Stephen's topic

Sorry to still be emailing this to you - at this late stage and all - but I failed in my weekend's campaign to post my topic to the blog. The blogger blog is a shitty thing that has been designed by sadists, but hopefully my topic is not - so Martin will post it up there for now. Here it is - would be great if people were able to muse overnight and bring some thoughts to the session: Almost daily now there is another headline about a flood or other extreme weather event in a different part of the world. If these extreme weather events continue to increase, we may eventually reach a point where acceptance that we are sliding into an environmental disaster reaches critical mass. By critical mass I mean the point at which the majority of people no longer view radical change in our daily behaviour as an annoying idea imposed on them by others, but rather as a personal imperative driven by their own sense of necessity. Or, to put it more basically, where fear overtakes denial as the stronger instinct. At this point, one would presume that the level of global human energy that comes online to actualise change should bloom to thousands of times its current level. While, from our current decrepit vantage point, that might seem like a victory in itself, the subsequent challenge, of "what to do now?" will be just as important to our salvation, and no doubt be subject to all the same squabbling, power-plays and screw-ups that plague the majority of mass decision making. Up to now, it seems amazing how little public energy the growing challenge to come up with a 'new way' appears to occupy. Where are the models, the proposals, the scenarios? Isn't solution or scenario modeling the standard approach to managing an imminent serioius threat? Instead, all humanity seems to have come up with is a hotchpotch of good samaritan ideas, such as having four minute showers, and tokenistic, commercial and political piss-fartings such as carbon trading. If the developed world is living in a manner that cannot be supported by the planet then surely that manner itself has to change. And yet, humans, like all beasts, are hard wired to acquire and horde both material and power - and certainly not to relinquish it. The challenge therefore, is this: What does a world look like that is both sustainable and palatable? As the first of our new, more applied, COSC series, I can think of few more worthwhile challenges than to make an initial attempt to devise a practicable, high-level, new model for a sustainable modern society, suitable as a target for transition over the next few decades. To provide a little structure for the discussion, I propose the following primary criteria for the solution - we can discuss and adjust these if necessary at the beginning of the session. The solution should: 1. Discuss change across the various primary struts of society - political, legal, commercial, technological, social, cultural, communal etc.. 2. Address the major known environmental impact areas: food and nutrition / transport / manufacturing and consumerism / waste / 3. Be fully cognizant of human nature i.e. as palatable as possible to existing generations and culture. 4. Be practicable within the confines of current technologies or those reasonably foreseeable in the coming decades. Now, I am fully aware that this is not a likely brief for a 90 minute discussion but I think that although we can't hope to weave anything like a complete fabric for a solution in one session, it would nevertheless be very worthwhile if we can simply make a general start by tossing around some thoughts and creating a few good threads.

3 Feb 2009: Paul's Topic

I have struggled long over this post. I have been puzzling, maybe not daily, but at least ever few days, how I could lead the next conversation.

I have been thinking about my dreams. I have been puzzling if there is any hidden meaning in them. Wondering if maybe some strange thing that has been dredged up from my subconscious has some meaning. Is it telling me the future? Is it rehashing something from the past? Is it something that I'm current worried about? And I have been trying to put it in the context of our meetings... but nothing. I just haven't been able to grasp at a meaning.

Now obviously my short span of concentration hasn't been enough to totally dissuade me from imaging that there is something there, but as yet, it just hasn't bitten me.

So, given my predicament, I have chosen a more basic subject for focus of our next discussion, something more primeval, something that can be grasped and held onto. Fear.

In my imagination, this is coming from a similar place to dreams. It is something which drives us, which shapes our world. What we are willing to put ourselves up against. What we are unwilling to embark on. It must, must, come from that imaginative part of our brain. The part that remembers as a child hiding behind the couch when something unimaginable(/imaginable) was happening on the television. The lying in bed with the dread that something/someone was hiding in the wardrobe ready to pounce when the eyelids shut. The scary future, the worry that the familiar world will skip a track and suddenly be playing a different tune.

So, I don't give have a strong topic to lead, rather just a starting point for a discussion. Hopefully we can tie in to some of the earlier topics, and maybe just add a little more background to them to further discussions.

11 Mar 2009: Greg's Topic

For this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the topic of the flow of time.

What really sparked my interest is I heard a scientist discussing this issue and she said that none of the physical laws are time directional, in other words they don't support an 'arrow of time' as most humans perceive it. Following from this two distinct possibilities were presented:

1. There is a absolute flow of time from past to present to future. In this model, the future hasn't happened yet (whatever that means) and time is independent of human (or other) consciousness. The future could be considered non-linear and chaotic, and therefore impossible to predict except in the most limited domains. This is the model to which almost all humans prescribe, and even those that don’t usually operate day-to-day as if they do.

2. Flow of time is only human construct, and actually all 'moments' or 'states' or whatever of the universe exist simultaneously. In this case , the flow of time is purely a human construct.

An additional question regards single or multiple/infinite timelines or event sequences. Either model could be consistent with the universe splitting at any or all points. Certainly, option 2 where all states exist simultaneously in a single event sequence seems to be incredibly fatalistic.

One interesting question regards entropy, where systems tend to move from high to low potential energy and from ordered to a disordered states. Is this a genuine arrow of time or another human construct?

5 Aug 2009: Paul's Topic

I'm trying to think of a suitable topic, but not particularly successfully.

To distract you all, I suggest you do the survey on America's Apocalypse. (if you can't be bothered reading the article the link is here - which on my second run through I was an "humanitarian internationalist", which was a lot better that what I was labeled the first time...)

OK, now nice that you've forgotten that I was supposed to be choosing a topic...

So, I'm thinking that tomorrow we'll talk something along the line of "Social Responsibility".

- Should you donate to charities? (or are the ones that demand only the ones that are good at advertising?)
- Should you give some money to beggars? (or is that just proving them with a local maximum from which they can't jump out of?)
- Should you volunteer for the local sports club/council/group? (or should that be just a role of local council?)
- Does what work requires of people now leave them in a state which is unable to have the energy to contribute to society building? (and that stuff is better left to the professionals anyway?)

Anyway, something along those lines!

26 May 2010: Paul'sTopic (although he couldn't make it)

OK, we all have a week to form some opinions on this topic... (which is less ethereal than possibly some...)

A number of European countries/lawmakers (Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, etc.) have proposed/legislated that the burqa should be banned from public display. Is this an attack on religious belief, a liberation of oppressed women, a racist backlash again recent years Muslim terrorism or just politicians trying to draw peoples attention away from disappointing economic activity over the last couple of years?

So the conversation can head in a number of directions from there, but I think a couple of themes come though:

- Should religion have freedom to express itself in whatever it's forms?

- Should members of society be forced to have responsibilities as well as rights? What limits either way?

- Is this a particularly European issue because of lack of multiculturalism? (well beside other Europeans - but is Australia any different?)

Anyway, we'll start with that, and maybe see where it leads.

28 Apr 2010: Piers' Topic

Last time I chose a topic it was death. Now life's other painful inevitability - no, not taxes - love. According to all the spiritual traditions I know, Love has a central, if not the central place. But what kind of love? Surely not the intense, passing fever of romantic passion, even less it's pale cousin, infatuation. It seems an irony that something as notoriously fickle, treacherous and ephemeral as romantic love should share the same word as that which in the great religious traditions is supposed to be eternal, even synonymous with God. The Greeks did not confound such utterly disparate phenomena. They had several words for love: Eros, for passionate love, of which sexual love is one variety; Philia, for friendship and loyalty; Storge, for natural affection, especially within the family; and finally Agape, for deeper or true love, including selfless love, the spiritual love which we are supposed to strive for or live by in most (all?) religions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love.

But all these forms of love are related (I would argue), and one could make an argument that even the most shallow infatuation is an inferior or immature form of this one Love, that in infatuation we love the image of something we see through the window of the temporary object of our desire. For a moment we see Beauty, Passion and Transcendence incarnate in the form of some chick. Romantic love seems to be the way divine love reaches those of us who aren't saints. That is how it generally breaks through and wounds us.

Because love is the only way we get wounded. I challenge anyone to find a counter-example. Only physical pain seems to defy the rule that all pain comes from love, or in fact the failure and the loss of love. (Of course the formula requires a broad definition of love, including the self-love of egotism). Love hurts us either because we lose the object of love, or the object of love does not love us back, or loves us in some imperfect way. Initially when I was writing this I was thinking of love as an outgoing thing, the act of loving. But love is intrinsically two-way, at least the love that seems to matter most. We need the object of our love to love us back, sometimes to love us back in a very exact way. That is why we seek and seek for a love we never quite seem to find: because we love the idea of being loved in a certain very precise way, and any imperfection in that being-loved-ness is intolerable to us. S/he is not The One (how religious!).

Some psychologists would argue that is all about parental love - the quirks of our adult tastes and choices are expressions of the way we were loved or the way we failed to be loved by our parents, mainly of course our mother. But where does this passion for maternal love come from? How/why do these infantile wounds carry such intense stings? Like we come into the world naked and helpless and ready to have these invisible knives plunged into us, wounds from which we will continue to bleed our whole lives - at least if you buy that line of psychological theory. On a philosphophical/speculative note, if the infant's love and need for love is some reflection of divine Love, then does God also fail us in the same way mother inevitably does? Is Love itself flawed? (Again presupposing one is prepared to take a Platonic view of love - I mean the eternal forms idea, not platonic with a small 'p').

OK, this has gotten deep. I'll stop there. One other observation that is interesting: there seems something faintly embarrassing about the subject! Why is that? I have an idea, but am interested to hear what others think.

21 Jul 2010: Piers' Topic

Er... yeah. The topic. Is. Umm. The topic is... ! The topic is... OK the topic is: What is worth living for? No, I'm not suicidal. But I am curious as to what people feel about this, especially given our mix of metaphysical positions. What is worth living for if we accept that it's all fundamentally meaningless and random? Pleasure? Or is it in fact that nothing is worth living for as such, it's merely that as animals we are compelled to continue now that we're on the conveyor belt? So we contrive distractions to fill the time before we die, as I think Paul put it (words to that effect). Or if we believe in some greater spiritual or metaphysical context, then how do we honour that, and what makes our lives worth living in the context of that greater reality?

Right, you've got four and a half hours to solve that one. Free beer for the best answer (I'm included among the contestants and I'm the judge. No correspondence will be entered into and the judge's decision is final).

23 Mar 2010: Stephen's topic

OK – tomorrow it is then.

The topic for this month, continues to focus on the human subject and our fundamental frame of reference – that from which our mind, culture and reality arise – today we will examine the subjectivity/objectivity duality.

Why is it that when three people look at the same issue, we so often have such different responses?

What are the factors behind the differences? vantage point, history, habit, education, intelligence, discipline, personal agenda etc...

How does one work out whether they are being objective – what are the signs and techniques?

If we were to order our objectivity, what would be some of the things that we know most surely?

Is there an active struggle b/w the imagined world and the material world – which one is winning?

What do we value most between the countable, material imperfect world and the uncountable, unprovable but more idealised world - which is closer to god and which to the animals?

What are the means by which a man manages the material and imagined worlds? Dreams, expectations, biases, vs.realities of matter and realities of the crowd.

Sanity and Insanity – is sanity anything more than a label for the subjective consensus of the many and classic insanity the result of venturing too far out of the grid and losing grip in the free space?

And what of the dream conundrum – each day we pass from one reality into another, being neither conscious nor in control of the transformation – it reminds even the most materialistic of us that our senses are not built on solid rock.

That should keep us going for 90 minutes I’d reckon.

24 Feb 2010: Greg's topic

I think tonight’s the go as we can’t seem to organise? Let me know if that’s not the case.

Anyway I should introduce the topic. And that is money, or more specifically the current ‘fiat’ system.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about the current monetary system recently and have become more and more convinced that it is eventually doomed – one way or another and

· Can the current monetary system survive?

· If not, what are features that have caused it to fail?

· What alternatives are out there and how would they work? Could a close variant of the current system work with a few important changes, or

· Probably the scariest question is: if the monetary system has to be fundamentally changed, is it possible to do so in a controlled and (relatively) painless way? Even if it’s possible in theory, is it in possible in reality, taking political and social reality into account? In other words, are we facing a situation where the social organisation on which we rely will be thrown into chaos? Or is that over dramatising the situation?

· Should we spend all our money today, because saving it for the future is pointless? And where is that bottle of Grange I ordered?

I realise none of us are economists, so there is at least a chance we can have something sensible on the topic…

See you tonight so we can spend some.

12 Dec 2009: Piers' Topic

Tonight's topic is death. (But I never ate the salmon mousse!!)
I used to say - and genuinely believe - that I wasn't afraid of death. I wasn't afraid of it like I'm not afraid of the mafia, neutron bombs, cannibals and dragons. Of course you're not afraid of something that can't possibly affect you personally. Most of us go through a good proportion of our (younger) lives thinking of death in the abstract. It's only as age starts to bite that it takes on any kind of reality. Some writer (who was it?) said, "in the end everyone loses everything". That is death. You can lose everything slowly, by getting very old, in which case death is a letting go of the very last thing you have, your last tenuous hooks on life, or you can lose it all in one go, by hitting a tree at speed while micro-napping or some such. So death - loss - is really creeping into us the whole time. It's not really such a savage, impermeable boundary. We live with death, with our own death, every day. How do we accommodate it? What is our relationship with it? Those are just some preliminary reflections. You will have your own...

Paul, sorry you can't make it tonight. You can sit at home with your leg up and drink wine and think about death on your own... :)

28 Oct 2009: Stephen's topic Ethics of Community, Tribe and Family

Ethics of Community, Tribe and Family.

Society and the bonds between people is based on an interchange of some value between them.

Without some exchange we are merely incidental cohabitants of a mutual space – no obligation no expectation.

As participants in a relationship we are already inside an interchange dynamic.

Even to say ‘I have no expectations and expect you to have none of me’ is a positive position within the domain.

If one agrees with all this, to be social implies that we each, generally (as a personality default) and more specifically (within each of our relationships) bring an approach or set of ethics to bear on our actions and decisions, where other are involved.

So the question space is this:

What are the ethics that run your relationships?

Do we have a responsibility toward those around us to play according to some shared value or is it rather about each looking to the gain (personal or otherwise) of each individual circumstance?

If there is such a thing as responsibility and it is mutual, does expectation also have a place?

And the grand question – what is an ethical approach that leads to a great life – for you and for your tribe and family.

N.B.

The focus of this topic is ‘tribe and family’ - read friends and family.

Community is included only as a contextualiser for the other two as the conversation becomes too wide if we are also trying to analyse our global ethical position.

30 Sep 2009: Greg's topic

I’ve been reading about the teachings of the spiritual leader G. I. Gurdijeff.

One of Gurdijeff’s fundamental ideas is that of man as a machine, and a corresponding absence of unity in man. In this idea man doesn’t (and cannot) ‘do’ anything, rather things just happen based on external influences (machine like), without a will. Because of this, the ‘I’ changes rapidly depending on current external influences, leading to inconsistencies or ideas, broken promises, projects started but never completed, etc. The belief of most that there is a single (fairly) consistent ‘I’ is a myth.

However Gurdijeff also states that it’s possible, with sufficient and desire and sacrifice, to free oneself from this state – and a permanent and unchanging ‘I’ can be achieved with

So, the topic is to discuss the questions: Does man have an (even partially) consistent ‘I’? Do people change as rapidly as Gurdijeff supposes? Is it possible to achieve a permanent and unchanging ‘I’ if one doesn’t exist (or bring it to the surface if it is suppressed)?

5 Jun 2009: Stephens topic for full moon JD 2454990.25903.

How are you defined?

Your decisions both inform and are informed by who you are - but how do you make decisions?

Each time you are faced with an important decision you pass it through your own persona. This is inescapable.

Logic

Romance or

Recklessness

Caution

Naivete

Cynicism

Conformity

Rebellion

Integrity

Perversity

Altruism

Selfishness

Method

Madness

Reinvention

Continuity

Experimentation

Consolidation

All negotiable modes of a persona - each growing and recoiling , one against the other, organically as we evolve through our lifetimes.

But who are we and from where do we make decisions and take positions

Are we flexibly in control of our decisions or ruled by patterns and tendencies.

So, the question of the evening:

What is the relationship between what you are and the decisions you make?

Next Topic - Election and out democratic process

So, my topic for this Tuesday is the election (campaign I guess). In the past, I think I've been equally dismissive and cynical of both major parties. But somehow there was interest in certain importance policies, and in the result of the election itself. This time I'm struggling to find anything to spark an interest.

• Why is this being considered as the most boring, shallow and visionless election in living memory? I mean, previous ones weren't all that flash in my estimation. If so, what are the reasons, and is the process in a inevitable downward progression (and to what)?
• What that is saying about the health of our democratic and political processes?
• What can be done about it?
• Does it matter?

This will probably inevitably lead on to the discussion of alternative systems of societal organisation, though I would like to concentrate on the the future of the existing structure first - whether it needs changing at all, can it be tweaked rather than thrown out, and if changes are necessary what is a realistic process that could be undertaken to achieve that.

There is obviously plenty of relevance being written at the moment, but below are a few articles that discuss a number of issues. Interestingly the first two (part 1 and 2 of the same article) contend that we are the problem. The last article takes a different view.

Sorry about not getting the topic out sooner in accordance with the new two week window, I'll try better next time

Cheers,

Greg.

This is all your fault

by Bernard Keane

Yes, this election is rubbish, and it represents the lowest point in policy debate since, probably, 1980. Yes it’s boring, and visionless, and run by two parties that are entirely risk-averse and who have turned their backs on so much achieved by previous generations of leaders. Parties for whom a key campaign strategy is to explain to voters that they have no intention of carrying out reforms they have long insisted were crucial. But bad luck – it’s your fault. Politicians, and the media, and the business community all share responsibility for this dire state of affairs, but it’s voters themselves who have ultimately brought this about. Last week, even mainstream media journalists began complaining about how tedious the campaign was. Hitherto, their main complaints had been poor catering and a failure by the Labor campaign to give them sufficient access to Julia Gillard. Whenblogger Grog’s Gamut attacked the press packs accompanying the leaders for ignoring policy issues (reproduced below), it elicited a very defensive reaction from some journalists (Larvatus Prodeocovered the spat and the broader political ennui enveloping us all). The media indeed bears some culpability for not merely the dire state of this election campaign but the dire state of politics as a delivery for quality government and public policy. But it isn’t solely or evenly mainly to blame for it. The role of the media in relation to politics is best understood as akin to that of feeders, the parasites who encourage obese partners to grow larger to satisfy their psychological and fetishistic needs, creating a deeply unhealthy cycle of mutual dependence. The media exploits and encourages a flawed political culture, but they don’t create it or control it. That’s not to say there isn’t much left to be desired in mainstream media political coverage (let’s leave aside for the moment News Ltd’s anti-Labor campaigning, which extends to smearing Julia Gillard over her appearance, relationships and childlessness). Most journalists indeed fail to cover policy properly, but not because they’re lazy or obsessed with trivia or think their readers and viewers are idiots — to pick three of the criticisms routinely thrown around — but because they lack the specialist skills and the time. Few journalists have an economics background – and ultimately economics is at the heart of most government policy. Many, it appears, can’t count. More seriously, few have the time to invest in analysis of policy, as political bureaux are cut back. Instead, they rely for policy analysis on external “expert opinion” and therefore inevitably frame policy analysis as a debate and conflict. This leads to “he said-she said” journalism which offers an easy way out for time-pressed hacks, and in the case of the ABC is actually made obligatory by editorial guidelines as part of the national broadcaster’s unthinking and unreflective quest for “balance”. This isn’t just a recent phenomenon occasioned by the slow death of the print media. Commercial broadcasters have been cutting back on news and current affairs since the 1980s. Political coverage has slowly become niche journalism. And 24 hour news channels are not a substitute for the long-term diminution of mainstream current affairs. They rarely provide in-depth analysis, but offer instead talking-head commentary and commentary on commentary. In any event, they are only watched by political tragics anyway. All this makes media complaints about “spin” all the more ironic: the media needs spin, both from politicians and from external experts and observers, otherwise it would have to do the heavy lifting of actual analysis. Political coverage relies on spin and fills columns and airtime analyzing spin, discussing how the spin will be perceived: spin, messaging, propaganda as it used to be called, has become the primary material of the media cycle. The result is too much cynicism and not enough scepticism. The media not merely covers policy poorly, it covers it selectively. A remarkable feature of the last three years has been the ruthless assault on every claim advanced by the Government in relation to key policy issues such as emissions trading or the mining tax, while the claims of vested interests have been waved through and reported as fact with virtually no scrutiny. Much of this, true, is the product of News Ltd’s war on Labor. But it isn’t confined to the pages of The Australian, by any stretch. The Financial Review was one of the worst offenders in relation to the RSPT, and the ABC is now the sort of broadcaster where it is typical, rather than a matter worthy of remark, that an irrational and discredited a figure like Chris Monckton is given extensive and high-profile airtime. In this swirl of self-interest, credulity and inconsistency, the role of the business has unfortunately avoided scrutiny. Despite its frequent calls for economic reform, Australia’s corporate sector is one of the biggest impediments to it. It was amusing to read last Thursday in the Fin the demands of the “Business Coalition for Tax Reform” for “real reform” to be considered in the election. At the centre of those reform demands was a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate, to 25%. Again, we’ll put aside that the Government tried to pursue a proposal to cut company tax to 28%, and received exactly zero support from corporate Australia while foreign multinationals successfully intimidated Labor into abandoning it. Cutting the company tax rate to 25% would cost perhaps $8-10b a year. Did the BCTR, or any other of the business groups that support it, nominate what other taxes should rise to make up the shortfall? Did they nominate any area of expenditure that should be cut? And not just something generic like “government waste”, but actual programs where proposed cuts might upset people – lower school funding, fewer roads, fewer doctors and nurses, waiting longer to buy some new warplanes or frigates? No. This isn’t serious public policy debate. It has no more validity than the bloke at the bar bitching about taxes between beers. The corporate sector, despite calling for it, provides no support for the cause of real reform. In fact it provides the opposite: individual industries or sub-sectors that may lose as a consequence of reform know they can try to derail legitimate reform without opposition from, or criticism by, the rest of corporate Australia, although the latter reserve the right to then criticise politicians for failing to show leadership. But neither the media nor the business sector can take responsibility for the policy timidity and risk-averse nature of the current generation of politicians. That’s where we come in.

It's your fault (part two): politics sucks because you outsourced it Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: BERNARD KEANE ON THE FEDERAL ELECTION 2010, FEDERAL ELECTION 2010

We’re all familiar with one of the basic social changes of the last 50 years: we stopped joining things. In particular, we stopped joining political parties and other community organisations.

The memberships of political parties have collapsed and aged dramatically. The Liberal and Labor parties memberships are old; they’re retirement homes for people born in an age when joining a political party was still common, when being 'Labor' or 'Liberal' was akin to following a footy team. Even the Greens, who attract strong support from young voters, have a graying membership.

This has had the unforeseen consequence that we have progressively outsourced the business of running the country to a new class -- professional politicians. There have always been career politicians, of course. And political leaders had frequently worked within their parties before becoming MPs. But the hollowing out of political party memberships, the rise of branch-stacking (unthinkable in mass-membership parties), public funding per vote for political parties, the rise of the lobbying and consultancy industries and the remorseless growth of ministerial advisers drove the creation of a new political profession. It's one that has its own career ladder, from uni politics to researcher or adviser, to pre-selection, to ministry, to satisfying post-political career on government boards or as a lobbyist.

And being a politician is only one branch of this new governing class -- it includes ministerial advisers, PR and media advisers, lobbyists and appointees to advisory and government agency boards.

The 'professionalisation' of politics occurred in another way, as well. It became less an art and more a science, subject to careful measurement and quantification. Polling was the most obvious example, but the language of managerialism began entering politics as it also entered the public sector. Key performance indicators became important. If it couldn’t be quantified, it couldn’t be policy -- literally, as government moved to a budget framework that was expressed in Outcomes, Outputs and Performance Indicators.

The minimal differences between the major parties from the 1980s onwards accelerated this process, because ideology and key policy differences became harder to see as points of product differentiation.

In this new profession, boldness or vision equals risk, and risk is something to be managed and reduced, not embraced. Reform is only pursued when the political calculus says it should be -- that is, when it is popular or the losers aren’t powerful enough to threaten the government (think teachers). What seemed remarkable about the RSPT was that a complex, potentially risky reform, which had significant but diffused benefits across the entire community but one small and powerful group of losers, was adopted at all by a government that only ever played the percentages. As we learnt later, however, it wasn’t policy bravery that drove the decision, but a miscalculation about the government’s own capacity to effectively sell even the simplest, most transparently beneficial policy in the face of a well-resourced counter-campaign.

This was the same mistake the Howard government, which for its first two terms was a genuinely reforming government, had made with WorkChoices. You can bet that political professionals on both sides have learnt the lesson.

The void created by the absence of real reform, the lack of genuine ideological difference, by the inability to provide an authentic narrative of governmental progress, requires filling; thus the reliance on spin, on constant announcement and re-announcement of minor policies, each one inevitably oversold and overhyped, or declarations of war on minor social irritants intended to earn voters’ enthusiasm.

As the importance of 'messaging' has grown, so has the importance of ensuring the appearance of unanimity. This is why political journalism is increasingly a sterile exchange between a politician adhering rigidly to a pre-prepared set of talking points and a journalist trying to find the tiniest nuance on which to catch them out. This is amplified in an election context in which trigger-happy journalists are quick to declare a 'gaffe' or 'stumble' -- my favourite headline of the campaign so far belongs to the Australian Financial Review, which portrayed Gillard saying “Nauru” instead of “East Timor” as 'Gillard’s Nauru gaffe rocks asylum stance'.

This is why the seeming difference between the current generation of politicians and their 1980s forebears isn't just the nostalgia of middle-aged journalists who remember Paul Keating in his pomp, but reflective of a seachange in Australian politics toward a political culture that is risk-averse and indifferent to genuine reform outcomes. Labor led the way after losing power in 1996; the Liberals, held back by Howard's death-grip on the leadership, started from behind but under Tony Abbott are catching up quickly.

Gratifying the media has become the primary purpose of the professional politician, a purpose journalists are only too happy to encourage and adopt as the essential measure of political success. This is why the media and politicians have the mutual dependence of the feeder and his obese partner. Politicians have acquired a crippling self-enfeeblement driven by their dependence on the media, in whose interests it is for politics to remain in a permanent cycle of spin, conflict and commentary, while actual problems are never resolved (remember, nothing irks the mainstream media more than problems being solved).

In the end, though, maybe it's not the politicians who are stuck helpless and immobilised. They have business opportunities, lobbying positions, board directorships, advisory roles to move on to when they leave politics. It's us.

We've outsourced running the country because we're too busy. Too busy raising the kids and paying the mortgage and the school fees and working to afford that ever-bigger plasma telly. Too busy chasing our tails in the endless circle of aspirational consumption, all driven by the media which has a vested interest in keeping us convinced we always need to be consuming more.

But don't blame the media. That's just the parasite we allow to use us. The fault lies much closer to our oversized, over-stuffed homes, and our own learnt helplessness in the face of the system we've allowed to spring up around us.

The topic is cancer — the 2010 election and the collapse of political legitimacy

by Guy Rundle

So let’s recap … two months ago, several key factional (actually small, state-based gangs, formed, like the big C, around the most powerfully malignant cell) leaders in the ALP organised the deposition of a sitting Prime Minister who had beaten John Howard, because a series of polls suggested that their primary vote was too low to guarantee victory, especially in key outer-suburban seats. The sub-factional heavies acted swiftly, at least in part, to head off News Ltd’s obvious destabilisation campaign spruiking Julia Gillard — even though said heavies may have been leaking stuff to the papers to aid this campaign, because Kevin Rudd swore at them. Having replaced the leader of the country in a few hours of meetings in offices away from the public gaze, said heavies then went immediately into an election based on a selling point of stability through incumbency, made an obvious lie about their capitulation to the mining industry, then having failed to go on the offensive and put the Coalition on the back foot over WorkChoices, opposing the stimulus, and hungrily eyeing a carve-up of Medicare, spent the first two weeks losing ground to the Coalition, proposing disconnected gimmicks such as the citizens assembly on climate change (remember that? A week is a long time in politics) and then relaunching her campaign by saying that the real her hadn’t even been present since the poll was called. Now a fortnight later, with Tony Abbott having survived an appearance on Red Faces, an off-colour “no doesn’t mean no” reference, the leader of the Opposition is appearing next to so many babies that if he opened a petting zoo, the dingo standing beside him would have one in its mouth, and simultaneously selling a combination of the Pacific solution “from day one”, scaling back the stimulus without creating unemployment, and pushing a business-tax funded parental leave plan of near-Scandinavian generosity while rolling back the nanny state. At this point, Abbott refused to accept the challenge by Gillard of a second debate that she’d earlier refused to have, while the factional heavies got Kevin Rudd (a character killed off in an earlier chapter) back in to save the election, while simultaneously sorting out the numbers to decide the next leader of the Opposition. The fake Andrew Bolt, who does a satire blog in the Herald Sun, threatened legal action against the real Andrew Bolt, a twitterer, and, as far as I can tell, then removed that entry from his blog, after 30 “Andrew Bolt” twitter accounts flowered in a day. Then chorus of horror at what a vacuous anti-election this had become was then joined by of all people Paul Kelly saying — Paul effin Kelly saying — that the politics of the major parties were too sameish and devoid of ideas. Finally, Tony Abbott launched the Coalition campaign by claiming that having a family made you a conservative. Have I got that right? I mean have I got that right? Cos I don’t know how the election looks from over there, but from over here — at a cafe in the shadow of Seville Cathedral, admiring the Islamic tile work on the walls of the Alcazar palace, while sharing a half-bottle of amontillado with a young woman who has never seen Andalusia before — it looks like sh-t. Beyond sh-t. Meta-sh-t. M’esteemed colleague Dr Bahnisch asked why, given so many people think this election is boring, what with all the hi-jinks and pile in of ex-PMs (what a pity Billy McMahon couldn’t be persuaded to say a few words. Could son Julian McMahon be persuaded to deputise in his place? Again?). The answer is because boredom arises not from a lack of activity, but from a lack of meaningful activity. This election is boring in the way other people’s recounted dreams are boring — because the disconnect between a genuine public political process, and what is going on now, is so total that anything can now follow from anything, and none of it presents a real case about how we should organise things, how we should live our lives, which is what politics is meant to be about. How the hell did it get to this point? A point where everyone is throwing up their hands in exasperation at a farcical, self-parodic process, while simultaneously serving it at every moment? Was it the Labor Party? The factional leaders? The sub-factional sub-leaders? The media? The system? The establishment? The man? That woman? Or, as m’colleague Keane suggests, youse*? The answer, I think, is all of these and more, except youse, in some strict sense. From multiple separate sources, Australian democracy is in a pretty low state, but much of the breast-beating is a ritualised way of offering obeisance while continuing with business as usual, and short on analysis. It might be worth looking at the array of forces with a little more dispassion. Australia entered this election campaign after the dumping of a centre-right Labor leader, busy applying a series of reforms in a fairly elitist, managerial top-down way. The reforms were overwhelmingly directed to tackling the increasing inequality that has become entrenched in Australia over past decades, and the systemic shift of public to private share of the economy. The Opposition that faced that government had been divided along moderate/hard-right lines burning through three leaders before hitting someone whom many in the party saw as a slightly demented religious neurotic. Prompted by bad polling, by destabilising reports of leadership contention, the factional leaders replaced the Prime Minister without a vote — and then went to an election with nothing. Zip. Bupkis. No narrative, no argument, no story to tell, nothing to project — save, of course, for the incumbency of a Prime Minister in the job for a month. The gap allowed the Opposition — which had no story, and less than a full slate of candidates — to cobble one together, and go on the attack, with some success. Labor responded with a series of disconnected initiatives that I hope to God were conceived in panic, because if they were planned then Labor is barely competent to drool. The press, led by a near-psychotically biased News Ltd stable fastened on these marginal pitches like cats playing with a bottle-top mobile, when they weren’t obsessing on Rudd, rivalry, and earlobes, at which point they were like dogs truffling their own scrotes. This bedlam is surrounded by a wider funk among the general public — a mix of dissatisfaction without an object, fear of specific groups, a desire for real action on some things such as climate change, with a simultaneous wariness of larger schemes, or anything out of the order of things, such as a financial stimulus. Institutionally, there is a comprehensive split between Australian political institutions and the more or less autonomous way they reproduce — two major parties, supported by taxpayers and exhaustive preferential voting, undergirded by compulsory voting — on the one hand, and the general public on the other. Living in an increasingly atomised society with a paucity of intermediary institutions that connect people to politics, they have more of a jaundiced attitude to politicians as a class than just about anywhere in the Western world, while the political class return the favour with a contemptuous attitude to them as a focus-grouped perennially polled lumpen-sample-tariat. Bad political systems can be overcome by passionate parties representing a public will, in the absence of a pluralist and active debate; and a society with a public connected to a vigorous pluralist debate can overcome sclerotic parties. Australia is in the invidious position of having all three — atomised social life is intersecting with a shallow and unreflective mainstream media (where it is not so biased and disinformational as to be malign), and both are intersecting with a set of political structures designed in the 1920s to set up both major parties as quasi-state apparatuses. Given that the process is a circle, one can start anywhere. But let’s start with the parties. There’s no real mystery as to why the only group that is operating like a genuine party is the Greens — with a large and active membership, a clear philosophy that generates a program with a meaningful set of priorities. Labor and Liberal used to be like that too. How did they drift away from anything resembling a core philosophy? For the Liberals, it was external factors — the Cold War held a contradictory philosophy of liberalism and conservatism together. As post-Cold War, globalised neoliberalism started in earnest, John Howard evolved a reasonably sophisticated version of this — a state-enforced social conservatism was necessary precisely because the forces of capitalism being unleashed were so atomising. The contradiction was the selling point. The trouble with this formula is that it doesn’t work for long, because the process just keeps on going — the GFC, climate change, cultural shifts. A liberal-conservative party in this period really needs to rethink what its position is on how the market interacts with wider social life. It hasn’t done that so instead it offers a grab-bag-chest-thumping xenophobia on boats, Swedish-style parental leave mixed with commitments to tax cuts and surplus. It doesn’t begin to make sense. But it just needs to give the impression that it can all be held together. Labor has a different problem. It abandoned its role of having a critical relationship to social process in the 1970s, and saw itself as managing the independent process of capitalism with a bit of re-direction in the Hawke/Keating years. What exchange there was between a wider world of ideas and programs (as opposed to mere policies) began to fall away in that period. This was the worst possible time for that to happen, not because of Labor’s failures, but because of its success. Having established itself a century earlier to achieve, among other things, a certain standard of living, it had to a degree by the 1990s achieved that, albeit in a fairly limited partial way. Unable to push those gains further as a majority program (creating Medibank/Medicare in the ’70s/’80s was for all Australians, helping the long-term unemployed uses the taxes of the minority for a majority), it simply stopped thinking about what a new and more expansive majority program might be. Having embraced the essentially anti-humanist ideal of neoliberalism — that people are nothing other than homo economicus —  it lost touch with the more expansive ideal that undergirds any progressive party, the ideal that people are more than a labour supply, a working class, a consumer group, whatever. Had it retained that idea, Labor would have been talking more aggressively for years now, about quality of life in an expanded sense — in terms of a more flexible and varied relationship to work, of a wider variety of housing options, of transformed cities and the like. It would have presented Abbott’s parental leave scheme as its own years ago, and with a more expanded remit of leave and care options. It would be in the business of changing what Australians think of as what falls under the scope of being changeable, transformable, improvable. The licensed cynics on the Right could argue that this is “elitist”. The plain fact is that progressive parties are always in the position of being “elitist”, if by that we mean challenging their own base and the wider population to want a better sort of life in ways that cannot be achieved through the cash nexus. It challenges people to be dissatisfied with things as they are, to reconceptualise them as changeable, and to aim for more. Within the Labor Party, the Right tend to snort with contempt whenever any such suggestions are made. But quite aside from the actual point itself of making life better, there is the political point . When Labor stops doing this, when it stops taking on the big challenges, when it stops talking about society, life, etc, as projects to be grasped whole — then it simply runs out of things to talk about. With the exception of the brief interregnum of Mark Latham — who genuinely did have transformative ideas despite his manifold faults now flagrantly on display — Labor has had zero ideas for a decade, to such a degree that Kevin Rudd’s very mild program looked like the Great Leap Forward by comparison. And that’s the point we have reached — where every morning Labor hacks pull micro-policies out of their a-se, along with the gruffnuts, to placate nine Hillsongers in Gunnamatta. Why such a failure of ideas, especially on the Labor side? One could blame the sclerotic structures of Labor, the choking off any means other than lifelong sub-sub-factions or fronting Midnight Oil to make it to a position of some power, the creation of a monoculture of hacks? It’s partly that, but if there was a real groundswell of people with new ideas and demands, they would be banging at the door with such force that even the factional powers-that-be could not hold them down. In that respect, one has to look at the systematic and relentless narrowing of debate in the large-scale mainstream media — in News Ltd, simply by turning the organisation into a right-wing propaganda machine of immense obviousness and crudity, and at Fairfax by largely dispensing with any sort of space for bigger ideas altogether — save for the moral panics of the SMH’s enormous roster of right-wing columnists. With honourable exceptions, Fairfax has become a wasteland of blah economic comment within a narrow range of options, tedious political handicapping, and then a sprinkling of articles, in The Ageprimarily, that sound as if they came from a community services regional office social work newsletter. With the gradual shaving down, or closing down altogether, of sections that once had space for essays and longer pieces, with op-ed pages that never connect to a broader spectrum of intellectual and political history, the wider intellectual framework within which a more imaginative politics might evolve, is greatly diminished. There is also the lack of a mid-level political-intellectual hinterland — with no weeklies of the order such as The Nation or the National Review in the US, and the only large-scale monthly, The Monthly, having turned out to be a timid and trailing exercise in colour-supplement reportage, and rather foolish as it turned out, Ruddolatry. Some of this is simply a matter of economies of scale, but that excuse can be over used. These newspapers used to be better, both in quality, and, in News Ltd’s case, in terms of basic moral integrity. Australia used to have a range of mid-level publications — larger than the small magazines, smaller than the papers, that provided part of the conveyor-belt by which a continuous process of renovation was made possible. Paul Kelly’s lament is ridiculous because, he as much as anyone, has been a key driver in making Australian political debate a narrowly focused discussion of methods for a series of unquestioned and undebated ends, a society measured solely by growth, and with the common good defined largely by corporate interest. To suddenly turn around and complain about the wasteland he helped create is either supremely obtuse or a bit bloody rich. A lot of editors of such publications know this — they complain about proprietors, boards, and overwhelmingly of a lack of audience for such material. Fair enough. There’s some truth in that. But was that ever not so? Hasn’t it always been the case that a newspaper or magazine that believed itself to be doing something important, would try and push its readers to think more broadly, more widely, than political writing more appropriate to either covering the greyhounds, or Paris Hilton? One of the reasons that the famed Age editor Graeme Perkin is periodically feted with a praise so excessive that it approaches ancestor worship, is that everyone is doing the precise opposite of what he was trying to do with The Age — and paying obeisance to his shade is a way of assuaging the guilt about publishing the nine-hundredth piece about S-x and The City, or some obvious 2000-word analysis of what Albo said to Ludwig, according to blah blah. Has the liberal middle audience collapsed to such a degree that more intelligent writing about life and society can no longer be sustained? If it has, then it is because of the third part of the puzzle, the last element in the circle — the atomisation of public life, the alienation of anything resembling the political, from most people’s conception of their own lives. In the 1920s in Australia, a debate on control of banking between a socialist and a distributist could easily attract 500 people. In the 1940s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the NCC could sell in the tens of thousands. Into the ’70s and ’80s, the Nation Review and the National Times could push the envelope. Despite ever higher levels of education and literacy, that realm has substantially, though not totally, disappeared (indeed, this publication is one of its examples). Here we come back to Bernard Keane’s lament that blame for the sorry state of Australian politics lies with the public. I sympathise with his frustration, but when you start blaming the people (and demanding that they be deposed and a new people installed, so the Party will not be let down), then it’s a fair bet that you’re barking up the wrong decision-tree. Far better to try and analyse what has occurred, why at some point, a decisive gap developed between political process and mass social life — developed, and then became a yawning chasm. Twenty years ago, we — or the political elites — made a decision to shift the centre of gravity from public to private life, in a whole range of areas, from social expenditure, to pensions, to the question of work hours and wages, in every conceivable field. That is, of course, but of a larger global process — and one, to a degree beyond the control of individual governments — but we really ram-rodded it here, off a fairly collective base. The result has been a certain type of society in which both the space for public life, and the means by which people without much social power could project themselves into it, has been diminished. Where in the 1980s we were talking — briefly — of the 35-hour week, we are now heading towards the 48-hour week (and two salaries, to afford a house), performed by people living in spec-built suburbs with little amenity, in under-serviced cities, and in conditions of diminishing, not increasing, social mobility for themselves and their children. In these circumstances, the private choice — the cable TV, the McMansion, the retreat to the home space and to the defiant, antinomian cry (much heard in the UK election) “I don’t do politics” — becomes overdetermined, becomes the only real choice there is. Yet even as people pursue their lives in the wilderness of plasmas, they are privy to a never-ending cascade of information informing them that a) the current way of life is politically, economically, and ecologically unsustainable and b) the gap between their lives and the levers of power is so huge there’s bugger all they an do about it in the current framework. Those things that need a public sphere in order to exist — such as the res publica, and a genuinely pluralist media — lapse into a non-democratic condition, the res publica as the realm of a caste of political professionals, the media as driven by cynical and self-defeating idea of “content delivery”. The parties narrow down to a core of pollsters and heavies, the public is further alienated, they become less interested in anything in the media which might be a little more expansive, which means the media stops challenging the parties, who then become yet more … and round it goes. To blame the public for the changed conditions of their life, and the way that earlier decisions by an elite shaped their lives, is to finger the victim, not the culprit. A series of cave-ins, ducked battles, and soft options by the people who controlled parties, papers and powers, and a refusal to stand up to the genuinely malign, has brought us to this point. It seems distinctive in the world — there is a collapse of political legitimacy everywhere, but only in Australia have I seen this degree of total exasperation and frustration, combined with an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way. The topic is cancer, indeed.