Robert Manne (1947)
Just as stagflation fatally undermined the Keynesian social-democratic consensus, so too will the combination of the Great Recession and the growing recognition of the destructive role played by neo-liberalism in inhibiting an effective response to catastrophic climate change eventually discredit the idea at the heart of neo-liberalism: the faith in the magic of the free market. …
[However, there] are two important differences between the circumstances surrounding the end of the Keynesian era in the late 1970s and the present unravelling of neo-liberalism.
When the Keynesian consensus collapsed, a party-in-waiting existed, ready to seize its chance.
No equivalent anti-neo-liberal party exists today.
Old-style socialism is dead.
Left-of-centre neo-Keynesians are far less ideological, far more divided and far more cautious than their neo-liberal adversaries.
Even more importantly, at the moment of the neo-liberal collapse, humanity confronts the diabolical problem of climate change.
Those who inherit the post-neo-liberal world will be obliged not merely to strive to reconcile the hope for renewed prosperity with the quest for domestic and global social justice.
They will also be obliged to reconcile both these ambitions with the gravest challenge humankind has ever faced.
No one yet knows what the new era will look like or what it will eventually be called.
Only one thing seems, at present, reasonably certain.
At the end of the era of free-market faith, we will be in a far better position to turn our attention to the kinds of ethical and environmental questions which, for thirty years, neo-liberalism encouraged us to [ignore.]
(Goodbye to All That? On the Failure of Neo-Liberalism and the Urgency of Change, 2010, p 36)
The Washington Consensus
Joseph Stiglitz (1943):
[It] is not surprising that policies based on models that depart as far from reality as those underlying the Washington Consensus so often led to failure.
(Nobel Prize Lecture, 8 December 2001)
Niall Ferguson (1964)
… John Williamson's original 1989 formulation [of the Washington Consensus advised policy-makers to:]
- Impose fiscal discipline;
- Reform taxation;
- Liberalize interest rates;
- Raise spending on health and education;
- Secure property rights;
- Privatize state-run industries;
- Deregulate markets;
- Adopt a competitive exchange rate;
- Remove barriers to trade;
- Remove barriers to foreign direct investment.
One recent study of [economic output] and consumption since 1870 has identified
- 148 crises in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in GDP of at least 10% and
- 87 crises in which consumption suffered a fall of comparable magnitude,
(p 342)
(The Ascent of Money, Penguin, 2008)
Contents
Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation
Goodbye to All That? On the The Failure of Neoliberalism and the Urgency of Change
Sorry Business: Historical Denialism in Australia
Robert Manne (1947)
Emeritus Professor of Politics, Latrobe University.
- Robert Manne.
Saturday Extra, ABC Radio National, 24 March 2018. - How can climate change denialism be explained? The Monthly, 8 December 2011.
- Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, Quarterly Essay, No 43, Black Inc, September 2011.
The Australian is … the country’s most important newspaper. …
It is an unusually ideological paper, committed to advancing the causes of neoliberalism in economics and neoconservatism in the sphere of foreign policy. …
The Australian is ruthless in pursuit of those who oppose its worldview —- market fundamentalism,
- minimal action on climate change,
- the federal Intervention in indigenous affairs,
- uncritical support for the American alliance and for Israel,
- opposition to what it calls political correctness and moral relativism.
It exhibits distaste, even hatred, for what it terms “the Left,” and in particular for the Greens. …
[The] Fairfax newspapers and the ABC are [both] constantly attacked and belittled …
Climate Change: “Clear, Catastrophic Threats”
Those calling for radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions were "greenhouse hysterics" (29 July 2005), "antediluvians" (9 August 2005), “prophets of doom” (14 January 2006), "neo-Arcadians" (31 March 2007), "deep-Green Luddites" (8 June 2007), "hair-shirted greenhouse penitents" (22 June 2007), "carpetbaggers" (17 December 2007), "utopian fantasists" (19 October 2009), "the hessian-bag brigade" (31 October 2009) and "zealots" (30 December 2009).
According to The Australian the "deep greens" displayed "a head-in-the-sand mentality" (1 December 2006), a "revivalist fervour" (27 August 2008) and a "mindset" that was simultaneously "medieval" and "totalitarian" (14 June 2006, 12 March 2010).
Such despicable people “would sell out the economy and their grandmothers” (27 May 2009).- Tim Flannery was "a well-documented global warming extremist" (9 February 2007);
- Bob Brown would "not be satisfied until everyone is taking cold showers in the dark" (14 March 2007); while
- Al Gore was an "alarmist" afflicted by "hyperbolic visions of gloom" (15 February 2007, 29 March 2007).
In its editorial of 5 December 2009 … all three strands of its case against those calling for radical action can, rather neatly, be seen —
- their embrace of an absolutist politics as a substitute for abandoned religion,
- their disguised anti-capitalism, and
- their censorious political correctness.
That the passion and dogmatic belief that once defined organized religion have been replaced for some people by a commitment to reversing climate change is not surprising.
There was a significant problem here.
As a response to what some see as excessive materialism in the West, fighting for the planet has become a way to scale back development, restrict free markets and redistribute wealth across the globe.
Virtually every climate scientist is convinced that radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions is vital.
In creating a new post-Cold War enemy camp — made up of climate scientists and environmentalists favoring such action — The Australian had broken with the values lying at the very center of the Enlightenment, namely Science and the authority of Reason. …
The Australian's wild, prolonged and abusive attack on the despised “other” it called the “deep greens” or the “true believers” was, then, not merely an assault on the ideal of civility in debate.
It represented a great betrayal of the very values the newspaper imagined it embodied and upheld. …
Of [880 articles from between January 2004 and April 2011], about 180 were favorable to climate change action and 700 unfavorable [80%].
[Opinion] columns opposed action on climate change by a ratio of about four to one.
In the real world, scientists accepting the climate consensus view outnumber denialists by more than ninety-nine to one.
In the Alice in Wonderland world of Chris Mitchell’s Australian their contributions were outnumbered ten to one. …
The Greens: “They are hypocrites; they are bad for the nation; and they should be destroyed at the ballot box”
In its editorial of 7 September The Australian argued:Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor.
[Hartigin (former CEO of News Limited) even let slip what had been leaked about the political discussions at Carmel [with Murdoch].
We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride.
We believe- that he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites;
- that they are bad for the nation; and
- that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.
[We] have things that we think as a company and individually as editors that need to be done.
… what Hartigan was saying here was that what the “company” that owned 70% of the Australian press wanted “done” was to bring to an end the “leadership vacuum” that had been created by the formation of the minority Gillard government.
One of them is a leadership vacuum by minority government …
In the political context, this was an admission that News Limited was indeed actively working to bring about “regime change.” - Goodbye to All That? On the Failure of Neo-Liberalism and the Urgency of Change, Black Inc, 2010.
Robert Manne and David McKnight: Editors.
25 Years Of Neo-Liberalism In Australia
Michael Pusey: Professor of Sociology, University of New South Wales
From 1980 to 2007, the wages share of gross national income fell from 60% to 53% as the profit share rose from 17% to just over 27%. …
[This has resulted] in a substantial upward redistribution of income [which] has mainly favoured corporations.
The real whole-of-life incomes of the broad middle class are falling …
(p 128, emphasis added)
The deregulation of the labour market has devalued the real worth of nominal wage and salary incomes.
There is no ready way of discounting incomes to reflect the reduced real value of fluctuating and insecure wage incomes.
Yet intuitively we all know that a secure income of, say, $50,000 is worth more than a volatile income of $70,000 or $80,000.
[This is because, when] a job is of uncertain tenure, one needs a much higher income to cover spending in the troughs between jobs and to cover unforeseen contingencies.
… Australia has the second-highest rate of job-churning in the OECD — the rate at which people change jobs over a lifetime …
A generation ago, working-class people could realistically expect to purchase their own home with manageable mortgage repayments from relatively secure job incomes. …
Until 1985, home loans were regulated to limit the amount that could be borrowed to a sum not exceeding 25% of the principal breadwinners earnings.
The effect was to limit demand (and indebtedness) to comfortable levels and thus to hold house prices in check.
[Banking] deregulation has [since inflated both house prices and household debt] by increasing the amount of money that could be borrowed …
[Today,] the typical house mortgage in New South Wales consumes nearly 40% of total household income.
(p 129)
[The] deregulation of the labour market has left us with working hours that intrude more into family and weekend time than in any other OECD country except Italy.
(p 133)
Moreover, in Australia high levels of job mobility are compounded by geographical factors that are more likely to force relocations that put people out of easy reach of their support and family networks.
(p 134)
The Limits To Growth Revisited
Ian Lowe
In the English-speaking world, the economics profession embraced a school of thought championed by a small group of Americans, the so-called Chicago school.
Their extreme market-oriented approach formed the ideological basis of:- the Reagan regime in the United States,
- the Thatcher years in the United Kingdom,
- Rogernomics' in New Zealand and
- extreme state governments in Australia, such as the Kennett government in Victoria.
At the heart of the Washington Consensus was an assumption that any social or environmental problem could be solved by economic growth.
(p 211)
[Climate change denialism] arguably began when an obscure Danish academic, Bjorn Lomborg, was able to publish a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Lomborg claimed that he was a reformed ardent environmentalist who, when confronted with hard evidence that all the important trends were positive, had changed his mind and concluded that we can all stop worrying about the environmental risks and go back to promoting economic growth with a clear conscience.
He even claimed that the best way to improve the environment was to accelerate economic growth! …
[The] book was a disgraceful exercise in cherry-picking data to support pre-determined conclusions …
[However, it] became a bestseller and made Lomborg famous because it said what the commercial media and most politicians wanted to hear.
(p 215-6)
Would you like to know more? - Sorry Business, The Monthly, March 2008.
[At the my final board meeting as the editor of Quadrant] discussion was dominated by the question of … the Aborigines.
It became clear that, for half the board, the way the magazine had treated Aboriginal matters raised serious questions about my suitability to edit a conservative cultural magazine.
On the question of the Aboriginal dispossession in general, and the Stolen Generations in particular, I had crossed over to the enemy camp. …
[Following my resignation,] Padraic McGuinness was appointed as my replacement. …
Over the next three years Quadrant led a national campaign- against the conclusions of Bringing Them Home and
- against the quest for indigenous-non-indigenous reconciliation.
Keith Windschuttle's revisionist history was launched.
The McGuinness-led campaign was soon joined by the increasingly influential right-wing commentariat in the metropolitan press:- Andrew Bolt,
- Piers Akerman,
- Ron Brunton,
- Michael Duffy,
- Christopher Pearson,
- Frank and Miranda Devine.
The campaign [contended that] these children had, in fact, been rescued [from neglect and abuse] and not stolen. …
Padraic McGuinness argued that the Aborigines who presented evidence to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry were suffering from … 'false-memory syndrome'. …
During the campaign, Sir Ronald Wilson [President of the Commission] was, we were told, [suffering from] "moral vanity" — a condition afflicting those who felt deeply about causes of which right-wing cultural warriors disapprove …
Other prominent white supporters of the Aborigines — like Sir William Deane ("Holy Billy") and Malcolm Fraser ("the sanctimonious prig") — also suffered from this condition.
[Such] white supporters of the Stolen Generations … were, in Michael Duffy's delightful phrase, 'white maggots'.
They fed upon concocted stories of supposed Aboriginal suffering.
They secretly hated their country. …
Was it not weird, Andrew Bolt reflected,that some Australians wanted to believe racist whites — their own forebears — snatched children from despairing mothers' arms?
The members of the elites who were shocked by the stories revealed in Bringing Them Home were not merely politically correct.
They were un-Australian. …
[The] anti-Bringing Them Home campaign [marked] the emergence under Howard of … an authentic Australian version of an international movement on the Right often known as historical denialism. …
The authors of Bringing Them Home argued that, following Australia's signature of the Genocide Convention in 1951, Australian authorities had committed the crime of genocide in their Aboriginal-child-removal policies.
It is now generally acknowledged that they were wrong. …
[The national apology to the Stolen Generations that] Kevin Rudd delivered to the parliament on 13 February was, in my view and in the view of many others, one of the most important in the history of Australia. …
[He] delivered his speech in the presence of every living prime minister, except John Howard.
