Setting the Scene: The Situation in Australian Politics
I can’t believe it has been fifteen months since the pin was partially pulled on this project. And despite that, despite leaving, as it were, my baby in the cold to fend for itself, it was never too far from my mind. And is that not the beauty of something that is ‘not real’, not real as in not living, but no less ‘alive’, alive as in an expression of life. Montaigne, in one of his many brilliant essays, wondered why we love babies with no ‘self’, shower them in gifts and yet when they grew older, we show them no affection at all, and, indeed, keep our money close to our own heart. He supposed love should grow with the child ‘according to reason’. But he also believed that great works of art by great artists are like children and that they grow such affection towards them that they would die for them, or, in the case of poetry, would recite pieces those closest to their heart upon having their wrists slashed by their servant. While this project was growing and changing, it was not being expressed. So, here is my best attempt to capture this without resorting to a dead formalism which appears the main goals of writers and thinkers today. I hope you may bear with my writing style, but there is nothing I can do about it. Furthermore, I hope you can deal with the topic, one that it seems few care about anymore: politics.
But, I digress. So much has happened in the last 15 months, both in Australia and across the world, that it seems it would almost be impossible to cover, to think about, and thus easier to forget. And while I will not attempt to cover in grave detail the events which have occurred, since that in itself may take the rest of my life, I would like to take a cursory overview of the last 15 months if for no other reason than as a mental exercise, positioning our minds together as we look forward together.
Things are not great…
The things that immediately stick out that we have collectively experienced in Australia are of course the election success of the Coalition, with Labour, as many have essentially argued, snapping defeat from the jaws of victory; we have seen the banking Royal Commission come and go, with a feeling that the ripple effects have yet been felt; we are watching the Royal Commission into Age Care, which has revealed systemic abuse of some of our most dependent citizens; and in Victoria, we are watching another one into the Legal system, after if was revealed that a lawyer acting on behalf of underworld figures was in fact a police informant. In other words, we have had our intuitions confirmed: institutions that are absolutely essential to a functioning and healthy democracy – institutions of care, of finance and of law – have been corrupted and are decaying under our very noses. And this is but the beginning.
The general contempt for life has been extended even further on to the natural world, with the approval of the Adani Coal mine in the Galilee basin simply the icing on the cake for the extractive Australian mindset, which, in prioritising the size if its economy over its responsibility towards its citizens, is finding itself further stuck between the business world’s embrace of the Chinese Yen and the pop-cultural world of the Australia – U.S alliance. I say pop cultural because the imperialism of American cultural products is turning people in general into what Soren Brier calls cultural cyborgs: in other words, Yen of Netflix? This is at a time when the rug is being pulled from under the feet of Australian’s all over the country, the elites have their eyes either on the future power of China or on the T.V screen. Indeed, many in the regions are saying that Australia is in the worst drought in its history and, according to a young fella I spoke to at a pub in Maffra, Gippsland, a few weeks ago, blokes over 80 are saying they are seeing whether phenomenon that they have never seen before. This particular fella was castigating the fact that we are more willing to send aid overseas than to give it to our own at home. This is a sentiment that is hard to argue with. Combine this with the arguments made by John Adams, former advisor of Arthur Sinodinos, that Australia’s bubble economic, flooded with both household and foreign debt and a fiscal orientation towards expansionary measures through the use of the so-far disastrous policy of Quantitive Easing, and we have both the ‘bottom’ and the ‘top’ seeing signs of impending collapse in Australia. Indeed, John Adams is argument that Australia could, like Ireland in 2008, could actually be the catalyst for a global meltdown.
Why are these signs not being acted upon? This is the 15 trillion dollar question.
One argument has been made by one of Australia’s most respected and, therefore, under-recognised economists, Peter Brain – an apt name – which is associated with the embrace of neoliberalism or economic rationalism, which has defined the orienting assumptions of each political party since the Hawke-Keating era. In a speculation made way back in 2001 – published in a series of lectures celebrating 100 years of Federation, entitled the Alfred Deakin Lectures – he suspected that the National/Liberal alliance resulted in rural Australia being abandoned and that, consequently, that nationals are likely to face a similar future to the Dodo bird: ‘The National Party, representing the poorest electorates in Australia, by following a policy of de facto fusion with the Liberal Party who represents the wealthiest areas in Australia, faces possible extinction.’ Because the nationals did not stay on the cross bench, they abandoned the ideals of representative democracy, Brain argues, which has produced inequalities between the regions and the cities, and also developed stark disparates within and between regions as well.
But this does not seem to be entirely the case, especially since their coalition no doubt created the space for the emergence of the Greens, although they have so far simply failed to established themselves as a major party after the Tasmanian Dams case. One of he main architects of the coalition was John McEwan, who after the death of Harold Holt, opposed the ascension of Deputy PM William McMahon to the seat of PM. As Andrew Theophanous argues in ‘Australian Democracy in Crisis’, the two had very different world views. McEwan established the coalition on the basis of state subsidies to the rural sector in exchange for large tariffs for manufacturing industries. Theophanous considers this to be an ‘alliance of conflicting interests’, which McMahon was opposed to. This is because he felt the country party was exerting too much influence on the liberals economic strategy (p.294). But, because the Liberals could not ditch the country party, McMahon was ditched, and John Gorton was moved for the leader of the upper house to the deceased’s seat and became Prime Minister. Although little was known of Gorton’s philosophic position, it became clear that he was an economic nationalist. At the time, journalist Max Walsh described Gorton’s position:
‘A mixture of Capitalism in State-Commonwealth fiscal relations (anti-federalist), isolation in defence matters, populism and nationalism in fiscal matters. Everyone of the ingredients of that package is capable of dividing the ranks of the liberal party. In combination, they provide an explosive mixture.’
Thus, it is clear that the country party, in its early coalition, was not simply passively absolved into the liberal party. And the so-called ‘alliance of conflicting interests’ could have be resolved under a form of economic nationalism. However, the embrace of economic rationalism after the tenure of Fraser resulted in the health of the nation being determined by the growth of GDP. The emergence of the notion of the ‘national interest’ has become a popular term of late, but, being clearly and deliberately ill-defined, it is clear that politicians who refer to the national interest are referring to nothing more than the protection of the growth of GDP.
In the same article, Brain discusses foreign direct investment, pointing out that this can be both positive and negative. Basically, FDI can be used to cultivate local industries, or it can be used to suppress the emergence of new groups that could challenge power within a market, reinvigorating it in the process. This is one of the reasons why John Adams turned against the liberal party, because it abandoned its philosophical commitment to free-market economics. Adams calls the Morrison government a ‘liberal soviet government. However, a market which is free from constraints is a fallacy, as Ha Joon Chang argues in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism:
The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.’
He goes on to discuss the legislation that restricted the employment of children in factories in early 19th century England. This is a form of positive freedom, a philosophical position which sees freedom and constraints as not mutually exclusive and, through the influence of T.H Green, had a huge influence on the formation of Australian democracy, seen, for example, in the arbitration court, which Adams believes should be governed by free-market policy. This would be an aberration if we considered the spirit in which the arbitration system was initial formed, as Marian Sawyer points out in her text, The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia. I agree with Adams on most points, especially regarding the inadequacies of undergraduate courses in economics as well as the defective assumptions used to guide economic modelling, but I disagree with his deeper philosophical commitments.
To return, FDI can be used to allow huge entities to takeover small entities, thereby also claiming their knowledge and reasserting their dominance in the market. Australia could invest in its own country to protect and cultivate the emergence of new innovations, innovations such as regenerative forms of agriculture, directing financial markets towards productive and regenerative industries, absolutely essential in the effort to mobilise the nation towards the climate crisis. The government could, through active intervention and fiscal policy directed towards real industries, spend money into existence by investing in profitable and essential industries, such as food security, thereby making small-scale organic farming not only a much more prevalent form of agriculture, but also significantly reduce the price of such products which are basically unaffordable accept for the economic elite. This would be just, since there is much research to suggest a link between gut bacteria and mental health and consciousness, thereby confirming the old adage that you are what you eat.
However, the Australia government has been largely uninterested in this. Brain argues that this is because of the embrace of economic rationalism, a doctrine which is inherently anti-democratic. Economic rationalism or neoliberalism is a topic that I will come back to a lot, both in this article and in future articles, because it has been the main ideological driver in Australia since Bob Hawke, and its embrace in the best way of understand how Australia has appeared to lose the plot in the last few decades. I will argue, perhaps controversially, that this is because it has excluded from economic discourse the notion of the nation. It seems that Australia would now prefer to allow foreign investment rather than making its own investments in itself, which has allowed huge global entities to come into Australia and takeover Australia firms, buy Australian land, etc., thereby taking with them the knowledge and creativity that was cultivated within the Australian education system and paid for by the Australian tax-payer. This, of course, is all overseen by the Foreign Investment Review Board which ‘operates without accountability of any form’ (Brian, p. 314).
Brain’s speculation of the future death of the country party seems to be coming true, with the emergence of the Shooters Party attempting to fill the void left by the nationals, which was also speculated by Brain in the essay. He suggested that if Australia is to break out of the constraints of economic rationalism, there needs to be a revival of Representative Democracy. This, we believed, can happen in three ways in Australia. Either constitutional change, the breakdown of party discipline or the breakdown of the two party system. He rejects the possibility of the first two, suggesting that the constitution will not change because the dictatorship of established interests will, through the media, ensure that this path cannot be taken, and party discipline will not be broken down since the adage ‘disunity is death’ dominates, and writes: ‘The only practical way forward is by the break up of the two party system where new parties and groups of independents emerge and control the balance of power in the House of Representatives’ (Ibid, 318).
But, of course, it is not just the shooters party that filled the void in the last election. There has been an inner city surge of independent voice who simultaneously want to maintain core of economic rationalism, while at the same time dealing with the excess it produces in the form, for example, of climate change. The major proponents of this view in the last election, were Zali Steggall and Oliver Yates. The former took the seat of Tony Abbott the latter failed to take the seat of Josh Friedenburg. Steggall seems to have a much more definite view that economic rationalism is the only way forward, whereas Yates seems to be partially divided on this issue, concerned with social justice and the influence of foreign investment on the one hand, but not wanting to appear to stray too far from the rigid orthodoxy of national politics – that is, national economy ideology. We saw this in the last election, and we also was legislation to attempt to limit this in the future. The anti-democratic forces are enclosing themselves around the population on the basis of free-market economics, and those in the public are frightened to talk about it. This is another reason why I comment John Adams.
And of course, to return to the issues revealed in the royal commissions, the Adani coal mine and, for the sake of the argument, the situation in the Murray-Darling basin, the situation faced within Australian universities which has been a topic close to the eye of scrutiny recently, the issue of the Western Highway, which has also gained significant attention (a proposed highway is threatening cultural significant sites of the Djab Wurrung people, including an 800 year-old birthing tree, which has had up to 10,000 births within its hollow), we are forced to ask ourselves: what it is that is going on within our boarders? And, of course, this is only a tiny fragment of all that could be mentioned. If all these considered independently are called ‘crises’ which is how they are generally considered, what might we call them together? We would presumably call it the collapse of democracy, would we not? Indeed, this is not an isolated opinion. Kenneth Hayne, the man who oversaw the Banking Royal Commission, argued Australians have lost trust in the functioning of Australian Democratic institutions. The ground under our feet is shifting and no one is telling us why. A reasonable question has been on the minds of most people: Are we American, are we Chinese, are we English or are we Australia? And what does being Australian mean? Far from being a regressive question, the idea that the nation is a right wing project is an essential assumption of the ‘progressive’ leftist arm of neoliberals, which wants to reduce the diversity within national boundaries to the homogeneity of the market. But diversity is health and I would prefer in live in a healthy, rather than a homogeneous, nation. This means that questions such as these must be raised. And they are not simply isolated to Australia: they are rising all over the world.
Last night I watched a foreign correspondent episode with my mum. It was contextualising the events in China and Hong Kong for the generally uninformed, which I most certainly am, and spread our vision onto Taiwan, another autonomous region which China sees as rightfully Her own, and thus another battle ground of the future. And too, there is a progressive form of nationalism emerging amongst China’s youth, expressed through music and culture especially, that is intent not only on resisting China, but upholding its own values, which often means creating them (as a side note, at the beginning of Montaigne’s essay which I reference above, he suggests that real value is created out of ‘oddities and novelties’ not price) as they go. They have to be protected, like a small seedling, in order to develop into a great tree, at which time they can serve as a shelter for the future critters that are shaped underneath them, so long, of course, as they do not develop the capacity to create chainsaws that can cut them down.
But this is the young people whose vision of the future is not fixed. There is an older generation of Taiwanese which are still loyal to Communist China, and, paradoxically, uses the freedoms afforded in Taiwan to celebrate a regime which would not allow the same freedoms within its own boarders. It was strange to see old Taiwanese people saying that when the Chinese invade, they will support them. But then, of course, I wondered. The human mind is a strangely organism, still largely unknown, or known only to the writers and the poets and, of course, the philosophers. How many Australians would do the same same when anti-democratic forces arrive, but not be as honest as these Taiwanese men?
That is an important one, obviously. With the now months of chaos (which, we know, does not mean ‘disordered’, but is rather deeply ordered) in Hong Kong, it also is a sign of what is to come. But the situation is much worse than what can be seen in Hong Kong. Paradoxically, what we are seeing there is life and what we are seeing there is hope. We in Australia have watched unfold terrible environmental catastrophes , from bushfires and drought to floods and snow storms, Tsunamis and hurricanes, and we have seen them unfold all over the world. But the most dramatic and important unfolding event which has struggled to maintain the eyes and the ears of the nation is what is unfolding in the Murray-Darling basin. As politicians struggle to understand water within their most popular frame of reference, we wait in horror for a new crisis to unfold in the Summer, as the iconic river is dried for the sake of cotton growing and other archaic forms of agriculture instituted by the dictatorship of entrenched interests. Two huge fish kills spurred by a perfect storm of low water levels due to mismanagement, a blue-green algae bloom, which multiplies by stealing the oxygen from the fish, and searing temperatures literally starved the fish of oxygen and baked them. Millions of fish, some of which were one hundred years old, are now buried in a mass, unmarked grave. What are we to tell the children? That along with a doggy heaven, there is also a fishy heaven?
Like the Mississippi for native Americans, the Murray-Darling basin was home to some of the most affluent indigenous people in Australia. And like the Mississippi today, the life which grows around the once great river is on the brink, and this includes the towns which people inhabit. Indeed, the decaying towns all along the once giant water way reveal the oddities of current economic policies and the framework in which they operate. As reported by the Saturday paper, the town of Willcania is the best example of this. Located in the north-west of New South Wales, there can be no fish-kills in Willcania, because there is no more water. It is now all gone.
Indeed, from an environmental perspective, we have heard ridicules story after ridicules story, as entrenched minds attempt to understand the environmental crisis within an essentially managerial landscape of strategic goals, growth indicators, perception manipulation, corporate brands and corporate responsibility and, of course, mass tax-evasion. Gramsci, at one point, describes the city as an octopus, capturing, with its tentacles, the towns and regions which make it up, for its own purposes, a tendency which ultimately destroys the city itself. And this seems to be happening at an accelerating rate in Australia. Indeed, we hear the story, told by the managerial class, that 80% of communication is non-verbal, so they think it is fine to discuss ‘excellence’ 30 times in half an hour because no one is listening. And no one is listening, they are marvelling at how his hair can stay that straight and wonder if the air in breathable.
But I digress again! People are not just listening, they are feeling and they are seeing, especially those on the front line. The people are not as easily fooled as we have the tendency of believing. Consider the problem of energy within a neo-liberal framework. The energy crisis is going to be solved by allocating 1,300 acres of prime agricultural land to a solar farms because a French company had a business idea. But that is still a better idea than the big stick. Indeed, as Nicky Ison, the founding director of the Community Power Agency and research associate at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney, argues:
‘Just as the underwriting program is designed to support new or existing coal power stations, the big stick is set up to force companies such as AGL to divest their coal assets and sell them on to other sources, so that the Age of Coal (and thus worsening climate change) will continue.’
And a lot of the people in the regions support the continuation of this Age. And progressive class in the cities explained this with reference to to Trump and Brexit and lifted their nose in quaint self-appreciation. They have explained the situation in Queensland with reference to their own self-asserted superiority over the (what is the correct way to say it today – genetically underdeveloped, epigenetically limited?) scum of the north and the regions more generally. Labour has not fallen into this trap, of course, and have promised to listen more… Great
People are guided by their experience. In the regions, they have seen industry emerge and towns succeed, and they have seen industry die and towns die along with them. Therefore, they like industry; they conclude that industry is the cause of the wealth of nations, not trade, and there is a large tradition of economic thought which backs them up on this, including Adam Smith. Indeed, I currently write in the town of Morwell (and I edit in Montmorency – interesting contrast), a town which was incredibly prosperous in the 1960s and 70s. Many people in the town believe that the town needs more coal power-stations, not less. Indeed, this view is held by my own dad who worked at Hazlewood power station on and off for a long time. Another conversation I had a few weeks ago with a business owner in Morwell was coloured by similar light. That is not to say that everyone in Morwell wants more coal, it is simply to note that this issue is not a foregone conclusion, and that they have at least reasonable arguments which, at present, are not being considered legitimate, because, one, they contradicts the tenants of neoliberal policy, and 2, they seem to contradict the reality of brought about by the climate crisis. So both policy makers and environmentalist often unite in their ignorance of the regions, which helps to fuel all sorts of issues.
The young and the education class understand that the threat of ecological collapse means the construction of new power stations is unwise, but they have hardly showed what is wise. They are lacking an inspiring alternative vision beyond the world of zero marginal cost production propounded by the likes of Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason, which sees every human as a mini-entrepreneur characterised by concepts such as ‘human capital.’ This vision of everyone being mini entrepreneurs producing essentially meaningless content is hardly inspiring, it merely offers a way to believe that there is a way out, which probably includes crawling through metaphorical sewers for the next few hundred years.
These is something lacking in all of this. This sense of lacking is expressed, for example, in our (lack of) debate around energy policy. Indeed, we still don’t know why, as the Labour Party continue to point out, Malcolm Turnbull is no longer Prime Minister, but we can assume that it is because his national energy guarantee pissed off the big players in the Liberal party, who are dependent on the coal industry for their political immunity – what we used to call barley in line chasey. How can there be an informed debate around energy without the vast majority of people having any idea as to what energy is when they actually think about it. You know, energy, that vital life-giving force which flows from mind, body and spirit?
The very idea that the goal of energy policy is to reduce the cost of energy for consumers misses the core of what energy policy should be about. Energy is not very well expressed by a government out of ideas, without moral fibre and, after the Pacific Island conference, clearly lacking humanity. This is because energy is about vision, primarily, and in Australia we on the cusp of a transition towards something that is not yet clear. And yet we don’t seen to have the political energy to even recognise this, probably because there are so many parts of society that need to change that are immune to change. And while we still have the capacity to determine the direction of the change, an energy policy based purely on the effort to reduce consumptions misses the links between other aspects of life which are keeping us on a trajectory of ignorance. If, for example, a series of policies encourages the use of less energy, say, by encouraging people to spend more time outdoors, to exercise, to produce food locally and to travel less by revitalising local, especially regional areas, by allowing citizens to reclaim the streets and the public institutions (which have been lost in Morwell) then the overwhelming multipliers of those interactions would not only lessen the amount of energy used in multiple ways, especially in the realm of health, because people would be encouraged to lead healthier lives, policy like this would allow people to respond collectively and in unison to other problems facing their local area, and to devise solutions suitable to local areas, in creative way, as is the case with the town of Yackandandah. The people could be unified in their outrage against the decay of their regions, but respond constructively. If the Australian government encouraged the use of local currencies, for example – as human ecologist Alf Hornborg has argued – then a global downturn would not only not affect local economic activity, it would actively shield them for the worst shocks, while allowing them to reinforce the changes they achieved, by maintaining and multiplying the interactions between the people of the area, and prevent them from sliding back onto the old trajectory. In this way, a global down turn could produce a local upswing. But this requires thinking within a new paradigm which has not established itself in Australia, what is called ecological economics.
Ison is partially right to suggest that the Liberal’s want to maintain the Age of Coal for their mates, but it appears worse than that. Indeed, since the industrial revolution and the birth of mechanistic science, it seems that we have been drifting further and further away from the idea of purpose and meaning in life, and closer towards the idea that life is meaningless, and that, by extension, the end of civilization is meaningless, too. And we get all antsy when we hear the term civilization, especially on the left, because we immediately classify it as far right-wing idea – no generalities exist, there are only particulars and every generality is ultimately oppressive. The mantra of postmodernism has a firm grip on the throat of the political left, defined by Lyotard as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ in a text he later described as his worst, mainly because he wrote about science he did not understand and to compensate for that, he ‘made stories up’ and referred to books he had not read. A fitting book, perhaps, to underpin the collapse of the intellectually deficient left in Australia.
Everyone says that we need to listen more, but everyone wants to be heard saying it. That is, we are on a trajectory, and during transition periods we have the power to reflect on and challenge that trajectory. The question is, how far are we willing to go? What are we willing to bring into question? But it is not just about challenging defective assumptions, but replacing them with something better. I think that we can only go so far without looking at the history of the landscape we are on. And we all know, whether we admit it or not, that this is an ancient landscape. But there have also been some more recent ideas that have been incredibly fruitful in the formation of the Australian identity. Is it possible to synthesise the modern with the ancient? The more fundamental question was asked by the former head of the CSIROs department for land and water, in the Deakin lecture series mentioned above:
Do we as a society really want to know what is going on? Or are we all ostriches – a feral species with our head in the sand? Will we accept this challenge of acceptance of our history, and the challenge to change our ways.
Each institution of the nation is on a path, but the nation, too, is on a path, so most of the institutions of the nation are not on independent paths, otherwise the nation would be out of control. They are united by economic indicators, which describe the nation in terms of GDP, productivity, unemployment, and other indicators. This is what I once heard Ken Wilber describe as an external objective description and, in itself, it lacks the meaning and power to unite people in anything but mutual slavery. Few institutions now appeal to collective internal meaning, a sense of national pride, and when they do, it seems to be either reactive or used on repetition. This is reducing possible futures that are open to us. I read recently in a grade 6 class room something along the lines of: every fish is a genius, but if we judge a fish based on its capacity to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it is an idiot. Now, I do not think that every fish is a genius, but I do think that judging every institution based on its capacity to produce profit does not make any sense at all, especially when we consider the subsidies that are afforded to the mining, agricultural and forestry sector, that only allow the big players to maintain market control. The obsession with measuring and metrics is maintaining and actually narrowing our trajectory, by forcing each institution to be measured by one stick, one set of values, which must clearly and efficiently outline the value of itself to the economy and the future, which so often these days seems a priori determined, they are converging towards socioecological collapse. But who in our political system can predict the future? And how much energy does it consume to confuse the population into thinking that their speculations about potential future has any grounding in reality, that everything is fine.
From Home to Abroad: A Very Brief Outline
Across the world, the situation is not a whole lot better. The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey and the attack on oil tankers in the gulf have increased tensions between adversaries, the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is strained, as well as between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which, in turn, heightens tension between the United States and Russia, and pushed the planets political economic landscape towards a major tipping point. Tensions are transformative. 24% of the world’s oil moves through the gulf of Oman and the attack sent prices up. That is the way our market signals work: a reduction is supply leads to an increase in price. And still no one is sure who was responsible for either the murder to Khashoggi or the sinking of the oil tankers, there were no doubt a handful of people of benefitted handsomely from each. With regards to the Khashoggi matter, the United States blames the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and passed legislation to end US financial support to the Saudi lead military offensive in Yemen which has lead to massive human rights violations within the country. (And now, as I edited, I see that a rebel group that has emerged out of this in Yemen, the Houthi, is claiming responsibility for a drone attack on a Saudi oil base on the 14 of September, which is a grave threat to supply, increasing the price of oil further as up to 5 percept of production is cut.) However, Trump refuted this, and, in so doing, refuted the conclusions of the CIA, that is, his own intelligence, and argued that ruining the relationship with Saudi Arabia would cost the US billions of dollars in arms sales and would also wreck an important US counter-point to quell the Iranian influence in the region. This situation is unprecedented, with the use of the ‘war act’ law, a law which was first passed in 1973 at the close of the disastrous Vietnam war, after congressed recognised that the sovereign right to declare war lay not with the White House but with Congress. This is the first time it has been used in America, although Speaker Paul Ryan managed to intervene. This, of course, is still a mess. (Although, editing this, we are actually seeing a similar situation emerge in Australia, with the Chinese Australian Gladys Liu. It has been alleged that the government ignored information provided by ASIO, Australia’s intelligence agency, that Liu is not fit for pre-selection due to her links with organisation connected to the Chinese Communist Party.)
As for the attack on the oil tankers, the situation is blurred. However, we should not see these as two unconnected events, but rather part of a movement the direction of which is still unclear. But it is important to understand that this is not limited to the Middle-East. Interesting, Norway, Japan, the UAE, Singapore and Taiwan are also involved in this, at least directly, because the former owned the ships, the middle was one of the exporters and the latter two were receiving the goods. More broadly, China has also been forced into the mix, because this act of war occurred within the six month window of the American efforts to leave a cold-war missile treaty signed with Russia in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. How the world has changed since then. While the American’s have argued, especially the war-monger Pompeo, that the US needs to leave because the Russians have broken the agreement, a more realistic reason is that China is not bound by the agreement and has been producing the mid-range missiles the treaty sought to ban. Trump spelt this out recently, suggesting the possibility of all three ‘reducing.’ Considering both Russia and the US were not meant to be producing, this is concerning. And while he has also called for a possible three-way treaty, what about the next power to emerge? India, perhaps? Or Nigeria? Or some other national, corporate or ethnic group? Just as the sinking of oil tankers in the Gulf has a flow on effect which is not just political, surely the signing of a treaty regarding the production of missiles is a conversation that should involve every nation state on planet Earth, no?
But despite the threat of a global arms race accelerating exponentially (again), the major global issue dominating the global media landscape is trade tension between the US and China, with billions of dollars be smacked back an forth like a tennis game, as both old and new flex their fading or newly found courage. It is not always clear why this is the case. It has been argued that tariff protection leads to war, but this link is not very clearly established at all – indeed, would it be fair to assert that we are already in a war? I am sure the Syrians, Afghanis, those from Yemen and alike would agree. The idea that tariffs are regressive is one of those many academic myths that are ingrained into the mind of a social science major, because they structure their belief system upon the basis of free-market economics and tariffs disrupt this ideology. However, there are strategic tariffs and then their are distractions and while this is not simply a distraction, when their is much complexity within the global world today, it is incredibly unhelpful for paid commentators to divide the world into those who favour regressive isolationism and those who favour progressive free-trade. I guess that is why they get paid…
Tariffs are one political strategy of protecting a national community for an external threat. Another strategy is a welfare system. Politicians have turned away from strategy, preferring free-trade, which is another way of allowing the people who have power at present to maintain and grow that power. Free-trade, which has led to deindustrialization, an expansion of the migration labour market and a situation where wages are not growing at the rate of inflation, that is, more competition in the labour market, has been a disaster for ordinary people all over the world. Combine this with austerity politics, which have seriously cut and attacked the welfare net in most western countries, the result has been devastating for citizens and has left economic, political and cultural institutions severely unprotected from external shocks. The new wave of public spending that is happening in Australia (and probably in other parts of the world as well) is not a return to the 1960, but is rather a sly struggle to cover the short-fall of private investment, especially for essential services, and maintain a tax base (especially as house prices drop) to allow the function of government to continue. This is a race to the bottom because, like the ordinary household, it is all funded by debt at a very low interest rate. Once that rate increases, and along with it the cost of money, the whole project looks set to go up in flames.
But maybe not. Economists like Erik Reinert and Ha Joon Chang not only support tariff barriers in some circumstances, they actually argue that all developed countries necessarily went through a stage of protectionism in order to protect their industry and develop their own consumer base. This is known as the infant industry argument and Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and Daniel Raymond are the important thinkers in this tradition. You’ll find Hamilton’s face on the American $20 bill, although he was never president. And while they discount the cultural element of this, the struggle that the American and Australian subjects were involved in to ensure their political sovereignty against an imperial power, the argument holds. Powerful countries embrace free-trade in order to dominate less developed economies, and they may only revert back to protectionist policies when the expansion has gone so far that it allows another country to rise, as is the case with China, what Karl Polanyi called in his classic The Great Transformation, the double movement. The IMF and the World Bank, essentially American institutions, ensure that third world countries today are not allowed to follow the path followed by the developed world, an argument made y Erik Reinert in his excellent text, How Rich Countries Get Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. In Australia, we too went through a period of tariff protection. Remembered regretfully as the White Australia Policy, this policy was in essence a tariff protection, which Alfred Deakin strongly supported, and his biographer, professor La Nauze points out that this policy did not contain racism nor notions of racial superiority, but was related to national unity as well as political and economic considerations. In a speech in Ballarat in 1903, Deakin himself characterised the policy as a ‘reasoned policy which goes to the root of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial and political organisation is governed.’ These are strong claims. David Syme, the owner of the Age and close friend with Alfred Deakin, was the most avid defender of protectionism in Victoria, and he often clashed with Henry Parks after he became a free-trader upon meeting John Stuart Mill in England, who supported the infant industry argument only up to a point. These protectionists saw reality as having depth, as having layers and as moving, they saw the position that they found themselves in as being weak and they recognised the need to protect themselves in order to develop and maintain a national identity.
I am not advocating a return to white Australia. What I am saying, however, is that we have to approach these things with the novelty of a child, to attempt to understand what people who seem so different from us were actually trying to achieve. They were trying to ensure that essentially slave labour from the Pacific Islands were not allowed to come to the country to undercut the wage system and fragment the national identity which, at that time, had not been established. Some of the most powerful speech in parliament were made in defence of this policy. But a policy never has simply one effect, of course. But this policy was about establishing an industrial base, which meant not only protecting manufacturers, but also protecting workers as well. Indeed, in the same speech, Deakin argues that ‘it means protection against unpaid labour; it means social justice as far as we can establish it, including just trading and the payment of fair wages’ (p.15).
Unfortunate as it may seem, but a community is established on the basis of exclusion and vision. This is just something that cannot be avoided when vastly different people have to come together. Certain activities have to be banned, other activities worshiped; certain pathways have to be shunned, others have to be honoured. Passivity in government circles has allowed money to pry open the door to Australia, has allowed activity which our culture abhors to dominate and now we have to figure out what to do. Thus, character has made a resurgence into the political domain as conservative forces sympathetic to the neoliberal agenda struggle with the foreign concept of the nation-state, because we have to distinguish between good and bad migrant – in other words, those with and those without money. This is because of government’s economic management is non-existent. It should be noted that those defending the nation state have no concern with the national character, with national history, national culture, or, God-forbid, sovereignty, and they definitely have no interest in reflecting on the health or the history of the land more generally – that is, they have no interest in a synthesis of cultures, or redeveloping the idea, long lost, that ‘we are one but we are many’. That is, they are not interested in complexity. No, their ideas of nationalism have no connection to previous nationalistic movements which were progressive; rather, they are paranoid nationalists, and racists. However, too often we identify nationalism with paranoid nationalism, and contrast nationalism with cosmopolitanism, which is generally regarded as being Liberal and on the left. But here in Australia, the Liberals are on the right (and, so are the Labour Party now, unfortunately.) It is confusing in Australia that no one discusses the early left party, which were the nationals, who also defended protectionist policies and that the Liberal party where on the right, precisely because, hailing from Sydney rather than Melbourne, they supported free-trade.
But I digress. One reason why the trade-tensions disputes are in the news is because it is sending the stock-market all over the place. What causes what and how is harder to determine, but because so much money is tied up in stocks, because everyone was encouraged to become mini stock holders in the 90s, because so many people are in debt, and because all of this affects national economic policy, such as the bizarre negative interests rates in Europe and the almost zero interests rates here in Australia, we are intimately tied up in the escalating feud between China and the US. And we are seeking to quell tension, to be leaders here, rather than on climate change, because our period of 28 years of unending economic growth appears in serious danger, which will make us look bad, and, quite dangerously, look back. Hence, we are increasingly looking to side with China, because they can grow our mates bank accounts, ah, I mean economy, in the same way that Trump refuses to break America’s ties with the Saudi kingdom. What happens in Hong Kong, then, is all about timing for Australia, will the economic conditions change in such a way that will allow Australia to jump ship? Or will the emerging flashpoint (I love that word – it evokes so much colour and excitement) pull Australia back in line with the US? Who knows? No one, yet.
In Other News
This situation is not a struggle for Trump, he is at home. He is happy (and capable) of going against the World Trade Organisation the World Bank and the International Monetary fund, and the elites are happy enough with the situation, it seems. But while there has been concern for industry, there has less concern for infants, and those in the weakest position of society. Since May the 8th last year, we have seen 285 days pass where there have been mass shootings in America. This is days, not events. In 2019 alone, there have already been 270 ‘events’, where an event is considered 4 or more people – not including the shooter – to be wounded. 285 days. Unbelievably, mass shootings represent less than two percent of that 39,000 people that have been killed in America by guns since the Sandy Hooks school shooting, which took place on the 12th of December 2012. That day, the day in which America swore never again, 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7, and 6 teachers, were murdered. And despite how horrific an event like Sandy Hooks is, the 14,000 homicides and 23,000 suicides since account for the vast majority of gun deaths. The latest shootings in Dayton and El Paso are terrible, there is no doubt about that. But there have been 13 events since Dayton on August the 4th, 7 people have been killed and 55 wounded. Access to guns is clearly a major problem. (This was written initially on the 15th of August and is being edited on the 16th of September – I did not update the numbers).
However, it is important also to draw distinctions. But to do this, we have to move beyond the context of America. Another event which clearly signals a trajectory is what happened on the 15th of March, 2019. This was the day Brenton Tarrant and his accomplices live-streamed the murder of 51 people in a Christchurch Mosque. The shootings that happened in Dayton and El Paso were targeted shootings, aimed at immigrants perceived to be invading the country, and similar sentiments have been expressed by the Christchurch shooters, and those that they were inspired by, especially the Breivik attack in Norway on the 22nd of July 2011, in which 77 people were murdered. Racist views or religion beliefs are driving these crimes and structuring the world-view of these murderers, but they are responding to a threat that government all over the world have ignored: the destabilising effect of mass immigration. It is unlikely that these kind of events can be stopped by changing gun laws, since they are crimes of passion and belief, not the outcome of blind rage or drunken violence alone. These cannot be understood though the lens of bad ‘choices’. Indeed, the people themselves don’t see themselves as making the wrong choices at all. They see themselves as fulfilling their duty. We are caught in what seems to be a terrible spiral, because we are not outraged by gun violence in general – not fits of rage – but rather what it is that leads someone to act so coldly, calculatingly and monstrously for the sake of belief, and we do this as the world becomes so devoid of meaning and belief that we are literally threatening the delicate ecological stability of our planet which is necessary for life at all, especially a particular kind of life called a civil life. Civility means putting away the guns and swords and using words, but it also means listening. This is where the free-speech debate falls down. How can one speak freely if they have not been educated to do so? How can one implement change if no one will listen?
Recently, Matt Schlapp was on the Drum. Schlapp is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a very convincing speaker. What I thought was the most interesting aspect of the interview was how childish the other members of the panel looked in confronting a seasoned political figure. But even more interesting was the way they tried to critique the actions of the president be suggesting that his insidious speech helped provoke forms of violence like those discussed above and that he ought to deescalate his language. This was especially so with the Latino ‘caravans’ which, Trump has argued, and Schlapp agreed, were invading the country and I think it was his Twitter personality which, the panel thought, needed to change. Schapp disagreed and argued that Trump’s use of twitter has basically revolutionised the way leaders communicate with their ‘base’. The biggest concern with the questioners on the panel was not what was actually going on, but what was being said about what was going on.
So, the issue was the perception manipulation of the consumer, not actually the experiences of those on the ground, in this case on the boarder of the U.S and Mexico. One is forced to ask: who is being offended by the language, the latino caravaners, the black congressman asked to go back to their own countries (they were actually born in America) or those on the panel? Yes, we all have Twitter in front of our eyes, we can all see those words, but have we given up on looking at pathways created by institutions, by legislation, by technology, by culture, by the media, which are changing us in manners we do not see so clearly in words? Why would we seek to manipulate the perception of the American public? To make better choices, of course. But what if these shooters are already on a trajectory and this trajectory is driven by a passion and belief that they are doing the right thing, something that is their duty? If the language is toned down, would not the shooter read the subtly in the text? That is, would they not read what they wanted to read?
We have to consider causation, here. It is highly unlikely that causation can be reduced to a Trump twitter post, although we could expand the view to look at government policy. Indeed, we know that the ecological crisis in Honduras, the terrible drought, has caused huge numbers of people to flee to America to Send home money to their family. And researchers have also pointed to the role that climate change played in the Syrian crisis, forcing great numbers of people to flee their land in the country side and take a chance in the city. This has the effect of greatly reducing wages, increasing congestion, conflict, expanding cities, creates sanitary problems, just to name a few of the most obvious.
Is it at all fair to draw a comparison between Tarrant on the one hand, and a leftist consumerist cosmopolitan, whose economic activity contributes to distant slavery in Bangladesh, whose flying to all corners of the world for experiences contributes a small but significant amount to global carbon emissions and whose worship of Hollywood celebrities further erodes cultural life in the developed west? In a strange way, are they both not on the one hand expressions of a culture lost for new ideas and attacking the culture that provided them a protective layer to develop in a reasonably healthy manner? I think that this is a conclusion that Zizek would come to, and I think that it is as useless as the two opposing visions because it is nothing but a piece of clever scholasticism. The point is that these things are happening, they may be related, but much more is happening that is not being recognised that cannot be understood by these dialectical abstractions. So, I throw the question back on the reader: what do you recognise as being significant?
There is no doubt in my mind that I am touching on something important and it is not my intention in any way to be insensitive in attempting to explain horror, especially to those who have gone through the pain of losing someone in this way that must seem incomprehensible, in a manner that is meaningless that it must surely seem not only not fruitful, but cruel to attempt to attribute meaning, or examine causation anywhere but within the brain of the individual, who we deem as evil. And it is certainly incomprehensible for me to begin to imagine what that pain of losing someone in such a way must feel like. And I am sure that it is not just pain, but a chaos of emotions which has no ground. But I am not a behaviouralist, I am not an economist and I do not believe in a God as such. Therefore, I do not local causation purely in the brain, nor in rational choice, nor in any divinity, evil or God. These are myths to help explain things we do not understand by asking hard questions and with deep introspection and we have must therefore dispense of them for the sake of civilization. I believe we should examine our own institutions rigorously, I believe we should study our world rigorously. This does not mean there is no space for chance or creativity, however, and I believe we should ask difficult questions when necessary, because I am a humanist and I believe in the core ideals of the original conception of the humanities, Humanitas in latin – Nature, Civilization and Kindness. And I believe that, in cases at least, Elvis Costello was right: you gotta be cruel to be kind. The humanities consider that the natural world has significant meaning all around, considers humans as part of nature and developing within nature and, importantly, give a central place to creativity and emergence but does not shy away from the existence of good an evil. Like Heraclitus’ dictum, found in fragment 51:
‘Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonises with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre’
the humanities consider tension as being productive. This is the ground upon which the new sciences are being built, and they are directed towards the creation of an ecological civilisation.
Animals model the world, models which are informed my meaningful experiences, which then provide organisation and coherence to their activity. And experience can also challenge the coherence and organisation of their model (there understanding of themselves) and change its activity. That is because models are always based upon assumptions about how the world ‘works’ which are liable to be false. Therefore, at least one goal of developing one’s internal model of oneself is to continue to develop less bad assumptions about how the world works, or to develop a deeper understanding of one’s relationship to the world. This is a much more useful form of dialectic, one that is not so bound up in Saussurian dyadic logic, but is rather triadic, giving a place to self, world and the development of a model which expands the concepts of self and world as it develops. Model might be another word for mind, as opposed to brain, because it is not clear where it exists.
To return to the above point, it is not clear how those critique of Trump’s language (generally but not always on Twitter) seem to understand how Twitter itself has changed the political landscape through smashing and transforming traditional boarders and how Trump is simply taking advantage of this. An innovation like that of Twitter, and its products, are emergent and cannot be understood through the old rules. They create new rules, and they are being prescribed at present, as people try, through post-modernist methods, to deconstruct the discursive episteme of Trumpism. Doing this ultimately leads to an under-recognition of how the two periods are connected by common assumption, assumption which have narrowed rather than expanded our relationship between self and world, by attempting to remove those vagaries which blur the lines between black and white, the interactions of which produce the colour that we apparently love so dearly. That is, despite the changes, there is consistency in the transitions that have occurred in the form of a collective model of the world, a model which could be called economic rationalism, which has directed our culture to an impasse.
I think the idea of space-time compression, of flattening out reality onto a two-dimensional plane and destroying temporal and spatial constraints is a useful way of thinking about this, but I don’t think we can properly understand what has happened to the world unless we appreciate how the humanities have been reduced to a form of entertainment. We now produce fragments of knowledge with no way to converge them in a manner that produces any coherence. Indeed, Ted talks are a great example of this problem. They are celebrated for spreading knowledge, yet you can watch two talks one after the other and be exposed to two different world-views. TED takes no position – thus, it takes the position of a free-market rationalist, which appears to us as not being a position. By appearing to let everyone in, there are always those excluded. Paradoxically, they may be doing more for the understanding of knowledge than they are aware. But they point remains: with the loss of the synthesising and story-telling capacities of the humanities, new channels of communication had to open up to spread knowledge, and out of this pressure the internet was born. Wikipedia is perhaps the only living off-spring of this project. All have since died out. Why, because the spirit of the humanities has too largely died out. We have not sought to protect and pass on the spirit which always surrounds the formation of anything great and without that common spirit, which needs to be educated, the great creations of the past are withering and dying before our eyes to such an extent that we do not know which way to turn nor what to save.
Signs for the future
It seems to me that because the world is represented as being black and white, we think that it is plain and clear. Despite the fact few read anymore, the optical echo remains in our cultural vision. And those who do still read seemed, for quite a while, to be sitting on the train reading 50 shades of grey. So much of our experience seems to be taken for granted now that it seem impossible to believe that scientific observation, the kind generated by Galileo, required people to actually look at the world not through a theory or doctrine but with an open mind. A few hundred years later, Physicist David Bohm argued that free play is the condition for entertaining different possibilities. This is an innovation that cannot be captured by metrics. That is, it is an innovation in the true sense of the word: Galileo did not just change a culture, he contributed to the regeneration of a culture. Could insights like the one of David Bohm do the same, insights which are not new ideas, but simply the revival of an old idea?
We are having trouble, it seems, with the idea of causation. In an interconnected would such as ours (I hate it when people say that because our world has essentially always been an interconnected world, it is just that now we can send fast messages), Newtonian causation – cause and effect – does not work well. It seems, and this is certainly an argument made by my supervisor Arran Gare, that we need to revive the notion of immanent causation, and link it to the idea of self-organisation, a concept which is having a growing influence in the life sciences. But this means that we have to introduce the idea of a telos, an idea which breaks the zeroth law of the sciences: causation goes from past to present to future.These were not radical ideas 150 years ago, either. Now, with the strange sciences, the strange experimental findings, scientists are beginning to wonder whether the future is causative, and, paradoxically (at least through the Newtonian world-view) they are looking to the humanities for guidance. If the future is causative, that means vision is an essential aspect of the sciences of economics. This ultimately means reintroducing meaning into the sciences, but also elevating the status of rhetoric for example, which means bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences.
What inspired me to reform this page is that I believe first of all that this was created in the right spirit, but that we did not have access to that spirit. I still do not believe that I have access to that spirit, but I do believe that I have access to important ideas and that they need to be linked with people who are looking, but that they need to be linked in a systematic way because they are systematic ideas. So, it makes sense to me to compile them in a space like this. This is by no means comprehensive, but a set of branching ideas that are still currently floating, like shareholders, unconnected to the ground they take from. But they have been compiled in some sort of order for the present. It was also triggered by some of the events about, as well as recent news of the inverted yield curve, where investors are profiting more from short-term rather than long term investment, a tell tail sign of a recession, although some, including Mohamed El Erain believe this to be a distortion. If a global recession happens in these circumstances, where everyone seems to be provoking everyone, and everyone is scared, it seems that a threshold will be crossed. What does that mean for the future of the planet?
But there is something about the Royal Commission that sticks with me more than all of the other stuff. I think it is because people taking from their own and those in weaker positions, and doing it through public and social means, people betraying their own because they are scum and getting away with it because, basically, others could not be bothered, and people threatening the stability of the systems upon which we all rely to satisfy our needs to reward themselves in the short-term. This project is perhaps a symbol of volunteerism that has not been forgotten by those still of a community spirit, but is basically looked down upon by careerists who are selling off the country and are ignoring the threat posed by mass immigration, dodgy economic activity, pathetic environmental policy, climate change and ecological destruction, commodification of education – the list goes on. The have, in all cases, ignored the question of the nation which was at the heart of the early founders: what is Australia? This was the project of the neoliberals in the Austro-Hungarian empire, who were threatened by the rise of left wing nationalism: to establish an economic theory that would make the nation unintelligible. Thus, I am writing in the spirit of Johann Herder, of T.H Green, of Alfred Deakin, and, more recently, Rex Connor. These kinds of thinkers seemed to have become extinct from the public sphere, thinks that can be considered as left wing nationalists.
Three seperate incidence and fields of investigations are united in more that the formal term of a ‘Royal Commission’. Each reveal systemic corruption into essential aspects of Australia’s democracy, and essential institutions in the unfolding of national life, both collectively and individually. All of these partially seperate investigations have revealed not only systemic problems within absolutely essential institutions of Australian democracy, they have revealed a general contempt towards ordinary people, as well as key pillars upon which Western Civilization is supposedly based. The faith in a fair trial, which is an expression of the further spread of civility, was sidestepped for the purposes of doing ‘what was necessary’, or giving people ‘what they deserve.’ But justice is a complicated concept and in giving it, the state government has clearly taken it away, because faith in the law is now lost.
Fragility is a difficult concept to understand when standing on the top of a mountain. Whenever I think of fragility, I recall a brief and single meeting I had with a old man in Western Victoria, when he said, fleetingly: ‘I once ran down these streets.’ How might a middle aged politician at the top of his ‘game’ understand the importance of aged care, especially when his retirement will most likely be funded by the state? Indeed, the very idea of a ‘self-funded’ retirement is a hoax, since the law is one of many institutions that is necessary for the stability of commerce to generate profit. Another necessity is ‘sound’ monetary policy and regulation. It is interesting to note that the term ‘policy’ is clearly related to the Greek notion of ‘polis’ (as, interesting, is police), which was where ‘the demos’ (the people – indeed, men of power generally) would go to debate. But it was more than that. It was a way of living, living communally and making decisions communally. The policy of the central bank have become largely disconnected from what is considered politics, although it is incredibly vague what people mean by politics today, since the general goal to be to depoliticise and economise life. As we do this, we lose more and more control over life, because decisions are made within a sphere which the ‘demos’ have no access to. A series of choices replaces the idea that life is continuity and that continuity expresses that we are on a trajectory. Choice becomes life, and life is expressed as increasingly fragmented fields, fragmented for the sake of ‘efficiency’, which people no longer see as connected.
This is speeding up the world and no one seems to takes seriously the possibility that this is having a dramatic effect on how the future unfolds, because our culture seems fully captured in the logic of the sovereign individual, of linearity rather than complexity, each the product of mechanistic science. But there are still right choices and wrong choices. As American economist and the ex-governer of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke said in the wake of the 2008 crash: ‘the recent financial crisis was more a failure of economic engineering and economic management than of what I have called economic science.’ More recently, in the context of the most recent economic anomaly, the reemergence of the ‘inverted yield curve’ mentioned above, the NBC business reporter stressed:
‘Those things can be self-fulfilling prophecies, right? The dow is down 800 points today, that’s three percent. That’s the biggest percentage loss of the year. That starts of happen, then people start to say: ‘Wow, there’s a shutdown coming, so companies chose to spend less, people chose not to spend as much. It all feeds on itself: it’s psychological, not scientific.’
Those words: ‘It’s psychological, not scientific.’ They speak volumes. Is science detached from the mind(s), the culture and the landscape that produce it? And who is responsible? Ultimately, the people’s choices. If that’s the case, then to hell with the science, since it cannot help us. However, those that make the choices have progressively lost access to a seat at the decision-making table. They have their choices, but they did little to formulate the rules or the pathways within which they choose. So, no, there are no self-funded retirees.
This takes me to the Banking Royal Commission. Scant attention has been paid in the mainstream media about how the institutions of banking have changed overtime. It was only in the 80s, that is, in living memory – but not in my living memory – that banks played a constructive role in social life: they had to make judgements. Now, they play, or attempt to play, a purely pecuniary – that is, monetary – role in social life, and they occupy as space in the social sphere that cannot lose. They simply have to make decisions that benefit themselves and the banks. That is, the choices they have to make are already set in stone. The banking Royal Commission touched on this, but it is not evident that the changes have been made to transform this institutional landscape.
In Hong Kong, we have witnessed 10 weeks of unceasing protesting as a initial protest opposing the formation of a bill allowing the extradition of Hong Kong nationals to China exploded into a general argument against Chinese incursion into Hong Kong’s affairs. We have witnessed rising tensions between America and China on trade, totalling billions of dollars, which is causing a huge disruption to the liberal agenda and should be forcing heads of economics departments all over the world to scratch their heads. Instead, they are returning to empty and reified categories such as ‘irrational’ and ‘wicked’, words which basically mean that he (Trump) is not cohering to their formalised system of irrelevances. And, as Pacific Island nation implore Australia to not use accounting tricks to reach our Paris agreement and rather simply stop burning coal so their homes don’t flood, Australia sits precariously in the middle of the two superpowers, telling those tiny Fijian and co economies that they should be happy Australia is doing anything. In reality, we are frozen stiff.
Hayne’s offered no answer for this institutional decay, perhaps I have offered some… This is not a battle between labour and liberal, but between parliament and the people.
So, I publish this on an historic day, the 20th of September, when people all over the world openly rebel the inaction of climate change. May this day be the catalyst for the emergence of something great.
A New Kind of Human 