In which, oh no, some Liberals know a dirty word

SMH:

”We have to move forward,” said Hockey. ”Clearly this issue has done us incredible damage and I hope the Australian people forgive us for having this very public display. But I say to the Australian people: we are a progressive party.”

With all the turmoil and intrigue of the Coalition’s civil war, it’s been easy to miss some of the little details. Far more interesting than theorizing over a Liberal Party disintegration that isn’t going to happen is this important piece of rhetoric from the man who might be their leader as soon as next week.

Australian politics, though not to the extent of its American counterpart, has shied away from overt expressions of left wing ideology in recent decade. Even Keating, with his heartfelt embrace of reconciliation, the republic, an improved relationship with Asia, and other such small-l liberal causes, he was still an economic rationalist who had little time for old Labor socialism. John Howard proudly proclaimed his conservatism, as did his fellow party-members. Such was the benefit of being associated with the right wing that Kevin Rudd, as a new Opposition Leader, invented a reputation for himself as “an economic conservative.” The last thing any self respecting member of mainstream Australian politics wished to claim was an affiliation with the greenie, latte-sipping, chardonnay-swilling, inner-city left. In fact, the only time in recent years that being seen to be a conservative was a problem was for the NSW Liberals in 2007, and that’s because no one in the state could quite believe anyone could be to the right of NSW Labor. (Barry O’Farrell won’t make the mistake Peter Debnam did; that’s why he’s clamping down on the hardline conservatives in his party causing troubles with Hitler parodies.)

But all of a sudden, thanks to the 2007 election, the unpleasant aftertaste of 11 years of John Howard, and issues that resonate within the electorate like climate change, being a leftie ain’t that bad anymore. Look at Uncle Joe up there!

Excuse his blatant falsehood; whatever stance the Liberals should form on climate change, they are not a progressive party. Not even Petro Georgiou is anything more than a moderate conservative who knows how to act like a human being around refugees. The Liberals have long liked to call themselves a, well, liberal party, but after a half-century of conservative policies, it’s hard to believe them.

This, though, is different[1]. Hockey is adopting a tag usually associated with students, Greens voters and other assorted ratbags: progressive. Liberals are never progressive. They can be “wet,” or “moderate” or “centrist,” but never “progressive”; unlike the Labor party with its right wing, their centrists aren’t described as lefties. But here Hockey sees a political benefit for his party in the public perceiving them as more left-wing than they actually are. It’s the same mechanism Rudd used with his social-conservative schtick; the public didn’t trust his party to be economically responsible, so he claimed the opposing ideology for it.

And you can see why Hockey’s doing it, even though a big chunk of his party is determined to convince the country they’re anything but progressive. The Australian political center is definitely to the left of the Coalition on this issue. They don’t support an ETS as strongly as they used to, but they still greatly approve of doing something about climate change. The Coalition is simply not progressive enough on this issue, and in the words of Ian Macfarlane, “Malcolm Turnbull is modernising the parliamentary Liberal Party … He is bringing the party into the 21st century and there are some people who want to keep the party in the ’60s.”

On this issue, being progressive is, for once, not a dirty word. In fact doing what the Liberal Party is doing, as Turnbull says, is ”irresponsible from an environmental point of view and it is completely and utterly self-destructive from a political point of view.”

—

[1] I think adopting “progressive” and “liberal” are different things, because liberal is not only the name of their party, it has suggestions of classical liberalism about it. Progressive is just calling yourself a pot-smoking vegetarian friend-of-the-ABC.

In which Joe Hockey loves it when you call him Big Poppa

At the Herald, Peter Hartcher looks at Joe Hockey’s probable rise to the Liberal leadership next week:

If Joe Hockey wants to be the next leader of the Liberal Party the job is his – for a price. It’s very expensive. He will spend this weekend agonising over whether he wants to pay it.

It has three instalments. First, he has to be prepared to sacrifice his family life. This is standard for any political leader, but Hockey’s circumstances are particularly delicate.

He has three children under the age of five, one of them a newborn. Xavier is 4, Adelaide 2, and the new arrival, Ignatius, is just five weeks old.

And Hockey’s wife, Melissa Babbage, is committed to a demanding job of her own. As the head of foreign exchange trading at Deutsche Bank in Sydney, she is responsible for an $800-million-a-year business.

It’s not an ideal moment to move to an all-consuming, travel-heavy, sleep-destroying job with towering expectations and minimal resources.

That this is a consideration at all for a male politician is a small but fairly significant step. In the old days, it would have been a no-brainer for Hockey to place his career over his family and take the top job. (Disregarding the other factors Hartcher mentions: that it would require sacrificing his support for an ETS, and place him in the leadership at a time he’s unlikely to succeed.) A man in Hockey’s position would once have assumed he could leave the child-raising to his wife, while he got on with the serious man-business of politics.

It’s to Hockey’s credit that he considers the business of raising his family to be, at least in part, his responsibility, and that he’s willing to share the burden of doing so with his partner, Melissa Babbage. The challenge women face of balancing a career and a family can’t be easy for Babbage, particularly considering the size of her career and the size and youth of her family. That challenge is eased if it’s a challenge that belongs to her husband as well. That Australia appears to accept this is a reasonable consideration for a prospective leader to make is an undoubted good thing.

Of course, I suspect Hockey would have an easier time deciding to go for the leadership than if the roles were reversed and Babbage was weighing whether to sacrifice her family life for her career, she would have a slightly tougher time convincing the public that this was OK. Though we should be, I’m not sure we would be as comfortable with a mother of young children tilting at the leadership as we are with a father in the same position.

Then again, perhaps not. In the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, Sarah Palin ran for Vice-President with five children, including a new-born. Despite all manner of other criticism directed at her, there was a little in the way of discussion as to whether it was appropriate for her to take on a position of such responsibility while acting as mother to a large family. And nor should there have been; as with Hockey, that was a decision for her and her partner.

In which we understand why words mean so much to you; they’ll never be about you

There was an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald Thursday. It wasn’t by a Herald writer; it was sourced from the L.A. Times. Whatever — I sure would have preferred to have seen an Australian writer get the space, but I’m not a protectionist when it comes to other things, so I sure shouldn’t be when it comes to my own industry. Evidently the editor thought the Herald’s readers would enjoy this piece.

It wasn’t that great a piece; just some woman called Amy Alkon making the perfectly fine argument that kicking an excessively disruptive child off a plane is a good idea, then using it as a battering ram to say all kinds of preposterous things. You know, opinion journalism. But I’ll show you the quotes that interested me.

Unbelievably, Root demanded the apology she eventually got from the airline (shame, shame) and hit it up for the cost of nappies and the portable cot she says she had to buy for the overnight stay.

Except Alkon didn’t say “nappies.” She’s American! It says as much right at the bottom of the op-ed! And sure enough, the original article used the word “diapers.” It also described a “portable crib,” not a “cot,” an edit I find astonishing, because I had no idea “crib” was an Americanism us Australians must be prevented from seeing for the sake of our national dignity*.

Likewise, in the Herald, Alkon is printed referring to the “Mummy Mafia,” when, of course, she wrote “Mommy Mafia.” This is an even more egregious edit; a “mummy” is quite different to a “mommy.” The images conjured up are entirely different and the notion that a mafia of one kind is identical to a mafia of the other kind makes me want to give these copy-editors nap-time with the fishes. Let me make it clear: Australians have mums. Americans have moms. American moms should be “moms,” even if an Australian is referring to them, and vice-versa. Would we really call Carmela Soprano or Marge Simpson or Peggy Bundy a “mum”? Should an American really think of Maggie Beare or Kath Day-Knight or Sal Kerrigan as “moms”? It’s preposterous!

It is time we all learned to accept that those of us around the Anglosphere speak different kinds of English. Unless that kind of English causes problems with comprehension (and sometimes even then; American publishers should not change “jumper” to “sweater”) we should retain the writer’s original voice. If the Herald thinks a woman in Los Angeles is worth publishing, it shouldn’t patronise its readers by assuming their precious cultural sensitivities will be shocked if they read that woman communicating in her natural voice.

*Come to think of it, “cot” sounds like a Britishism we should have jettisoned along with the Monarchy when we became an independent nation.

Cross-posted at my Tumblr

In which I name names, all shots.

Jason Wilson at The New Matilda:

on the internet, no one knows you’re a broadsheet.

Well, true: a quick look at the garbage ass Web site of the actually respectable Sydney Morning Herald confirms that. The article itself is about the cutely named “trollumnists”; opinion writers who are more concerned with attracting attention than adding to public debate.

The article seems to be written from a viewpoint I basically hold; that it pays to produce quality material. Yet I’m convinced by its argument. Even broadsheet journalism is a business, and if the Herald or another such paper gets people reading by publishing people like Miranda Devine or Janet Albrechtsen, then they should publish them. It’s only a problem when these “trollumnists” become the norm. Fortunately, Australia still has people like Peter Hartcher, Paul Kelly, Annabel Crabb, David Marr — even Greg Sheridan — who are concerned with advancing debate and do so constructively. My beef is with writers like Paul Sheehan, who claim to be intelligent commentators, but in reality add nothing to public discourse. Sheehan, unlike Devine et. al., cannot even write well. He can’t construct an argument and he can’t construct a sentence. It is people like him we should be defending Australian media against, not the populist shit stirrers.

Cross-posted at my Tumblr

In which we remember we’re still a Federation

Adele Horin in today’s Herald:

Since Tasmania adopted the senior college system in the 1990s, its year 12 retention rate has grown at well above the national rate. The college system has been successful in the ACT. NSW is typically moving at a snail’s pace with only 16 senior colleges.

We don’t tend to like our states in Australia, not unless we’re, I dunno, from Queensland or Western Australia or something, and it results in getting a massively disproportionate share of government funding. But Horin reminds us of one of the benefits of our system: the potential for innovation in having six — eight if you include the territories — different governments all looking for a solution for a problem. Whether that is worth the duplication and waste of our Federal system is a debate worth having, but in Australia, we tend not to have that debate at all, sticking to petty buck-passing between the different levels of government accompanied by poorly thought-through declamations about dismantling Federalism, without giving due consideration to its benefits.

In which America’s billionaire tyrant ruins journalism with his Australianity.

Or not.

In the midst of a perfectly reasonable article, Jacob Weisberg drops this inflammatory, obnoxious and ignorant bomb:

What’s most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in Europe or many other countries that do have free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has implemented at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he’s doing as he does it.

I know Americans would like to blame some other land for the ills caused by American (not Australian) citizen Rupert Murdoch, but this exercise in contrasting media landscapes is glib and fails to take proper account of cultural nuance.

As Weisberg elliptically acknowledges in the same article (he refers to the “”tea parties” that Fox covered the way the Hearst press covered the Spanish-American war” — an allusion to the politically-influential press barons of the 19th century American media) bias in the American media is hardly new; it was indeed a 20th Century innovation that made American news more oriented toward the public interest.

While I can’t, and have no interest in, speaking for the British press, Australian newspapers have a strong independent and public service-inclined streak that shouldn’t be dismissed in the scurrilous way Weisberg does here. While we have undoubtedly had stronger and more enduring tabloids — of the American Hearst/Pulitzer mould — here than in the States (major cities like Adelaide and Brisbane do not have local broadsheet papers), these publications are more concerned with serving the interests of a particular working class social class than pushing a political agenda, as Fox News does. And though sadly defunct news magazines like The Bulletin were not without a political agenda — that publication once had the slogan “Australia for the White Man” emblazoned on its masthead — these had long ago moved into modernity.

Papers like Fairfax Corporation’s Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times remain respectably independent, and Murdoch’s own national broadsheet, The Australian, is filled with the kind of respectable reporting you would never find on Fox. (Its opinion pages lean heavily rightward, however, but then again, so too do American opinion pages like the Wall Street Journal – even before it was owned by Murdoch’s News Ltd.)

There is much to admire about American journalism, and a 20th Century commitment to independence is one of those things. Its continuing resistance to tabloid sensationalism is another. But the Fox News model of journalistic political advocacy cannot be sheeted home to Rupert Murdoch’s Australian birthplace; it was created in America, for Americans, by an American — Murdoch renounced his Australian citizenship in 1985, when he became an American — and if anything, it has distinct echoes of an earlier brand of American journalism, the kind William Randolph Hearst’s papers were deploying in the Spanish-American War.

Cross-posted at my Tumblr.

In which Republicans are the kings of wishful thinking

I sure hope, for the sake of the G.O.P., that the New York Times is engaging in liberal mischievousness today, with its report that Republicans are so confident of gains big enough in the 2010 midterm elections that they may even take back the House:

“I have no doubt that we will,” said Representative Tom Price, the Georgia Republican who leads the conservative Republican Study Committee. “TheAmerican people want checks and balances, and the way to do that is to put Republicans back in charge.”

Publicly and privately, Republicans have been upbeat about the midterm outlook, saying voter unrest demonstrated at meetings this summer coupled with strong candidate recruitment have them highly optimistic about capturing 40 or more Democratic seats and resuming command of the House.

I would tell you all the many, compelling reasons this is utter fantasy –whether you agree that the 2008 election marked a once-in-a-generation political realignment leftward or not — except the Times has been good enough to do it itself:

At the moment, Democrats have not experienced a wave of retirements, sparing them from having to protect numerous open seats in competitive House districts — typically the best opportunity for a takeover by the opposition.

…

While Democratic fund-raising is down, the House committee has still outraised its Republican counterpart. Republican standing remains low in public opinion polls, and the party continues to struggle to resolve the gulf between its conservative wing, which is ascendant, and the remaining moderates.

Further, it is impossible to predict what the public mood will be a year from now or what the response will be if Democrats are able to pass a health care overhaul or the economy improves and unemployment decreases.

Things have got a bit better for the right since the nadir of the 2008 Presidential election. They’ve found, in Obama’s economic stimulus and health care reforms, a rallying point that has boosted their morale, and they’ve received a fair amount of media coverage over both. The bad news for them is that they’ve appeared to confuse the coverage of the Republican base with genuine voter sentiment.

It’s true that the American public has its doubts about health care reform. They’re nervous. But they also remain behind the goals of the reform — expanding coverage and reducing costs — and remain happy to increase taxes to see this done. Democrats are unpopular in Congress, but Republicans are even more unpopular, and voter identification continues to side with the Democrats. This suggests the midterms are unlikely to swing toward a Republican party offering itself up as a mere alternative to an unpopular government. That worked in 2006, when the governing party really was on the nose. Today, voters are frustrated with the government, but they’re still listening. The Republicans have wandered into a hall of mirrors and, staring at their own reflection, are convinced they’re in the midst of a revolution.

It is true that governments most often fail not when they offer bad solutions to their constituents concerns, but when they don’t recognize those concerns as problems at all. This is what happened in Australia in 1996 and 2007, and in the United States in 2008 and 1968. The Democrats should pay heed to American voters’ worries about high deficits and expanding government, lest someone else come along and pay heed for them. But right now the Republicans are offering very little in the way of solutions, and it is difficult to see them turning the current situation to their advantage.

Steven F. Hayward in the Washington Post expands on some of the background to this problem:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

President Obama has done conservatives a great favor, delivering CPR to the movement with his program of government gigantism, but this resuscitation should not be confused with a return to political or intellectual health. The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.

Basically, the right has a lot in the way of gas-bags willing to complain, but no one coming up with new ideas to turn those complaints into policies, and subsequently, votes. Right now, voters concerns are still centered on solidly Democratic issues: health, employment, the environment even. Republicans can’t afford to get cocky.

Yet right now in the cycle is the time for parties to get cocky. They do need to get the base excited and donating time and money. Closer to the election will come the time for management of expectations, and this should prove very interesting indeed. The Democrats likely will lose seats in the House, since they’re picked up numbers the past couple elections and many of these are in districts that naturally lean Republican. Not to mention that it’s tough being the party of any President half way through a cycle.

But this will not be 1994. Republicans have no Contract with America, and they’re not about to come up with one. The battle for the Republicans will be to make the gains they do make look substantive enough to seem like a victory; for the Democrats it will be to make their losses look mild and inevitable rather than a rebuke of their policies. The Democrats understand this game. If the Republicans keep talking about taking back the House, they will find the victories they do gain will look insufficient after their big talk.

In which Texas stands athwart history and yells, “Huh? What?”

You should be feeling pity for Texas conservatives right now. See, conservatism is meant to be easy; that’s one of its greatest appeals. It rejects the mushy moral relativism of liberalism for simple, straightforward dicta. Like: if it’s Middle Eastern, invade it; if it’s a tax, cut it; if it’s a gay marriage, oppose it.

Except right wing Texans down[1] in the Lone Star State have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of supporting gay marriage. Or, one specific gay marriage anyway. Reports the New York Times:

HOUSTON — A judge in Texas paved the way for a court battle over the state’s ban on same-sex marriage when she ruled this week that two men married in another state can get divorced in Dallas.

The state attorney general said Friday that he would appeal the decision, even as gay rights advocates applauded the judge, Tena Callahan of Family District Court, for declaring that the state’s four-year-old ban on same-sex marriages and civil unions violated the right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Turns out these two dudes Texas’s Family District Court is calling H.B. and J.B.[2]  got gay-married back in Massachusetts (where folks can do such things), moved to Texas, then realized they weren’t living gay-happily in gay-harmony, and wanted to get gay-divorced. Gaily.

Texas law does not permit gay marriages — indeed, it’s only permitted sodomy since the United States Supreme Court said it had to, six years ago — so it seemed J.B. and H.B.’s decision to divorce would have been recognized as an admirable effort to conform with the laws of the great state they now called home. The problem was, though, that since Texas refuses to admit the couple was ever married, it couldn’t exactly allow them to get divorced. Which meant they had to stay married. Except, according to Texas, they weren’t married. Except in Massachusetts. But they couldn’t get divorced in Massachusetts, where they were married, because now they lived in Texas.

You’d think, then, that it would have been a relief to everyone involved, gay, straight or Texan, when a judge stepped in and said that the two men were perfectly entitled to a divorce, just like every other resident of Texas. Indeed, she based her decision on the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution which says governments can’t deny citizens equal protection under the law. That is, if the government says two people who happen to be a man and a woman can get divorced, then two people who happen to be a man and a man are entitled to the same option.

The judge, Tena Callahan[3], was doing something pretty radical and pretty straightforward here. She looked at a constitution that said, basically, “folks need to be treated the same,” saw a situation where J.B. and H.B. were not being treated the same as other folks (i.e. were not permitted to get a divorce) and told the government in breach of that that this was not on.

Of course, this has implications for more than gay divorces. If Texas law must allow gay couples married in Massachusetts to be divorced, it must recognize that they were married in the first place. And since Texas must do so because, according to the U.S. constitution, it is discriminatory not to, then it probably is discriminatory for Texas not to permit gay marriages within its own borders. And since this is the American Constitution being discussed, rather than the Texan one, the ruling should apply to the entirety of the United States. Judge Callahan’s decision might as well declare gay marriage legal throughout the fifty states.

Texas Governor Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott, both Republicans, vigorously oppose Callahan’s decision. If Texas doesn’t reverse this decision, there’s a chance the case could go all the way to the United States Supreme Court, a prospect I’m sure the minimalist-inclined Roberts Court is dreading.

I guess we should all be pleased even Texan conservatives have finally expanded their defense of the sanctity of marriage to include gays, even if they don’t actually recognize the marriages of which they’re defending the sanctity. But it’s useful to hear from one of the parties involved, J.B., who Fort Worth’s Star Telegram quotes as saying in a statement from his attorney:

“Some have called for this to be a day of victory or a cause for celebration … It is actually a day of great personal sadness as a chapter to my life ends.”

Divorces aren’t fun occasions for anyone, and I’m sure they’re even worse when your state’s Governor is arguing about whether you can even have one. This is one gay marriage of which no one should be in favor.

—
[1] Well, since we’re in Australia, technically up.

[2] Guys, it’s not me.

[3] Us Australians may be a little discombobulated to find she’s campaigning for re-election next year.

In which I get my Bush on…

...lay down the competition, take their cash crops, and get my push on.

Over at Slate, Reihan Salam and Sam Tenenhaus have been discussing the latter’s The Death of Conservatism. Says Salam:

As he plotted the rise of George W. Bush, Rove pressed for a kind of market populism, to use Thomas Frank’s derisive turn of phrase, that would unite Sunbelt conservatives with aspirational voters of all classes and ethnicities. It was the housing bubble and the failed push to revamp Social Security, the two pillars of the ownership society, that were at the heart of the Bush-Rove domestic vision, not the fight against abortion or gay rights. And though it is painfully clear that Bush’s brand of ownerism was dangerously half-baked, it really was an ambitious project of social reform designed to cultivate the bourgeois virtues and to chip away at entrenched poverty.

I sort of agree with Salam, though Tenenhaus goes on to offer a well-argued rebuttal. But while we shouldn’t underestimate the significant harm Bush did with his support for social conservatism, I doubt he was the true believer his base thought he was, or the left feared he was. The same goes for his neo-Conservatism, though his embrace of that philosophy had disastrous consequences.

Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative” who desired an America that had a lesser involvement with the problems of the rest of the world (in fact, he seemed quite disinterested in foreign policy overall); a moderate and a businessman who spoke Spanish; a low risk worth taking in the peaceful prosperous nineties.

(Which is not to say that he is or was a fundamentally a good guy; his mocking of death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker’s plea to him for clemency was, for instance, a hint at his unreflective moral surety, his self-righteousness and his vindictiveness.)

But social conservatism seemed a means only to an end — getting elected — and neo-conservatism was a solution his advisors offered up to the foreign policy problem presented by 9/11. Bush campaigned on a new American isolationism, and when Osama Bin Laden made that an impossibility, the President gladly allowed his team to implement their solution of forcibly democratizing the Islamic world.

And social conservatism? What did social conservatives gain from the Bush presidency. They held back the tide a bit on stem cells and gay marriage, but as early as two months into Bush’s second term, the country had begun its repudiation of the movement with its clear disdain for Republican attempts to politicize the end-of-life arrangements of Terri Schiavo. Court decisions against the teaching of the supposed creationist silver bullet, Intelligent Design, followed, as did legal gay marriages in a steadily expanding set of states. And Bush didn’t support a constitutional amendment preserving marriage as a heterosexual-exclusive domain. He didn’t create a Supreme Court that would reject Roe. He just soaked up the support of religious conservatives to… well, to what?

To do exactly what he came into office to do. Bush was a businessman, albeit one with shamefully successful business ventures to his name, and he wanted to make things better for businessmen like him. He reduced federal regulation until it was barely effective, he cut taxes, he paid-lip service in the form of a silly, pointless fence, to his party’s urgings to combat illegal immigration — why would he, a businessman, want to oppose a source of cheap, compliant labor? He refused to regulate the financial sector, and his signature reform for his second term was his failed attempt to privatize Social Security.

And Bush got what was coming to a businessman who thought government could be destroyed to tame it. He created a federal bureaucracy unable to rescue the city of New Orleans from a natural disaster, he created a budget deficit that ballooned impossibly out of control, he created an economic boom that did not raise the earnings of the average American, and he set the economy up on the precarious perch from which it fell, in a neat piece of bookending, in the closing year of his presidency.

Bush is neither hero, nor monster, though he did monstrous things, and he pursued the tenets of Reganomics heroically. He was not a fundamentalist crusader nor a ideologically warped warmonger. He was the scion of a scion, who was born into wealth and wanted to do right by the moneyed men he grew up alongside. That Salam, a conservative, seems to recognize this presages well for any revival of American conservatism. That the rest of the right — and the right alone — seems convinced that the all-light-no-heat ravings of a hysterical minority of Palinites and Tea Partiers are their future does not.

(Cross-posted at my Tumblr.)

In which the north shore doesn’t parking lot pimp, it politics

I don’t need to sift through the Lan Choo dregs to tell you guys this: In November former Optus executive Paul Fletcher is going to be elected as the new Member for the North Shore seat of Bradfield. He’ll replace the departing Brendan Nelson, and either help the Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull by handing him a healthy winning margin, or trouble him with a closer scrape than a high profile Liberal in an ultra- safe seat should experience. That’s not very interesting.

What is more interesting is the process by which Fletcher received his party’s nomination, which the Sydney Morning Herald’s Phillip Coorey outlined last Friday:

There are 17 candidates vying for Liberal preselection for the safe north shore seat, vacated by the resignation of Brendan Nelson. Their winner will be chosen by 120 party members, of whom 72 are local members and the remainder party officials.

…

[Fletcher and another competitive candidate, David Coleman] are from south of the Harbour Bridge and tried for preselection for the Sutherland Shire seat of Cook in 2007.

The influence of factions is limited in Bradfield but the left, which has about 35 votes, is broadly lining up behind Mr Fletcher. It will support Mr Coleman as a second option.

The right, which is estimated to have about 30 votes, is scattered among local candidates including Julian Leeser, Tom Switzer, Sophie York, Simon Berger and John Hart, who is considered the dark horse.

There are around 90 000 voters in Bradfield, and their next Federal member was subject to the scrutiny of just 120 of them. Sure, he will have to face the electorate at a full election, but a north shore seat like this one is only going to vote for a Liberal, and this is the Liberal the party has told them they will vote for. Fletcher won this enviable position with a mere 60 votes, his closest challenger being local boy Julian Leeser, who received 51.

That’s not all bad. The Liberals, particularly in New South Wales, need an injection of new talent, and it is in the interests of voters in and outside of Bradfield to have talented politicians working in Parliament. But we should also remember the purpose of our representative system of government, and it isn’t to restock the ranks of the Liberal Party with people who don’t have to worry too hard about being re-elected. Fletcher’s job, first and foremost, will be to go to Canberra to represent the interests and concerns of the people of Bradfield — a place in which, currently, he does not even live. It would be nice if a few more than three twentieths of one per cent of the people he wishes to represent had a real say in whether he should do so.

Erin Riley over at Naysayers has a suggestion: Open Primaries!

Pre-selection battles typically involve a very small number of voters.  Consequently, you have to very much toe the party line to be chosen to run in an election.  Open up the process, and you may well find a broader range of candidates.  Plus, it would go a long way toward discouraging some of the nepotism in Australian politics, and might convince political candidates to engage with a broader range of people.

There was a bit of chatter about this sort of thing last year amidst the excitement of the American Democratic primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from Australians wishing for a homegrown version of the spectacle, not realising that kind of high profile leadership contest would be impossible in a Parliamentary system. But there’s no reason we couldn’t implement the less glamorous but more practical system of subjecting party candidates to the wider electorate, rather than the kind of highly-exclusive cabals that threw up Paul Fletcher for the people of Bradfield to rubber stamp.

Australians tend to be disengaged from our politics; as long our members aren’t doing anything egregiously noxious, we prefer not to think of them. That’s partly a result of our culture, but it’s also a result of a system that discourages us as much as possible from becoming involved.

Our experience is a marked contrast to the United States. Take a look at this New York Times article from the weekend, about the U.S. Republican Party choosing candidates for next year’s midterm elections.

“In New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado and other states, the push by Washington Republicans to identify preferred Senate candidates has stirred resentment and prompted competition from those not impressed by the Washington seal of approval.”

The problem in these states is not that the voters want a say in who is their candidate for the next election — they get that. These voters are upset that the national Republican organisation has favoured one candidate before the voters have even got a look, and as a result, many grassroots opponents are receiving a boost in support. These voters are troubled by a mere show of support from the Federal party; imagine how they would react if, like in Bradfield, they didn’t even get a say.  And unlike Fletcher, the interloper is not a non-local high flyer the party has flown in to benefit its national organisation; all the candidates involved are locals.

The most striking example, for my money, is that of Charlie Crist, the well-liked Governor of Florida who hopes to stand for the Senate. Crist is local and popular, yet the quick seal of approval the National Republican Senatorial Committee gave him was enough to stir up some of the locals and force Crist to compete against Florida’s former House speaker Marco Rubio for the nomination. Crist is probably the better candidate, but it’s healthy to see voters engaged enough in their government that they see it as their right, and not select officials in the Republican Party, as to who gets to stand in an election.

Could we see a similar level of passion in Australia? Last month, the Victorian Premier John Brumby proposed the ALP adopt a primary system to select its candidates — within Victoria, anyway. He is candid about the difficulties of implementing the system, but he also understands the benefits:

Mr Brumby said the system would be complicated to implement because the party would need to identify regular ALP voters, whereas in the US they were registered to a party.

He said the system could be trialled before next year’s election, with preselections yet to take place in most of the opposition-held seats.

“It’s something that I think the party should examine. It’s really based on the US system and that is where registered voters for political parties can help pre-select the candidate,” Mr Brumby said.

“At the moment in our party you need to be a paid-up party member to participate in a preselection process and it’s normally a combination of people in the branches and people on the central office selection panel.”

This kind of thing is encouraging to see, and we should hope Victoria — and the rest of the country — does indeed implement a primary system, open or otherwise. It wouldn’t prevent candidates like Paul Fletcher receiving the nomination for their party, but it would require them to convince a few more than 60 voters that they’re up to the job.