn, help to dry out southern Australia. This is one real issue that Labor has choked on, and then run away from. Australia is in a state of policy paralysis compared to China.

Australia is moving backwards on climate change reform. Consider the plan to build a new coal power station at Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. Though its new ''clean coal'' gasification technology would reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 36 per cent lower than the cleanest existing Victorian brown-coal power plant, the plant would still release up to 4.2 million tonnes of gas a year - increasing Victoria's annual emissions by about 3 per cent.