Queensland Election

The sheer vacuousness of Australian (and indeed global) party politics is shown by the LNP victory in Queensland. As is stated in this article, voters have 'voted for change'. That is all: they were vaguely fed up and voted for a change. Well, they'll get one, just as NSW did before them. They will get a slightly quickened pace of neoliberal destitution. The bottom line is that in the current situation of competition between Labor's slightly socially muted neoliberalism, and the Coalition's slightly less social neoliberalism there is no obvious choice and voters simply challenge incumbency based on factors that are whimsical and irrelevant. This is one reason why there is so much focus on personalities, on tiny blunders, on minor issues today, because these are the only things that constitute points of differentiation, lightning rods for mass discontent. Let's go further: 'twas ever thus, more or less. Politics is generally hegemonic in this way, with broad consensus between parties. What's exceptional is when you get a Whitlam moment, at which a party actually pushes through significant changes, in which a new hegemony is partly established.

NSW: far right get their foot in the door of public policy

It's an obvious piece of commentary, but I think still bears noting, that the victory of the Coalition in NSW, and their ability to rule with support from the Shooters and Christians in the Upper House means that the far right have a serious influence now in NSW. OF course, their influence is marginal, and mainly confined to ramping up shooting in national parks and prayer in schools. The exacerbates though what is genuinely awful situation of having the Coalition in government – given that Labour is really already clearly on the right of the political spectrum by any reasonable measure, we're dealing with a radical right-wing government already.

This is dissimilar to the situation federally inasmuch as the need for support from independents federally for Labour to rule means that Labour is not simply dragged to the left by the Greens – more's the pity.

The Chinese Connection

Optimism about the Australian economic outlook is premised on the idea that Chinese demand for resource exports will carry Australia through. I do not believe that the resources sector is really capable of keeping the Aus economy afloat, and that what is really keeping it afloat is precisely the myth of its own robustness. But in any case, it seems dubious to think that the Chinese demand will last forever. To wit, a couple of pieces by Bloomberg correspondent William Pesek. Firstly, this general piece, warning about the stability of the Chinese economy. Secondly, a more specific warning directed at Australia.

Finally?

The Australian economy has kept rumbling forward for the last couple of years like a headless chicken. "Look how it runs around! It's not dead!" But, sooner or later, chickens must come home to rot. The key point of vulnerability and volubility in the Australian economy is the house price bubble. This is now deflating everywhere but Sydney. In conjunction, the economy has just nosedived into recession (though not by the strict definition by which only several quarters of recession is counted as recession). The blame for the latter is being placed on the weather, much as it was in the UK earlier this year. But you put these two things together and one may see the crucial puncture. Of course, given a global situation in which capital has nowhere to go, and with Australian interest rates still so high, mass capital flight is not upon us yet. But we may finally see the adjustment to house prices and dollar that we've been waiting for.

Update The chicken is teetering, woohoo.

David Marr's series on the rights of religions in Australia continues in greater depth: the overall conclusion here must be that the state and churches are not separate in Australia.

Here's an interesting little nugget: private schools in NSW are allowed to exclude students on the grounds of their sexuality. An interesting way to turn this around, it occurs to me, might be to establish a gay-only private school, pending what I think is the almost inevitable abolition of this law.

Soldiers at urban military installations to be armed, given immunity from prosecution in cases of killing civilians.

This story is a little confusing to the capsule narrative I have of Tanya Plibersek, viz. that she's about the most left-wing federal Labor MP in NSW. Here she appears as the right fringe of the Left, demanding action against WikiLeaks. It is hard to imagine how she can be called left-wing at all on this basis. It's an odd thing for her to say, because the ALP strategy for retaining her seat seems to be to compete with the Greens on a left-wing terrain. Perhaps with the precedent being set in Melbourne of the Libs preferencing Labor, a new strategy of wooing Liberal preferences is to be expected in the inner city.

Wikileaks reveals Mark Arbib's contacts with the US embassy.

Workers being forced to work through Christmas? This is surely something that will be generally understood as 'unAustralian', that the Right, with their defence of the family and Christian institutions, will oppose, in short, that finds no support within mainstream political opinion.

A cartoon character that represents Australia meets a kangaroo.

Terrorism (Police Powers) Amendment Bill 2010 passed in NSW

This is a rare act of wanton disregard of ecological concerns, representing a reduction of quality to quantity in an absurd way. In a state and a country that just seem to be getting worse all the time, this is beyond satire.

Marcus Strom on the absence of oppsition within the ALP to the war on Afghanistan.

Anonymous cyber-attacks on Australian government

I don't necessarily endorse the view that there is anything intrinsically desirable about a total freedom of 'information', but I do share the view that the Australian federal government's moves towards restricting the internet are extremely sinister.

This is a dark fucking day: the dependence of Sydney on a really unnecessary desalination programme is established.

SMH Election Petition

The Sydney Morning Herald has launched a campaign to amend the NSW constitution to get rid of fixed terms. A modest, and completely non-specific, reform proposal.

The principle that the people should be able to recall the government tends in the direction of democracy. Though the word 'recall' is being bandied around here, the petition does not include it: the simplest way to end fixed terms is to allow parliament to choose when to call an election. There's nothing particularly admirable about that principle. There's no reason to think that things would be better with it.

The campaign for a recall provision is effectively a secondary, subsidiary objective for the paper. This is a noble cause in itself, however. That said, in our current position, it's not possible to see any particular advantage to it. A new election would either legitimise the Labor government, or install a Coalition government that would scarcely be preferable.

The suggestion we would put forward is to abolish the state of NSW, and the states of Australia generally, as the way to deal with the entrenched corruption that can be found in their institutions. They are outdated colonial institutions for which there is simply no longer any need or advantage, only a financial burden to the taxpayer and an obstacle to clarity for the voters.

Keneally

I suppose we should find it rather comforting that our leaders aren't surrounded by a phalanx of security goons who would prevent this kind of thing from happening. This is, more realistically, probably because we have so many tiers of government that they can't afford that, not to mention that the NSW premier is just a placeholder and not worth protecting. Anyway, here's to our first American premier.

Ethics

The putative introduction of 'ethics' classes in NSW is pretty interesting, but hardly great news. It represents certainly a slippage in power of the old, religious ideologies, but indicates the intent of state to ensure that bourgeois ideology is inculcated into Australian workers one way or the other.

By the way, I'm opening this log up to comments as of this post. Let's see how it goes.

Recession-proof?

Notwithstanding the strenuousness of the technical definition of recession – such that the economy has to keep contracting for multiple quarters, and actually has to contract at that, whereas Ross Gittins points out very low levels of growth will look and feel like a recession – Australia seems to have dodged the recession bullet.

Well, part of this is clearly due to the stimulus package, which meant that the public purse took the hit for the team. But it wasn't Rudd or Swan's fiscal genius that meant that the Australian stimulus prevented recession whereas the American or British ones didn't – something else is going on. Basically, the Australian economy is – no surprises – different from those of Britain or America: less dependent on the financial services sector, more reliant on primary production.

The big surprise to me is that the demand for Australian primary goods hasn't collapsed. That is, that the demand for primary goods hasn't collapsed full stop. Why hasn't this happened? The answer is that Asian demand hasn't collapsed, because Asia's not in recession, and that's where all the coal and shit is going to.

Why hasn't Asian demand collapsed, though? Asian growth has been fuelled by exporting to First World countries, where the economy is in serious trouble.

Has demand for Asian goods outside Asia fallen? Yes, I think so, but not by that much: Asia makes what is cheap, so what is likely to still be bought in the bad times, and the stimulus packages have stimulated purchases of Asian-made goods. Retail spending is resilient in Britain, for example, and this has been ensured by public policy. Moreover, we have the Asian version of the stimulus, the reorientation of the Chinese economy towards domestic consumption.

Well, now what? Is everything going to be fine? I still can't help waiting for the other shoe to drop. The great flaw in the world economic system it seemed to me was that Asia was producing for markets who couldn't afford to buy, and were buying on massive credit lines extended, effectively, by Asia. This is precisely what precipitated the crisis, because the credit stretched to breaking point. Now some of the credit's been nationalised and everyone's trying to get back to business as usual, i.e. running up enormous amounts of credit and importing Chinese plasticware. I can't see this ending well: indeed, what I expect to happen is an almighty crash, again, and at some point there is going to be no restarting the credit-bubble-economy.

Australia is not immune: it runs a substantial current account deficit, if not as substantial, and is also (therefore) a credit-bubble economy, if not to the same extent as other parts of the Anglosphere.