Pomophobia

There's an interesting footnote to Australia's culture wars happening in the Australian today.

A couple of academics have written a book arguing that Howard's brand of 'conservatism' actually incorporates some elements of postmodernism, such as social constructivism:

Howard's battler, melded from largely left-wing folk stories, but with the anti-imperialist strain omitted to suit Howard's vision, is a classic example of such social constructivism. (source)

Cue predictable gnashing of teeth from the right.

Casuistry

Welfare and related industries in Australia routinely shaft their employees, in terms of pay, workload and working conditions, and occupational health and safety. There are many reasons why I think this occurs, and I may save those for a later post. There are also reasons why I think such workers constitute a kind of proletariat, despite this term traditionally being associated with workers on the factory floor.

In any case, Jesuit Social Services have apparently victimised a union and OHS rep, a matter you can read about here. The most 'progressive' or radical thing that all workers can do is to seek more control in the workplace. To that end, union reps and OHS reps are essential, and it is vital that they be permitted to do their work. For a worker in a 'caring profession', protecting oneself and one's colleagues is every bit as important as assisting one's 'clients'. It is disgraceful that a purportedly Catholic service believes otherwise.

The Bias Police

The Australian Senate has just completed its report on allegations of radical leftist bias in universities:


The committee heard from the Liberal Students' organisation Make Australia
Fair a description of the link between the radical philosophies and teaching practices
in vogue in university education faculties and schools of education, and the likely
application of those ideas in the classroom. Make Australia Fair tabled a 'dossier'
listing academics in education faculties who, it was claimed, share a commitment to
radical activism and who view politics and education to be' different perspectives of
the same reality'. They quoted from another submission to this inquiry to describe
activist methods of teaching as a:

… radical orthodoxy is composed to an almost slavish adherence to various
theories and political commitments associated with neo-Marxism,
postmodernism, deconstructionism, the theories of Michel Foucault, poststructuralism,
discourse theory, feminism, neo-Rousseauianism, radical
environmentalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and related
ideologies.

3.29 Make Australia Fair argued that where ideological activism is entrenched in
the academia of education faculties, there is crossover into school teaching. 'After all,
universities provide the theoretical underpinning for school curricula and teaching and
training of future school teachers.'

3.30 The committee has no way of assessing the veracity of this claim, particularly
in regard to what is taught to B.Ed and other trainee teachers, but it suspects that it is
wildly exaggerated. Such content would be beyond the comprehension of many
students for whom it would have no practical use. Such comments as these neither
enlighten the committee nor persuade it of a case to be made. Indeed, the committee
believes that the case That Make Australia Fair makes for the existence of a leftist
conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical.

Farcical indeed. Having spent many years - too many, if truth be told - in tertiary institutions, I've seen little evidence of systematic political bias. Academics, like everybody else, do fall victim to fashionable trends, but these trends are not necessarily political, and, if political, are not necessarily related to the 'activist' left.

Indeed, academia is inherently conservative, for most academics are busily defending the status quo that constitutes their little theoretical patch. When students come armed with new approaches that challenge dominant paradigms, they face a far greater burden of proof than those students who merely repeat accepted disciplinary truisms. Throwing down the gauntlet to a large body of work within a paradigm, or challenging academic consensus on a particular topic is always much more difficult than simply taking the line of least resistance, and conservatively endorsing the opinions of one's lecturers.

Now, when will the bias police be called off the ABC?

Lazy blogging

Uncle Noam has a bit to say on the president-elect:

By usual indicators, the opposition party should have had a landslide victory during a severe economic crisis, after eight years of disastrous policies on all fronts including the worst record on job growth of any post-war president and a rare decline in median wealth, an incumbent so unpopular that his own party had to disavow him, and a dramatic collapse in US standing in world opinion. The Democrats did win, barely. If the financial crisis had been slightly delayed, they might not have.

You can find the article here.

Hiatus

This blog will be doing very little for the next three months, as I'll be doing some travel.
Whilst I won't be writing very much, I will be checking in frequently, and keeping an eye on other people's blogs whenever possible. Please feel free to continue leaving comments/suggestions/witty abuse in the comments, or at my email address, the_happy_revolutionaryAThotmail.com

The Myth of Prosperity

Almost a month ago, I wrote briefly of the need for the environmental movement to be united with workers' movements, particularly in the current context of possible economic downturn. Lo and behold, like Piers Akerman at a table of hors d'oeuvres, I have a fanatic repeatedly popping up at my blog. This fanatic is thrashing about like a fish out of water, gasping for air, and claiming to have 'pwned' me.
The said fanatic claims that the past few years, namely, the Howard years, could not possibly be viewed as anything but prosperous. This narrative is pretty common, particularly in the News Ltd cheersquad. So we see a series of fairly blunt statements in the comments thread, as follows:

[L]iving standards in Australia will continue to rise. If they fall, it will be due to a Greens-model carbon trading scheme.

Inflation isn't that high, particularly when compares to rising wages. As I pointed out on my blog recently, Australians tend to be a bunch of whiners when it comes to prices.

Like most lefties, your economic illiteracy speaks volumes. Go read about 'real growth' over at Wikipedia.


Whiners, eh?

Any discussion of wage rises and 'real growth' ought really to make mention of a well-established fact, namely, that Australians work a very high number of hours compared to other countries; the 40-hour working week is 'dead'. Furthermore, Australia's labour force has become casualised (a whopping 1 in 3 workers are employed as casuals), meaning that more Australian households suffer from uncertainty in terms of future income, as well as no sick or recreational leave, and difficulties in securing credit.

With this in mind, there are two areas I'd like to touch on where the prosperity narrative has been clearly undermined, to all but the most ardent of true believers.

Firstly, as a result of a number of factors, we have seen the emergence of widespread 'mortgage stress'. This latter notion is determined by the number of households for whom 30-35% of income is spent on mortgage repayments.

In 2001, the term mortgage stress applied to about 1 in 10 Australians. According to the ABS, in 2007, this figure was 47% for Australians below the median wage of about $53,000. Or take this (June 2008) article, for instance:

‘The number of households struggling to meet mortgage repayments jumped 15% to 784,000 in May and is likely to reach 923,000 by September, Martin North, head of Fujitsu Consulting, predicted.’


This is in the context of broader economic difficulties for Australians:

‘…The new figures were released as the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that household wealth fell by 15%, or $7500 per person, in the three months to March and the debt-to-asset ratio surged to a record 138%.

"The ratio shows that households do not have sufficient readily liquid assets to cover outstanding debt, highlighting a degree of vulnerability to an economic downturn," said Craig James, CommSec's chief equities economist.’

As one can see, 'prosperity' has been selective in terms of who has received its blessings. Despite Australia's much-vaunted growth during the Howard years, and despite rising wages, many Australians, particularly the most vulnerable, are clearly and significantly disadvantage by the cost of housing.

In addition to increased mortgage stress during the allegedly prosperous years, poverty has also increased. Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Australians living in poverty rose from 7.6% to 9.9% of the population. If a lower threshold is used to define 'poverty' (i.e. if it is defined as living on 60% of the median income), then poverty levels increased from 15.9% in 1994 to 20.4% in 2004, a clear indicator of growing inequality in both relative terms. In absolute terms, Australia's most poverty stricken and vulnerable have been demonised by the Howard government, and their financial lot has not improved.

Despite calls by Rudd for 'wage restraint', and the hand-wringing of the business community, the modest rise in wages for Australia's lowest-paid workers are insufficient to lift anybody out of poverty, particularly given that recent wage increases were below the rate of inflation (i.e. constituted a wage decrease in 'real' terms). This article also contains many useful references on this topic.

In sum, let the fanatics bray with fawning imbecility for 'fiscal conservatism' and Howard. Mortgage stress and rising poverty undermine their thesis, and this is before we have examined inflation, and the soaring cost of fuel and food. Whiners, indeed.

Hayek versus Brezhnev

The libertarians picked up on a recent speech by Rudd, in which he had the temerity to question one of the foremost 'philosophers' of liberalism:

We simply don’t have to choose between Hayek and (former Soviet president Leonid) Brezhnev,” Mr Rudd said.

Of course, the Russians had a poll last year to assess which leader (of the past century) was the best, and which was the preferred era in which to live. The Hayekians might have hypothesised that free market, anti-communist, fire salesman Yeltsin would have got over the line. On the contrary, he was overwhelmingly trounced in popularity by Brezhnev (preferred by 31% as opposed to Yelstin's 1%). Hell, even Stalin got 6%.