The horror and undeniable cruelty of the Madrid bombings are taking time to sink in. Is it because we have become immune since 9/11 to scenes of chaos associated with hate-driven political terrorism? I don’t want to know whether we are becoming immune to the television images.

What may be the lessons from the latest outrage?

Is it that governments and peoples should fear the wrath of so-called theocrats who would enslave women, stone gays and render ineffectual any semblance of liberal democracy? Should we shape our international policies, our defence stance or alter our values to take into account the hatred and unbridled violence of a few?

Spain is in mourning. Yet it is the very picture of a progressive liberal democratic society, re-fashioned after decades of fascist rule by anti-communist Franco and his cronies. No massive human rights problems, a successful war against separatist regional terrorists, a society that promotes the social values of the united Europe so many of the Left applaud.

Yet is was a target for hate.

A Socialist government is in the making.

What does modern socialism mean to those that recognise the sterility of the Stalin excesses and the abject failure of planned economies in this globalised world? It should mean a social democratic regime prepared to do what is needed to fight the medieval intolerance of those prepared to make everyday citizens pay for alleged crimes.

This is not, I hope and pray, a war based on a clash of civilisations or creeds or race. This should be a struggle between modern international liberalism, with its focus on human rights, and despotic fanaticism of the most extreme kind.

Playing a role in the war against terror is no different to merely being a liberal democratic society. The fanatics appear to hate us for who we are not what we do.

The real question for the Left is not how we destroy the Bush/Howard/Blair neo-cons. This is a convenient smokescreen for those seeking power or a change of policy. The more troubling and challenging question is how do we in the West, from left to right on the old spectrum, respond to a threat to our very existence?

Do we kowtow to terrorism from this source, fuelled by poorly structured religious arguments, or do we make a concerted effort to defeat a threat to liberalism. If the Left make common cause with the Right on this campaign, they will no doubt have ample opportunity of winning the peace afterwards.

Conservatives like myself, liberals, progressive environmentalists and old style social democrats have one thing in common: a belief in a secular liberal democratic state underpinned by emerging global human rights standards. This is too precious a modern achievement to be lost by infighting or appeasement of aggressors.

The war on Terror is just too important to lose whilst we debate the high moral ground.

Spain is the first nation to sack a pro-war leader. Professor Gabriel Kolko gave me permission to publish this analysis.

The American elections, the future of alliances and the lessons of Spain

by Gabriel Kolko

The author is a leading historian of modern warfare. He wrote ‘Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914″ and, in 2002, ‘Another Century of War?’

We are now experiencing fundamental changes in the international system whose implications and consequences may ultimately be as far-reaching as the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

The United States’ strength, to a crucial extent, has rested on its ability to convince other nations that it was to their vital interests to see America prevail in its global role. But the scope and ultimate consequences of its world mission, including its extraordinarily vague doctrine of “preemptive wars,” is today far more dangerous and open-ended than when Communism existed. Enemies have disappeared and new ones – many once former allies and even congenial friends – have taken their places. The United States, to a degree to which it is itself uncertain, needs alliances, but these allies will be bound into uncritical “coalitions of the willing.”

But the events in Spain over the past days, from the massive deadly explosions in Madrid to the defeat of the ruling party because it supported the Iraq war despite overwhelming public opposition to doing so, have greatly raised the costs to its allies of following Washington’s lead.

So long as the future is to a large degree – to paraphrase Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – “unknowable,” it is not to the national interest of its traditional allies to perpetuate the relationships created from 1945 to 1990. The Bush Administration, through ineptness and a vague ideology of American power that acknowledges no limits on its global ambitions, and a preference for unilateralist initiatives which discounts consultations with its friends much less the United Nations, has seriously eroded the alliance system upon which U. S. foreign policy from 1947 onwards was based. With the proliferation of all sorts of destructive weaponry, the world will become increasingly dangerous.

If Bush is reelected then the international order may be very different in 2008 than it is today, much less in 1999, but there is no reason to believe that objective assessments of the costs and consequences of its actions will significantly alter American foreign policy priorities over the next four years.

If the Democrats win they will attempt in the name of internationalism to reconstruct the alliance system as it existed before the Yugoslav war of 1999, when even the Clinton Administration turned against the veto powers built into the NATO system. America’s power to act on the world scene would therefore be greater. Kerry voted for many of Bush’s key foreign and domestic measures and he is, at best, an indifferent candidate. His statements and interviews over the past weeks dealing with foreign affairs have been both vague and incoherent. Kerry is neither articulate nor impressive as a candidate or as someone who is likely to formulate an alternative to Bush’s foreign and defense policies, which have much more in common with Clinton’s than they have differences. To be critical of Bush is scarcely justification for wishful thinking about Kerry. Since 1947, the foreign policies of the Democrats and Republicans have been essentially consensual on crucial issues – “bipartisan” as both parties phrase it – but they often utilise quite different rhetoric.

Critics of the existing foreign or domestic order will not take over Washington this November. As dangerous as it is, Bush’s reelection may be a lesser evil because he is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe that the worse the better but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush’s mandate.

Bush’s policies have managed to alienate, in varying degrees, innumerable nations, and even its firmest allies – such as Britain, Australia, and Canada – are being required to ask if giving Washington a blank check is to their national interest or if it undermines the tenure of parties in power. Foreign affairs, as the terrorism in Madrid has so dramatically shown, are too important to simply endorse American policies. Not only the parties in power can pay dearly for it; more important are the innumerable victims among the people.

Germany has already called for European Union action to prevent repetitions of the Madrid catastrophe but nations that have supported the Iraq war enthusiastically, particularly Great Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands, have made their populations especially vulnerable to terrorism, and they now have the expensive responsibility of protecting them – if they can.

The way the war in Iraq was justified compelled France and Germany to become far more independent, much earlier, than they had intended, and NATO’s future role is now questioned in a way that was inconceivable two years ago. Europe’s future defense arrangements are today an open question but there will be some sort of European military force independent of NATO and American control.

Germany, with French support, strongly opposes the Bush doctrine of preemption. Tony Blair, however much he intends acting as a proxy for the U.S. on military questions, must return Britain to the European project, and his willingness since late 2003 to emphasise his nation’s role in Europe reflects political necessities. To do otherwise is to alienate his increasingly powerful neighbors and risk losing elections. His domestic credibility is already at its nadir due to his slavish support for the war in Iraq.

In a word, politicians who place America’s imperious demands over national interest have less future than those who are responsive to domestic opinion and needs. The tragedy in Madrid and the defeat of the ruling party in last Sunday’s Spanish election is a warning that no politician in or out of power will ignore.

This process of alienating traditional close friends is best seen in Australia, but in different ways and for quite distinctive reasons it is also true elsewhere – especially Canada and Mexico, the U.S.’ two neighbors. In the case of Australia, Washington is willing to allow it to do the onerous chores of policing the vast South Pacific and even take greater initiatives, at least to a point, on Indonesia.

But the Bush Administration passed along to it false intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, which many of Australia’s own experts disputed, and Bush even telephoned Prime Minister John Howard to convince him to support America’s efforts in innumerable ways. As Alexander Downer, the foreign minister, admitted earlier this month, “it wasn’t a time in our history to have a great and historic breach with the United States,” and the desire to preserve the alliance became paramount. But true alliances are based on consultation and an element of reciprocity is possible, and the Bush Administration prefers “coalitions of the willing” that raise no substantive questions about American actions – in effect, a blank check. Giving it produced strong criticism of the Howard government’s reliance on Washington’s false information on WMD and it has been compelled to endorse a joint parliamentary committee to investigate the intelligence system – sure to play into opposition hands this election year.

Even more dangerous, the Bush Administration has managed to turn what was in the mid-1990s a blossoming cordial friendship with the former Soviet Union into an increasingly tense relationship. Despite a 1997 non-binding American pledge not to station substantial numbers of combat troops in the territories of new members, Washington plans to extend NATO to Russia’s very borders–Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania especially concern Moscow – and it is in the process of establishing a vague number of bases in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Russia has stated that the U.S. encircling it warrants its retaining and modernizing its nuclear arsenal – to remain a military superpower – that will be more than a match for the increasingly expensive and ambitious missile defense system the Pentagon is now building. It has over 4,600 strategic nuclear warheads and over 1,000 ballistic missiles to deliver them. Last month Russia threatened to pull out of the crucial Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which has yet to enter into force, because it regards America’s ambitions in the former Soviet bloc as provocation.

“I would like to remind the representatives of [NATO],” Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told a security conference in Munich last February, “that with its expansion they are beginning to operate in the zone of vitally important interests of our country.”

The question Washington’s allies will ask themselves is whether their traditional alliances have far more risks than benefits – and if they are necessary.

In the case of China, Bush’s key advisers were publicly committed to constraining its burgeoning military and geopolitical power the moment they took office. But China’s military budget is growing rapidly – 12 percent this coming year – and the European Union wants to lift its 15-year old arms embargo and get a share of the enticingly large market. The Bush Administration, of course, is strongly resisting any relaxation of the export ban. Establishing bases on China’s western borders is the logic of its ambitions.

The United States is not so much engaged in “power projection” against an amorphously defined terrorism by installing bases in small or weak Eastern European and Central Asian nations as again confronting Russia and China in an open-ended context which may have profound and protracted consequences neither America’s allies nor its own people have any interest or inclination to support. Even some Pentagon analysts have warned against this strategy because any American attempt to save failed states in the Caucasus or Central Asia, implicit in its new obligations, will risk exhausting what are ultimately its finite military resources.

There is no way to predict what emergencies will arise or what these commitments entail, either for the U. S. or its allies, not the least because – as Iraq proved last year and Vietnam long before it – its intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of possible enemies against which it is ready to preempt is so completely faulty.

Without accurate information a state can believe and do anything, and this is the predicament the Bush Administration’s allies are in. It is simply not to their national interest, much less to their political interests or the security of their people, to pursue foreign policies based on a blind, uncritical acceptance of fictions or flamboyant adventurism premised on false premises and information. It is far too open-ended both in terms of time and political costs.

If Bush is reelected, America’s allies and friends will have to confront such stark choices, a painful process that will redefine and perhaps shatter existing alliances. Independent, realistic foreign policies are likely to be the outcome, and the dramatic events in Spain over the past days have reinforced this probability.

But America will be more prudent and the world will be far safer only if the Bush Administration is constrained by a lack of allies and isolated.

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Scott Burchill recommends the Washington Post’s Al Qaeda Implicated In Madrid Bombings. Antony Loewenstein recommends MEMRI for a translation of and commentary on the Al Qaeda statement of responsibility. Webdiary’s conservative columnist Noel Hadjimichael comments in Appeasement or action: the lessons from Madrid.

The British people just released from Guantanamo Bay tell their stories to The Guardian at Revealed: the full story of the Guantanamo Britons.

Antony also recommends Robert Fisk on the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq at Happy first birthday, war on Iraq. In case you’ve missed it, the expose by former American defence analyst Karen Kwiatkowski on the dirty ‘intelligence’ tricks used to convince the American people to invade Iraq is a must read. See The New Pentagon Papers.

American actor and anti-war campaigner Tim Robbins (star of the movie Bob Roberts, well worth a viewing before the American presidential campaign gets really down and dirty) is involved in a new play calledEmbedded.

Education is big this year, very big, with John Howard seeking to resurrect the old chestnut of state funding for religious schools. The big issue, though, is whether all Australian kids have the right to a good education regardless of their means, and what the consequences might be for Australia if this principle is abandoned in favour of user pays.

 

Carmen Lawrence rolled the ball last year in A fair go education system: the advantages for all of us. Late last year I asked a new Webdiarist, Mark Notaras, to pen a piece on what�s happening in education, but I lost his essay in the end of year rush. Here it is, if anything more timely now.

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The Myth of choice

by Mark Notaras

The �Myth of Choice� in education is perpetuated by the John Howard and his merry team, now thrice elected by the Australian public. While Homeric scripts endure in captivating readers through tales of triumph and tragedy, this Government seeks to hoodwink the Australian public with fanciful reasoning confined to tragedy. The folkloric diatribes of the prejudiced policy playwrights pretend that increased funding to the private school system at the expense of public school system is a rational and even-handed method of securing Australia�s educational future.

Our Prime Minister continually claims that we Australians live in an egalitarian society, yet his Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment (EBA) for schools funding is yet another piece of the purist policy puzzle reflecting a blatant lack of parity in society.

In December 2000 the Federal Government�s controversial Education Bill was whisked through the Senate with the tacit support of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The net results of the EBA are frighteningly prejudiced against the greater goals of public education. Briefly, Commonwealth education funding is directed from the needy public school system to the private system, in particular to the 58 wealthy category 1 schools that house a fraction of Australia�s school children.

Under the guise of providing �choice for Australian parents�, this tight-fisted policy defies reason and aids the Liberal Party in appealing to key constituencies. In monetary terms, the EBA allocates $25 billion to all schools over 4 years. $16b is directed to private schools and $9b is reserved for government schools who educate 70% of Australian school children. State government grants go some way to addressing this growing imbalance but an additional $4b per annum is required to create equal opportunity in Australian schools.

It is well known that in 1996 the Commonwealth cut $2.2b from University funding and introduced inequitable full fee-paying arrangements enabling those with more money to qualify for courses where they were below entry level standard. Such an inspiring idea has parallels with the present school funding structure. In both situations, the wealthy can buy their way into premium education to the detriment of those without such a choice.

Previous studies conclude that high investment levels in education in the short term will facilitate improvements in many social indicators in the long term including higher literacy rates, lower crime rates and increased high school completion rates. The EBA funding arrangements will undoubtedly have community ramifications for years to come and dispel another myth, that of the �Clever Country�.

When the Australian States became a Federation a century ago, the constitution stipulated that our elected �leaders� should be committed to their societal obligation to achieve equality of educational opportunity for all children. Wretchedly, it is now commonplace for public or government schools to rely on small change from the latest Parents & Citizens lamington drive to assist in financing school luxuries such as electricity, tables, chairs, textbooks and toilet paper. Parental contributions are increasingly filling in the funding gap that has been created by governments of all persuasions in recent years. At present, it is estimated that up to 7% of total expenditure on public schools comes from locally raised private funds.

Private schools receive the majority of their funding (approximately 60%) from fees paid by parents, as they should do. Nonetheless, an increasing proportion of funding comes from the taxpayer who in 1997 provided 29% of total funding, rising to 40% by 2004. It is no secret that the elite private schools do not cater for a broad cross-section of the Australian community, Elite private schools are readily accessible to the proportion of the population who can afford the $10,000 odd required per year per child for non-boarding fees. Alternatively, one needs to be a genius to attain one of the few academic scholarships that exist.

Demographics indicate unquestionably that the independent (non-Catholic) private schools cater primarily to Anglo-Celtic children, predominantly those residing in areas of affluence. Coincidently, an extremely disproportionate number of these schools operate within the leafy hamlets of the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs. Merely by chance, no doubt, prosperous schools are situated in Liberal party strongholds. Also by fluke, Vaucluse High School (located near Cranbrook) has ceased trading independently and Hunters Hill High School (up the road from Saint Joseph�s College) had to fight a bitter battle to survive, no thanks to the NSW state government. In another twist of fate, these doomed public education institutions are located on prime land. Doesn�t one get the impression that current policies are a direct reward for continuing voter and corporate loyalty?

OK, maybe I�m a tad cynical.

Private schools, though unaccountable for the manner in which they spend public money, do have a right to exist. Their charter is to provide an alternative system resourced by private income (hence the name), for those who can afford the fees without disadvantaging those who can�t. In the meantime, the Federal Minister for education, Dr. Brendan Nelson, wants to continue his government�s savage attack on the powerless and disadvantaged in society by forcing the �worst� performing schools to shape up (with ever-diminishing funds) or shut down.

Dr. David Kemp, who has since been expelled from the crucial education portfolio, was the mouthpiece of the EBA scheme. A scheme that assists The King�s School, one of the most exclusive in Australia, to install a new pool, but fails to assist the poorest high schools to purchase up to date maths textbooks. Shameful! I do not have a problem with private schools or private school students despite some of their archaic practices. A free market economy (which in the eyes of the Kemps, Nelsons and Howards of this world solves everything) allows such schools to operate freely and independently in our democratic capitalist structure. Why, therefore, is there a need for taxpayers to fund opulent sectarian schools? Has the universal remedy known as �the market� failed?

Many before me have challenged the government�s policies to demonstrate that current education funding measures are extremely problematic and unscrupulous. To facilitate debate with people devoid of concern for the greater social good, perhaps one has to argue at their level and in their language. For the Liberals, this limits us to discourse in the language of economics; such are the confines of their philosophical and social mindset.

The word �choice�, repeated ad nauseam by the government, implies by definition that a person has �the opportunity or power of choosing� (Collins Paperback English Dictionary, 1986). This power to choose, with respect to schooling, is achieved through financial means. If you have money, then you have a CHOICE. If you don�t have money you have NO CHOICE but to enter the under-funded, under-resourced environment of a government school. Evidently so simple, yet surprisingly unfamiliar logic for the Coalition�s conscience deficient “eco-crats”. �We don�t need no education� to unearth the preposterous disparities that exist with such a funding arrangement. All we require is a sense of classlessness, of integrity and a bit of long-term economic sense.

I invite you to examine the following figures:

* In 1996, the Commonwealth provided $2b to private schools and $1.4b to public schools.

* In 2004, the Commonwealth estimates that it will provide $3.7b to private schools and $1.9b to public schools.

* This represents a funding increase of 84% to private schools and 31% for public schools over the period 1996-2004.

* These figures represent a real increase of $3669 per student in the private sector and $966 per student in the public sector.

* $5282 is spent per student per year in NSW public schools.

* $5038 is spent per student per year in NSW Catholic schools.

* $8117 is spent per student per year in NSW Independent Private Schools.

* By 2004, Trinity Grammar and the Kings School will be receiving an annual increase per student of $1707 and $1351 respectively from the Commonwealth.

* 7% of the school population will shift from private to public schools in the next decade.

* 15% of Australians aged 15-19 are not enrolled in and will not complete upper secondary education. This compares to 9% in Canada and 5% in France and Sweden in 1998.

* Australia ranks 20th of 28 OECD countries in public education expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Products (GDP).

* In the current financial year, 2003-04, private schools receive more funds from the Commonwealth than all of Australia�s publicly funded universities.

The size of the gap between funding invested into the public and private school systems is as great as the gaping hole that waits for a competent political force willing to eradicate this mismatch and restore equilibrium. At the last federal election, Kim Beazley lacked the necessary �ticker� to present a decent alternative education policy to the Australian electorate. According to forecast data, the ALP, if elected to government, would have diverted (wait for it) 0.03% of funding from private schools back to public schools. That�s right customers! (We are �customers� nowadays, by the way.) A mere 0.03% is better than nothing right? I won�t even bother calculating how much that is because it�s offensive for Labor to pretend that they have any more credibility on education that the Liberals.

The most lamentable detail often lost in the education debate, which in itself has been lost for some time, is the role of the Australian people. Are we a naive and ignorant people, concerned about our backyards and our renovations but not the schoolyards or our education? Perhaps. A 2001 poll by the Australian Scholarships Group surveyed 300 000 people, 94% of whom believed that future government funding should be in the public and not the private school system. So why is there not a propensity for little Aussie battlers to vote on such an issue, in the interest of their most valuable assets, their children?

Protests attended by relatively few stereotyped �lefties�, occasional Sydney Morning Herald investigations and the odd nine minute anecdote on the ABC�s 7:30 Report bring these issues to the fore.

Politically, our limited hope lies with the Democrats, the Greens and/or Labor under its new leadership.

If democracy itself is the surface on which John Howard constructs his political puzzle, then it is us, the susceptible voters, who are the pieces that he puts together. With a federal election fast approaching, a generation of concerned and informed voters carry the responsibility of protecting the most important cornerstone of an egalitarian society. Will you as an individual fight to protect every Australian child�s future?

We can walk, we can talk, but more often than not we should baulk at the absolute ineptitude, the blatant elitism and the profound lack of intelligence and vision that exists among the democratically elected policy-makers. Just don�t ever be deceived by those who seek to maintain the pretence that is the �Myth of Choice�. After all, how many politicians send their children to public schools? None in the Federal Cabinet – that�s right, none, and a minority in the parliament overall. This therefore sends a message to the rest of the community that the public school system is not good enough for the children of those who govern and claim to endorse it.

Personally I am extremely grateful for the pre-tertiary education I have received at public institutions over a period of 13 years. It is sad to think that right now, economic polarisation will lead more and more people to the private system further justifying funding increases there. Meanwhile, the majority of parents, devoid of choice, can�well�they don�t have the luxury of an option. The cancerous cycle has begun.

Cliched as it may sound, children are our future and unfortunately their future symbolises an educational schism. Many Australian children will have their chance to realise their full potential diminished. Will that child be one of yours? That, ladies and gentleman, is the truth. I can�t handle the truth! Can you?

The statistics used in this article are freely available government data that has recently been published by �Priority Public�, a non-party-political coalition of citizens.

G’day. I wonder how Webdiary will change this year. I’d like to alter its direction a little by shifting emphasis from micro analysing the behaviour of the political combatants to discussing the values being contested and the means being used to do so. And I’d like less anger, I think, and more observation and constructive ideas and action, especially at the grassroots. Today information, analysis, comment and critique from readers on matters raised in Webdiary since I’ve been back.

G�day. I wonder how Webdiary will change this year. I�d like to alter its direction a little by shifting emphasis from micro analysing the behaviour of the political combatants to discussing the values being contested and the means being used to do so. And I�d like less anger, I think, and more observation and constructive ideas and action, especially at the grassroots. Today information, analysis, comment and critique from readers on matters raised in Webdiary since I�ve been back. Please feel free to email your thoughts about Webdiary.

 

To begin, Joel Bateman volunteers to report the election campaign for the Brisbane federal seat of Ryan for Webdiary. In WEDGEWATCH, Rodney Croome fills us in on the buildup to the attempt to make gay adoptions a Howard vote winner, and David Eastwood, Rob Bruce, Mandy and Peter Funnell discuss Howard�s attempt to discriminate in favour of male student teachers. To end, Elayn James has a few choice comments on the Rugby League�s attitudes to women.

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NOTICEBOARD

1. Meg Lees has a blog. Is she the first serving Australian federal pollie to have a go? The next election is going to be wild, internet wise.

2. Allen Jay says he follows the American campaign partly through Steve Perry�s blog: �He is a committed Democrat with an insider�s view on the political process in Washington as well as in the Democrats. At the lower levels, the democratic process is alive and well in the US so long as it can survive the War on Terror and the US Patriot Act.�

3. I�ll be at the opening night of �CMI (a Certain Maritime Incident)� � a play inspired by the transcripts of the unthrown children inquiry – on Friday March 26 8pm at the Performance Arts Space in Sydney. I like this from the blurb:

�You told the truth; you stood by your desire to tell the truth. That is right, isn’t it?� (Labor Senator Faulkner, CMI inquiry transcript p1544)

�The TV news deadline has passed… You can turn away from your theatrics.� (Liberal Senator Brandis, p1582)

Producer David Williams said: �This is a story of six people wrestling with their wills, their vocabulary, their politics and each other. It�s an exploration of fundamental questions at the intersection between the personal and the political as much about Australia�s political process as about our response to asylum seekers.�

The performers and devisers of the play are Danielle Antaki, Stephen Klinder, Nikki Heywood, Deborah Pollard, Christopher Ryan and David Williams

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REPORTING RYAN

Joel Bateman

I’m a regular reader of your Webdiary and also Tim Dunlop’s Road to surfdom blog. I saw your announcement that you were looking for people to write about the election campaign in their electorate and thought I might have a shot at that.

I live in Ryan, an electorate that surely needs little introduction after the events of 2001 – after being a Liberal ‘blue ribbon’ seat for the entirety of its existence (26 years, from memory), it fell in a by-election after the resignation of John Moore a few months before the 2001 federal election. This swing to the ALP, only a month after Peter Beattie’s state ALP took 66 of the 89 seats, was widely perceived as indicating that John Howard would be in trouble. But after Labor’s Leonie Short held Ryan for six months, the seat went back to the Liberals, with new member Michael Johnson winning fairly comfortably (despite branch-stacking allegations and public infighting).

(Margo: For Webdiary�s coverage of Ryan, and how Howard responded the last time he was in big trouble, see Don’t kick me: I’m down, mate, Tax or vision, Ryan bears’ picnic, Tell me what to doand Ryan does Florida. See Webdiary�s 2001 archive to refresh your memory of Howard�s comeback back then.)

I’m a PhD research student at the University of Queensland, in the field (oddly enough) of political science. My particular focus is on political leadership, and my thesis is on four prime ministers and why they were or weren’t deposed by their party – Gorton, Fraser, Hawke and Keating will be my case studies. I am also the co-editor of a school-supported, student-initiated journal, Dialogue.

Whilst I’m not a member of any political party, I do consider myself of the left. I once had, for a semester (in 1999), Michael Johnson as a tutor for a subject here, and did not leave that class with a favourable impression of him (an opinion shared by much of the class, I should add).

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WEDGEWATCH

Rodney Croome in Tasmania, the bloke who helped end the criminalisation of male gay sex in Australia

Margo, there�s nothing “sudden” about Howard’s gay adoption wedge plans (Howard’s affirmative action for men). The issue’s been building for a couple of months now.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13TH 2004

Friday morning: Rumours begin circulating in the ACT Legislative Assembly that the Federal Coalition is planning to over ride the ACT’s new adoption laws. The rumours are dismissed as absurd.

Friday lunch time: The Prime Minister makes it clear at a media conference in Launceston that he is opposed to adoption by same sex couples under any circumstances. Journalists are surprised that 1. Howard is expecting the question and is well briefed and prepared for it, and 2. He spends so much time talking about the issue.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 14TH 2004

In an article in The Australian former Howard speech writer Christopher Pearson dismisses the idea that the Howard Government would use gay marriage as a potential electoral wedge issue, arguing instead that over riding the ACT’s recent relationship reforms would be higher on its agenda.

MONDAY FEBRUARY 16TH 2004

ACT Deputy Opposition Leader Bill Stefaniak reveals he has written to Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock with concerns Canberra’s new adoption laws may contravene federal laws and the constitution. Stefaniak makes it clear that if there is no inconsistency the ACT’s laws should stay.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 17TH 2004

On ABC Radio John Howard declares that the ACT reforms reduce the status of marriage and are inconsistent with federal laws. ACT Opposition leader, Brendan Smyth, says the Prime Minister has the right to intervene: “If you are concerned about something and you cannot change the effect of the decision at one level, everyone in this country has the right to go to the higher level of parliament”. ACT Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, condemns any intervention in the affairs of the ACT.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 18TH 2004

It’s revealed that John Howard wrote to ACT Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, on January 30th this year expressing his concern that the, then proposed, ACT relationship laws devalue marriage and may be inconsistent with the Commonwealth Marriage Act.

Federal Labor leader, Mark Latham, and Shadow Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, issue statements condemning any Commonwealth interference with laws passed by the ACT Legislative Assembly.

Latham speaks in favour of adoption by same sex couples at the National Press Club.

MONDAY MARCH 8TH 2004

John Howard again speaks out against gay adoption, gay parenting in general (and gay marriage) on the John Laws program, adding that “the ACT is a different constituency than some other parts of Australia”.

Federal cabinet plans to consider a relevant submission from Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, but doesn’t.

The Melbourne Age asks whether gay adoption will make an effective electoral wedge if it has already been accepted in WA and Tasmania.

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David Eastwood in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney

Margo, in your piece on the discrimination issue you suggested that the shortage of male teachers in the Catholic system is because �It seemed they didn’t like the job, given the pay, conditions, status and stress.� That is, of course the obvious reason. It�s just not worth it to them, economics 101.

So, that must mean that the job IS worth the stress, conditions and status for the women who dominate the profession. It�s interesting to try to analyse this in the light of the �politically correct� view that tends to be implied in our anti-discrimination regime; that no profession is really inherently male or female. Is it possible that teaching really is �women�s work�? A grab-bag of hypotheses (and I mean hypotheses, I don�t necessarily subscribe to these views):

1) Teaching is an extension of the female nurturing/child-rearing role that exists in most societies, so, the reward of teaching is biologically or psychologically greater to most females. As such, the trade-off against the conditions, status and pay is more attractive to them.

2) The corollary: The trade-off between pay, status and conditions in many professions we may currently see as male-dominated is biologically (or psychologically) unattractive to most females.

3) Despite the progress made over the last few decades, most single-income families have a male breadwinner � of their own choice. As a result, the pay trade-off is more critical (and less attractive to) males as female teachers are less likely to be sole breadwinners.

4) Males may be �gun-shy� of the risk of being perceived to be inappropriately dealing with students in response to �knee-jerk� regulations or codes of behaviour introduced to combat teacher-pupil sexual abuse, introduced in response to systemic abuse uncovered in numerous school systems over recent years.

5) Males may be biologically inherently more likely to abuse than females � certainly the vast majority of reported cases involve males. As such they may increasingly avoid the profession as new, enhanced levels of scrutiny increase the risk of abusive behaviour.

6) Teaching offers females a better pay/status/conditions trade-off than they can get elsewhere in the workforce, so they flock to it. If this is true, our anti-discrimination regime is simply not working.

7) The notion that young male students need male role models is a furphy. It�s often mouthed that there is some inherent need, but I�ve rarely heard anyone explain why in any great depth. Why do male kids need male teachers?

I am open-minded on the need to discriminate positively in this profession, and indeed whether there�s a problem in the female dominance of teaching. But surely, until we test these (and any number of other hypotheses one could develop) we are flying blind in trying to decide whether this discrimination is a good thing or a bad thing.

MARGO: How do we explain the declining numbers of men in teaching?

***

Rob Bruce in Potts Point, Sydney

You assert that “It is inconceivable that low percentages of women in other jobs would get such special treatment” in reference to the suggestion that there be some scholarships specifically allocated to male student teachers.

Margo, once again, you’re letting your automatic anti Howard reactions kick in to override reality. There are many such scholarships for women, most notably in the fields of engineering and IT. They were created specifically to help correct a gender imbalance. There are more examples but the point is made, hysterical reactions to suggestions are usually meaningless. I don’t overly care whether male only teaching scholarships are created, what I care about is our media keeping the bastards honest which cannot be achieved if persistent and extreme personal bias is allowed to overcome reason and logic.

If you don’t believe me about female only scholarships try the following test. Go to Google and enter “female engineering scholarships in Australia”. You will get back 10 pages of results directly relating to female only scholarships. Try the same test with “male engineering scholarships in Australia” and you will find only 1 such scholarship (and that apologises everywhere it is mentioned for the fact female students cannot apply) hidden amongst all the other results which emphasise that female candidates are encouraged to apply as well as male candidates.

Margo: Hi Rob. First let�s dispose of any argument that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is a politically correct relic from the Labor government. The Commission head and author of HREOC�s decision is Professor Alice Tay, appointed by Howard, as was the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward, who has strongly defended Tay�s decision. Have you read the HREOC Judgement?

To get an exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act you need to show that your proposed �special measures� will help overcome PROVED gender-based discrimination. Tay said:

�This requires an analysis to determine whether, in the relevant area (service delivery, employment etc), there are practices which do, or tend to, exclude, disadvantage, restrict or result in an adverse effect upon people in those groups, or leave uncorrected the effects of past discrimination against them. The most important aspect of identifying substantive inequality is to look at the overall effect of current practices and to trace unequal outcomes to their source.�

There was no evidence that men were discriminated against in seeking education to become teachers. Indeed, one of the reasons for the shortage of male teachers is that there are many more men than women who are school principals!

Howard has decided that because the Catholic Church couldn�t prove its case, he would give carte blanch legislative permission for any group to discriminate in favour of men in teaching, from preschool to university. The government�s legislation doesn�t even define what an appropriate �gender balance� is, and what test must be met before gender discrimination is cool. It says simply that �gender imbalance in teaching means an imbalance in the ratio of male to female teachers�. See Howard’s affirmative action for men for details.

Any sex discrimination experts out there who�d like to comment?

***

Mandy (surname supplied)

I read ‘Howard’s affirmative action for men’ today with interest, because research I�m doing on the politics of fathers and men’s rights activists shows that this debate pops up in several forms – education, fatherlessness, men’s health and family law.

For a long time, conservative politicians and commentators have been pushing the masculinist (crisis) discourse: too few male role models for boys (girls don’t rate a mention). Latham has joined in, egged on by organisations like the Fatherhood Foundation. Brendan Nelson�s SMH opinion piece “Masculinity’s unfashionable sons must be shown their worth” on February 20 this year is nothing more than a shortened version of a speech called “Educating Boys” which he made on 8/10/2000 at Holy Trinity School, Canberra.

It’s strange how few people test the validity of such claims. Doing a quick Google search I found at least 5 Australian studies and many more international studies that discredit such claims, or are highly critical of the masculinist discourse, which often tips into misogyny. See the Canadian study on gender and education, School Success by Gender: A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse released last year.

Personally I think Howard can make as many wedges as there are issues – why he’s a regular wedges, sour cream and sweet chili sauce short order cook!

For sure there’s bound to be more to drive a divide between the genders and between the classes. Could another Howard wedge will be around family?

While the focus of most people narrows onto the statements that form the basic issue/wedge, I’d be very interested to read what’s behind such agenda pushes and where the connections are, and how Howard gets others to do his bidding. Why are his political strategies so successful in diverting attention or moving the debate on before we get to examine things clearly?

I’m no political expert – just an interested observer, who sometimes comments on my own blog.

***

Peter Funnell in Farrer, Canberra

The world’s gone bloody mad. I read �Howard�s affirmative action for women� and I have to say that I too have trouble getting my head around what Howard is doing and might do next. It could be anything. The bloke has totally lost the bloody plot.

I have always worried about what he would get up too next. He is really panicking this time round. Like some mad bugger throwing overboard everything he can get his hands on to lighten the load on a sinking vessel. And he is definitely going down.

I am amazed that his backbench hasn’t gone completely feral – he has them well house trained! They may think they have to ride with this bloke to the bitter end because its their best chance of success. I don’t agree. I listened to Hewson’s view that it would be suicide for them to ditch Howard (I like his style, but I don’t agree with him on this one). It only works if you reckon Howard can get them up again at the next election and he can�t.

I have never seen a bloke back track and back flip and make such a comprehensive goose of himself. He has lost his composure, and is fast becoming a parody of himself. The entire fabric of a miserable government with rotten policies and a preference for lies and deception is unraveling, like some force of nature taking over to reorder things.

The latest example is the Medicare Bill, which will get through because Howard has let Abbot up the anti three times over. A big surplus gives you spending options for a short while, and he spending our money like there is no tomorrow. He is not writing good public policy, just buying his way out of trouble. It’s madness all round.

I really never thought this would all happen with Latham’s arrival as Labour leader. I am stunned by the crumbling Howard edifice.

I was thunderstruck by the silly play ground poking out of his tongue by Howard over the male teacher issue. Here is another example of how much this bloke either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about families, schools or education. Probably has no idea they are interlocked. Howard sees a bit of floating ice and says chip it away, only to be told it’s an iceberg. I agree with you that this is a real loser for Howard. I wrote this letter to the Canberra Times:

Rather than putting in measures to establish “positive” discrimination in place to encourage men into teaching, it would help to understand why men do not make the choice more often. Similarly, why do women chose teaching? The Minister’s proposal is a “no cost”, “no effort” token gesture.

Teaching is dominated by women, but I doubt that senior management in teaching (public or private) reflects their numbers. All is not what it seems in either teaching, or the organisation of schools, families or careers and it is not solved by introducing discriminatory public policy.

In the era of the two income family, longer work hours to get ahead, HECS debt, cost of child care, the teaching profession is definitely a family friendly occupation. There should be more of it. Teaching is a good solution for a spouse to whom falls both the real primary care responsibilities and a need to earn an income.

When has any Government put in place similar measures in favor of women in the majority of professions, that have always been dominated by men? “Affirmative Action” policies were often, incorrectly characterised as discriminating in favor of women, when all that was said was that all things being equal, choose a women. It doesn’t work and doesn’t help anyone.

Once there were teachers’ scholarships offered by the Federal Government across every State and Territory. It was a terrific system, reflecting the importance of maintaining and encouraging people into teaching. In its place today is an ever increasing HECS debt.

Once, teaching was acknowledged as a highly respected occupation in the community. Those days are gone, but the importance of the work teachers do has never diminished. Sadly, the students they teach aspire to more glamorous and better paid occupations. Teaching does not pay well, not for the qualifications required and the debt they now incur to get them.

If the Minister wants to make a “positive” whole of nation contribution to the teaching profession, reintroduce the scholarship system. You can’t do much about the rest.

***

Elayn James in Summer Hill, Sydney

The thing keeping me glued to the papers these days is not my usual fare of health, science, government and environment issues but the alleged Rugby League rape case. It’s disgusting that the players are providing minimal co-operation with police, and that there is so much talk about “damage to the game”. What about “damage to the alleged victim and her family and her other relationships” or “damage to women’s faith and respect for men”, or even “decent men’s disgust at other men’s appallingly animalistic and aggressive behaviour towards women as demonstrated by this example”?

As I see it, this issue is not about a nation of league fans struggling to face some brutal facts about their heroes, or about The Game (or the Bulldogs team) surviving the scandal. It�s about an entrenched, aggressive and unacceptable male culture that has no respect for women. I think it is cause for shame both within the code and Australia wide, house-to-house, school-to-school, workplace-to-workplace.

This occurred within the League culture but also within the Australian culture – what have we done (or not done) as a society to allow social standards and personal ethics to degenerate to this? What are we prepared to do to prevent something similar happening again?

Surely the mark of a civilised society is how it cares for its elderly, its women and its children. One young woman has been very badly treated. Within days it became apparent that she is not the only one to have had a nasty experience with league men. The media keeps us well informed that it’s not just some league men who behave badly towards women – women are raped by men from a cross-section of the community. But how many men have been speaking out demanding change? And how many innocent league men have we heard from? Not enough. It’s the feminist commentators making the call, the odd politician, and the judges. In my view, it’s time ordinary blokes found their voices: time to tell their brothers enough is enough and start to enforce acceptable standards of behaviour when they see wrong-doing, however big or small. Or perhaps we are a race of cowards who prefer to walk past in silence with their heads down pretending the nasty stuff will go away, with our men too scared to make a noise when their intervention could really make a big difference to one young woman.

Dear me. I’m just one voice in a crowd. Who’s listening?

Ah, the Zeitgeist! Everywhere you look the rules change before your eyes as new patterns seem to emerge then mutate. I’m still getting my head around John Howard ditching a long and entrenched Liberal tradition against affirmative action – quotas if you will – to allow discrimination in favour of men to go to teachers college.

Opposition to quotas – reverse discrimination – is embedded in the US Republican and Australian Liberal-Conservative core principles. Equal rights, it’s called. When I get a chance I’ll have a look at the affirmative action debates at the time the Sex Discrimination act was introduced to STOP discrimination in the workplace, in education, and in the provision of services on the basis of gender.

Howard’s planned overthrow of the Act also flies in the face of the One Nation catchcry so gleefully appropriated by Howard – treat everyone the same, no special benefits. In effect, the government is allowing the Church to pay men more than women for the same job, instead of lifting pay for everyone or improving conditions for all. Howard is taking us back to pre-sex discrimination laws, when marriage meant the woman involved was sacked and advertisements were divided into ‘men and boys’ and ‘women and girls’. Howard did not support the Sex Discrimination act back in 1983, and nothing’s changed.

The issue is simple. The Catholic Church was concerned a the falling proportion of male teachers in its classrooms. It seemed they didn’t like the job, given the pay, conditions, status and stress. So the Church wanted to give male-only scholarships to train as a teacher in the Catholic system. This is unlawful, unless the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which administers the Sex Discrimination Act, grants a special exemption. HREOC turned down the application for an exemption. You’ll find the decision and details of the case at HREOC.

There it ended, until the government introduced legislation this week to roll back the Sex Discrimination Act and legalise the Catholic scholarship plan.

Is this another wedge? Another sign of panic? Did Howard think he could turn the tables on Latham’s pitch for more male role models by throwing up this policy? (See today’s AM transcript and Sky News transcript.)

If so, I think he’s mistaken. This policy is indefensible. Even ten years ago, several Liberals would have crossed the floor rather than accept such a law. The fact that they’re now silent and compliant says it all about the collapse of liberalism in the parliamentary party, and any commitment to fight for principle.

It is inconceivable that low percentages of women in other jobs would get such special treatment. A subsidy for female train driver trainees, perhaps? Women are already suspicious of Howard’s commitment to equal rights when it comes to them. The last time he sought to overturn the Sex Discrimination Act was to stop defacto couples, single women and lesbians accessing IVF. The Senate knocked him back. For details, seeRandom thoughts about the IVF debate, Progressive lefties and libertarian liberals unite!, More on IVF, genetics, parties and pictures and The tangled web of sex, rights and IVF.

Here’s the the government’s legislation on teachers presented to Parliament by good old Philip Ruddock, our intrepid human rights defender – have a think at about how this template might be used for affirmative action elsewhere:

Sex Discrimination Amendment (Teaching Profession) Bill 2004

The Parliament of Australia enacts…

After section 38 (of the Sex Discrimination act banning discrimination in education on the basis of gender) insert:

38A Preference to address gender imbalance in school teaching

(1) Nothing in Division 1 or 2 renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person, on the ground of the other persons sex, by offering scholarships to persons of the opposite sex in respect of their participation as students in a teaching course, if the scholarships are offered in order to redress a gender imbalance in teaching.

(2) In this section:

gender imbalance in teaching means an imbalance in the ratio of male to female teachers:

(a) in schools in Australia generally; or

(b) in a particular category or categories of schools in Australia; or

(c) in a particular school or schools in Australia.

scholarship includes assistance or support that is similar to a scholarship.

school includes a pre-school.

teaching course means a course of study that leads to a qualification for teaching students at schools in Australia.

The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Howard appointee and friend Pru Goward, made her position clear in the Commission’s dissenting statement on the legislation:

“If the government wants more male teachers, there are many programs that could encourage male teacher students without requiring amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act or introducing a discriminatory scholarship scheme.”

“Successful programs that have worked to allow more women into traditionally male dominated professions can all be adapted to encourage young men into teaching. For example, sending young male teacher students to schools to encourage young men to consider the career, or supporting career counsellors to promote the benefits of a teaching career could be useful beginnings.”

“One of the problems is that male teachers either leave the profession mid-career because of poor remuneration, or they are promoted out of the school room to become Principals or Assistant Principals. Programs to stop this exodus and programs to encourage the promotion of a representative number of women teachers into senior administrative positions in schools would both result in more male teachers in the classroom.”

“There are any number of alternative programs that are not discriminatory and which do not need a legislative amendment, such as paying teachers more.”

“The simple fact is that young men are not attracted to teaching because they can earn better money elsewhere. As ‘women’s work’ it has never been remunerated properly.”

“Front loading the pay of male teacher students through a scholarship, effectively relieving them of the HECS burden their female counterparts will carry into their professional careers, entrenches this inequity and has not been demonstrated to address the disparity in numbers of male and female teachers long term.”

Commissioner Goward said Australia’s efforts to overcome historical and continuing inequalities against women have never been based on enforceable quotas.

“Australia has long recognised that assisting women to achieve positions based on anything apart from merit may well hinder rather than help in achieving equality. It’s about giving everyone a fair go. Removing the requirement for merit in the award of teaching scholarships for young men is a big change from that.”

“The government, and surely the community, needs to be sure the proposed amendment can achieve its purpose before even considering support for any deviation from the merit principle.”

“However, if that is the way forward, then the government should immediately introduce programs that pay a premium to women who enter parliament or seek positions as executive board members, university professors, surgeons, engineers, senior military officers or judges, where women are still disadvantaged and are seriously underrepresented. Women and girls need role models too.”

It’s clear Howard is seeking to woo the Catholic constituency this year. First, we saw the church move into the mainstream school funding system for schools and get big bucks as a result. Now this. On the day Latham was elected leader, a disgruntled Beazley supporter told me Latham would explode on any an issue due to his vitriolic tongue. He singled out Catholic voters, saying that Latham had bitterly attacked the Pope during the parliamentary debate on embryo research.

Even so, I think Howard’s on a loser with this one.

My favoured Howard wedge is gay rights. Bush is running big on ‘gay marriages’ in the United States, promising a constitutional amendment to ban States legalising them. He’s had a huge and vocal support group for this among conservative and fundamentalist Christians. American writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan gives detailed daily coverage of the issue from a right wing libertarian perspective on his blog Andrew Sullivan.

In Australia, Howard is setting up the ACT’s new laws allowing homosexual couples to adopt children as his trigger for the big wedge. This week he suddenly attacked the law, while not saying whether he’d do anything about it, like overturn it as he did to to the Northern Territory’s euthanasia legislation. He can’t afford to blow up the matter from nothing – it would look cynical, which of course it is. What he needs is for his media attack dogs and several strong community groups to build the issue up and demand that he take action. Watch this space. Here’s the transcript extract from John Laws interview on March 8:

A new ACT law wants to allow gay couples to adopt children. How do you feel about that?

Well I’m against gay adoption, just as I’m against gay marriage. I’m a social conservative. I think there are certain benchmark institutions and arrangements in our society that you don’t muck around with, and children should be brought up ideally by a mother and a father who are married. That’s the ideal. I mean I’m not saying people who are unmarried are incapable of being loving parents. Of course they are. I mean I believe in the maximum conditions of stability for people who have children.

Okay. Well if you believe that people who arent married can bring up children satisfactorily, that doesn’t include gay couples?

No I don’t because the notion is of having you need a male role model and a female role model. I think it is incredibly important that people have role models of both sexes because that’s the kind of society that they’re born into, and the way you do that is to preserve the notion of a mother and a father.

He’s casting around for the killer wedge all right, our John. I like Latham’s tactic of preemption – to warn his party room that another Tampa could be round the corner and name the gay issue as a candidate. Now we all know how Howard does politics, he is at risk of losing both the element of surprise and the perception that he’s just interested in doing the right thing. Latham seems to be following the advice of Labor frontbencher Craig Emerson in November to get on the front foot pre-wedge play (Wedge watch)

Any other ideas for Howard wedges?

Webdiary’s conservative columnist Noel Hadjimichael also writes on wedges today. Before his piece, a wedge email from ‘Tony’:

Populist Howard is in full fright! Here he is flying a kite on nationalising public hospitals – not endorsing it and not dismissing it either! He just wants to see where the wind blows with 51% of the population and then make it his own, something that he always believed in and something urgently needed to rescue the country from those Laborites that have never believed in Health and Education.

And another little wedgie on the Male Teacher brainwave. Interesting that Howard suddenly sees the need for the rescue of masculinity and male role models. Is Howard becoming a Whitlamite with his high spending, high taxing government focused on big social policy? The Chameleon is trying to remake himself into a pathetic imitation of Latham, the real thing.

All Howard’s actions are nothing but tools for survival. Forget about the national interest. After all, what national interest could be greater than Howard staying on as PM?

***

Wedge Politics and Crocodile Tears

by Noel Hadjimichael

Whilst not wishing to sound too cynical or jaded, I must remind readers that any statement that includes the phrase “wedge politics” should be treated with great care. The same type of care whenever one visits a Soviet built nuclear facility, stays at a Motel at the same time as the local footie club has its end of season dinner or passes by Old Parliament House when a ratbag demonstration is being held.

Webdiary readers have seen a lot of wedge politics complained about: that horrible Tampa incident which actually switched votes, any suggestion that any issue that divides the Left must be unAustralian or impolite or maybe the time progressive trendies walked softly around the failure of indigenous leadership to bring cohesion or efficiency to the huge task of relieving poverty and mismanagement.

In our type of democracy, the party that wins the majority of seats by a majority vote gets the job of government, This is tempered by a Senate which is unlikely to be controlled by any party in its own right.

In theory about 26% of the voting population can control our destiny. In practice, each major party seeks to capture a very broad coalition of interests to win a sizeable vote.

In simple language, the Labor spectrum in the old days went from hard right social conservatives comfortable with anti-communism, America and home-owning respectability to long haired flower-power advocates of liberalism, Soviet-ear benevolent social democracy and more jobs paid by other peoples taxes.

The old Liberal team would include pro-enterprise social liberals, old-time one nation tories, new money supply side economists and fiercely nationalist regional voters.

Each party always tried to break down the other side’s team by wooing voters with policies (like Menzies’ education grants for Catholic Schools), new directions (Whitlam’s stand on outer suburban services), threats of loss (Liberal anti-union scare campaigns) or nirvana promises (the original deals on Medibank, partial privatisation or human rights in East Timor).

There is no issue that should be off the political table. To hide uncomfortable issues or unpleasant issues is only to marginalise the victims.

Labor makes great noises about its education and health credentials. Great news for working mums, battler families and the yuppie professionals.

Liberals parade their credentials on defence, the economy and the security questions. This has made inroads in regional Australia, the elderly and the small business sector.

Putting issues in the cupboard only allow them to fester into diseased debates over injustice or elite arrogance. Let debate happen on everything. But let it be constructive.

Beware of any politician that mentions the wedge terminology. He or she is only wanting the other side to get off their turf. No party has a mortgage over any voter block. Particularly when they may be ignoring the priorities or concerns of bedrock supporters.

Maybe more swinging or minor party voters is a good thing. It reduces the arrogance factor amongst the party power brokers.

Ah, the Zeitgeist! Everywhere you look the rules change before your eyes as new patterns seem to emerge then mutate. I’m still getting my head around John Howard ditching a long and entrenched Liberal tradition against affirmative action – quotas if you will – to allow discrimination in favour of men to go to teachers college.

Opposition to quotas – reverse discrimination – is embedded in the US Republican and Australian Liberal-Conservative core principles. Equal rights, it’s called. When I get a chance I’ll have a look at the affirmative action debates at the time the Sex Discrimination act was introduced to STOP discrimination in the workplace, in education, and in the provision of services on the basis of gender.

Howard’s planned overthrow of the Act also flies in the face of the One Nation catchcry so gleefully appropriated by Howard – treat everyone the same, no special benefits. In effect, the government is allowing the Church to pay men more than women for the same job, instead of lifting pay for everyone or improving conditions for all. Howard is taking us back to pre-sex discrimination laws, when marriage meant the woman involved was sacked and advertisements were divided into ‘men and boys’ and ‘women and girls’. Howard did not support the Sex Discrimination act back in 1983, and nothing’s changed.

The issue is simple. The Catholic Church was concerned a the falling proportion of male teachers in its classrooms. It seemed they didn’t like the job, given the pay, conditions, status and stress. So the Church wanted to give male-only scholarships to train as a teacher in the Catholic system. This is unlawful, unless the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which administers the Sex Discrimination Act, grants a special exemption. HREOC turned down the application for an exemption. You’ll find the decision and details of the case at HREOC.

There it ended, until the government introduced legislation this week to roll back the Sex Discrimination Act and legalise the Catholic scholarship plan.

Is this another wedge? Another sign of panic? Did Howard think he could turn the tables on Latham’s pitch for more male role models by throwing up this policy? (See today’s AM transcript and Sky News transcript.)

If so, I think he’s mistaken. This policy is indefensible. Even ten years ago, several Liberals would have crossed the floor rather than accept such a law. The fact that they’re now silent and compliant says it all about the collapse of liberalism in the parliamentary party, and any commitment to fight for principle.

It is inconceivable that low percentages of women in other jobs would get such special treatment. A subsidy for female train driver trainees, perhaps? Women are already suspicious of Howard’s commitment to equal rights when it comes to them. The last time he sought to overturn the Sex Discrimination Act was to stop defacto couples, single women and lesbians accessing IVF. The Senate knocked him back. For details, seeRandom thoughts about the IVF debate, Progressive lefties and libertarian liberals unite!, More on IVF, genetics, parties and pictures and The tangled web of sex, rights and IVF.

Here’s the the government’s legislation on teachers presented to Parliament by good old Philip Ruddock, our intrepid human rights defender – have a think at about how this template might be used for affirmative action elsewhere:

Sex Discrimination Amendment (Teaching Profession) Bill 2004

The Parliament of Australia enacts…

After section 38 (of the Sex Discrimination act banning discrimination in education on the basis of gender) insert:

38A Preference to address gender imbalance in school teaching

(1) Nothing in Division 1 or 2 renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person, on the ground of the other persons sex, by offering scholarships to persons of the opposite sex in respect of their participation as students in a teaching course, if the scholarships are offered in order to redress a gender imbalance in teaching.

(2) In this section:

gender imbalance in teaching means an imbalance in the ratio of male to female teachers:

(a) in schools in Australia generally; or

(b) in a particular category or categories of schools in Australia; or

(c) in a particular school or schools in Australia.

scholarship includes assistance or support that is similar to a scholarship.

school includes a pre-school.

teaching course means a course of study that leads to a qualification for teaching students at schools in Australia.

The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Howard appointee and friend Pru Goward, made her position clear in the Commission’s dissenting statement on the legislation:

“If the government wants more male teachers, there are many programs that could encourage male teacher students without requiring amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act or introducing a discriminatory scholarship scheme.”

“Successful programs that have worked to allow more women into traditionally male dominated professions can all be adapted to encourage young men into teaching. For example, sending young male teacher students to schools to encourage young men to consider the career, or supporting career counsellors to promote the benefits of a teaching career could be useful beginnings.”

“One of the problems is that male teachers either leave the profession mid-career because of poor remuneration, or they are promoted out of the school room to become Principals or Assistant Principals. Programs to stop this exodus and programs to encourage the promotion of a representative number of women teachers into senior administrative positions in schools would both result in more male teachers in the classroom.”

“There are any number of alternative programs that are not discriminatory and which do not need a legislative amendment, such as paying teachers more.”

“The simple fact is that young men are not attracted to teaching because they can earn better money elsewhere. As ‘women’s work’ it has never been remunerated properly.”

“Front loading the pay of male teacher students through a scholarship, effectively relieving them of the HECS burden their female counterparts will carry into their professional careers, entrenches this inequity and has not been demonstrated to address the disparity in numbers of male and female teachers long term.”

Commissioner Goward said Australia’s efforts to overcome historical and continuing inequalities against women have never been based on enforceable quotas.

“Australia has long recognised that assisting women to achieve positions based on anything apart from merit may well hinder rather than help in achieving equality. It’s about giving everyone a fair go. Removing the requirement for merit in the award of teaching scholarships for young men is a big change from that.”

“The government, and surely the community, needs to be sure the proposed amendment can achieve its purpose before even considering support for any deviation from the merit principle.”

“However, if that is the way forward, then the government should immediately introduce programs that pay a premium to women who enter parliament or seek positions as executive board members, university professors, surgeons, engineers, senior military officers or judges, where women are still disadvantaged and are seriously underrepresented. Women and girls need role models too.”

It’s clear Howard is seeking to woo the Catholic constituency this year. First, we saw the church move into the mainstream school funding system for schools and get big bucks as a result. Now this. On the day Latham was elected leader, a disgruntled Beazley supporter told me Latham would explode on any an issue due to his vitriolic tongue. He singled out Catholic voters, saying that Latham had bitterly attacked the Pope during the parliamentary debate on embryo research.

Even so, I think Howard’s on a loser with this one.

My favoured Howard wedge is gay rights. Bush is running big on ‘gay marriages’ in the United States, promising a constitutional amendment to ban States legalising them. He’s had a huge and vocal support group for this among conservative and fundamentalist Christians. American writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan gives detailed daily coverage of the issue from a right wing libertarian perspective on his blog Andrew Sullivan.

In Australia, Howard is setting up the ACT’s new laws allowing homosexual couples to adopt children as his trigger for the big wedge. This week he suddenly attacked the law, while not saying whether he’d do anything about it, like overturn it as he did to to the Northern Territory’s euthanasia legislation. He can’t afford to blow up the matter from nothing – it would look cynical, which of course it is. What he needs is for his media attack dogs and several strong community groups to build the issue up and demand that he take action. Watch this space. Here’s the transcript extract from John Laws interview on March 8:

A new ACT law wants to allow gay couples to adopt children. How do you feel about that?

Well I’m against gay adoption, just as I’m against gay marriage. I’m a social conservative. I think there are certain benchmark institutions and arrangements in our society that you don’t muck around with, and children should be brought up ideally by a mother and a father who are married. That’s the ideal. I mean I’m not saying people who are unmarried are incapable of being loving parents. Of course they are. I mean I believe in the maximum conditions of stability for people who have children.

Okay. Well if you believe that people who arent married can bring up children satisfactorily, that doesn’t include gay couples?

No I don’t because the notion is of having you need a male role model and a female role model. I think it is incredibly important that people have role models of both sexes because that’s the kind of society that they’re born into, and the way you do that is to preserve the notion of a mother and a father.

He’s casting around for the killer wedge all right, our John. I like Latham’s tactic of preemption – to warn his party room that another Tampa could be round the corner and name the gay issue as a candidate. Now we all know how Howard does politics, he is at risk of losing both the element of surprise and the perception that he’s just interested in doing the right thing. Latham seems to be following the advice of Labor frontbencher Craig Emerson in November to get on the front foot pre-wedge play (Wedge watch)

Any other ideas for Howard wedges?

Webdiary’s conservative columnist Noel Hadjimichael also writes on wedges today. Before his piece, a wedge email from ‘Tony’:

Populist Howard is in full fright! Here he is flying a kite on nationalising public hospitals – not endorsing it and not dismissing it either! He just wants to see where the wind blows with 51% of the population and then make it his own, something that he always believed in and something urgently needed to rescue the country from those Laborites that have never believed in Health and Education.

And another little wedgie on the Male Teacher brainwave. Interesting that Howard suddenly sees the need for the rescue of masculinity and male role models. Is Howard becoming a Whitlamite with his high spending, high taxing government focused on big social policy? The Chameleon is trying to remake himself into a pathetic imitation of Latham, the real thing.

All Howard’s actions are nothing but tools for survival. Forget about the national interest. After all, what national interest could be greater than Howard staying on as PM?

***

Wedge Politics and Crocodile Tears

by Noel Hadjimichael

Whilst not wishing to sound too cynical or jaded, I must remind readers that any statement that includes the phrase “wedge politics” should be treated with great care. The same type of care whenever one visits a Soviet built nuclear facility, stays at a Motel at the same time as the local footie club has its end of season dinner or passes by Old Parliament House when a ratbag demonstration is being held.

Webdiary readers have seen a lot of wedge politics complained about: that horrible Tampa incident which actually switched votes, any suggestion that any issue that divides the Left must be unAustralian or impolite or maybe the time progressive trendies walked softly around the failure of indigenous leadership to bring cohesion or efficiency to the huge task of relieving poverty and mismanagement.

In our type of democracy, the party that wins the majority of seats by a majority vote gets the job of government, This is tempered by a Senate which is unlikely to be controlled by any party in its own right.

In theory about 26% of the voting population can control our destiny. In practice, each major party seeks to capture a very broad coalition of interests to win a sizeable vote.

In simple language, the Labor spectrum in the old days went from hard right social conservatives comfortable with anti-communism, America and home-owning respectability to long haired flower-power advocates of liberalism, Soviet-ear benevolent social democracy and more jobs paid by other peoples taxes.

The old Liberal team would include pro-enterprise social liberals, old-time one nation tories, new money supply side economists and fiercely nationalist regional voters.

Each party always tried to break down the other side’s team by wooing voters with policies (like Menzies’ education grants for Catholic Schools), new directions (Whitlam’s stand on outer suburban services), threats of loss (Liberal anti-union scare campaigns) or nirvana promises (the original deals on Medibank, partial privatisation or human rights in East Timor).

There is no issue that should be off the political table. To hide uncomfortable issues or unpleasant issues is only to marginalise the victims.

Labor makes great noises about its education and health credentials. Great news for working mums, battler families and the yuppie professionals.

Liberals parade their credentials on defence, the economy and the security questions. This has made inroads in regional Australia, the elderly and the small business sector.

Putting issues in the cupboard only allow them to fester into diseased debates over injustice or elite arrogance. Let debate happen on everything. But let it be constructive.

Beware of any politician that mentions the wedge terminology. He or she is only wanting the other side to get off their turf. No party has a mortgage over any voter block. Particularly when they may be ignoring the priorities or concerns of bedrock supporters.

Maybe more swinging or minor party voters is a good thing. It reduces the arrogance factor amongst the party power brokers.

G’day. Artist Robert Bosler was the first Webdiarist to pick the zeitgeist switch – just before Latham’s election – in some great pieces: Time for Labor to play to win, not just play safe, An artist’s blueprint for a Latham win, A Webdiarist’s speech for a Mark Latham address to the nation.

 

Today, Robert’s questions the relevance of the liberal philosophy in today’s world. I’ve been thinking about that a fair bit myself while writing my book. Before Robert, some Webdiary titbits.

TITBITS

Liberal leadership: Sensational interview with John Hewson on Lateline last night. But Tony Jones, you should have asked Hewie whether he’d stand as an independent Liberal against Malcolm Turnbull. Go for it, John! True Liberals unite!

Football sex scandals: Brian McKinlay recommends Football and Sex at Colorado: The Real Scandal, which has lots of insight into the whys and wherefores of the Bulldogs rugby league abomination.

Colin Rubenstein: The following email completes my email correspondence with Mr Rubenstein (see Mel, Colin, George and Miranda).

Margo to Colin

OK, one last attempt. Was George Brandis correct in his statement that after his Greens and Nazis speech Mr Rubenstein contacted him to say “he supported it and he was pleased it had been given”.

Colin to Margo, March 04, 2004

One more time. Your failure to want to comprehend my previous email leaves me with my initial impression that you are out to create mischief and misrepresent the truth. I reserve my rights.

Colin Rubenstein

*

March 26: Email from Dr Doron Samuell removed after he stated it was not for publication.

***

Death of the Liberal’s liberalism?

by Robert Bosler

What do people really know and understand of the Liberal Philosophy that has been governing us?

For instance, we hear from the Liberal Party a description of their philosophy as one structured on a belief in the individual. Clearly it is important for one to have a belief in oneself, and that we each find the way to doing that individually. However, isn’t it equally important that this belief in the individual be found through means provided in only a small measure by the state, and that we find instead this belief in the rich areas of life as provided through offerings from spiritual, sporting, cultural and parenting guidance?

Isn’t it more propitious for a political party to accept the belief in the individual as a matter for that individual and to provide, instead, the secure framework by which each and every individual can prosper?

It’s a subtle point, but one which bears serious scrutiny in the modern age.

It’s a matter of focus. The Liberal Party as it currently stands has a philosophy that is based on a focus, and that focus is proclaimed and in effect ‘the individual’. It may well be that the Australian society has outgrown a philosophy with that focus.

Originally, the focus on ‘the individual’ in the Liberal Party philosophy was born of a need to provide the individual with more freedom and choice during the political climate of 1944. There is a serious argument to be made that a philosophical focus on ‘the individual’ by a modern political party could possibly be very dangerous and detrimental.

We have to remember that the Australian Liberal Party is not that old. We have to remember that its philosophy was one that was created to solve a social and political problem of the time. What has changed?

We have changed, enormously. The whole social fabric and thrust has changed. The changes since the birth of the Liberal Party in 1944 have placed us in a different social planet entirely.

One example that bears scrutiny is our understanding of the human relationship. Were there books and tv programs and school programs discussing the human relationship during the 1940s and 1950s? Was there an abundance of social discussion and awareness on the workings and the importance of human relationships in that time?

No. Wasn’t it so that during those times the man had set roles and the woman had set roles and those roles formed the measure of the relationship? Isn’t it because of the lack of understanding of the workings of the human relationship that relationships bound by those times ended so much in disaster?

But the human spirit cannot be bound up in set roles. It wants to be free; it wants to express and create. No wonder the world of Australia was bursting for individuality and personal and social freedom during the forties and fifties. Bring on the sixties! Bring on the forces that threw the human spirit free. Bring on free love, bring on pot, bring on Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, bring on the pill. Let’s be free, they said, that is our individual right.

And so the bursted embers came settling back to earth in the seventies. But what could sustain itself during those times? As the embers settled, ideas that looked brilliant as people ran with them fizzled and died in their hands. People looked at each other in askance.

But free we were. Now settled in the eighties we had true individualism. The human spirit was free beyond its wildest dreams, in the social fabric of the western world. A man could now happily have a beer in the pub with his bricklayer mates and be taken by them to have had just a hard day’s work being a house husband looking after the kids. A woman could choose and relish in a career instead of a family. We had, for the first and utterly significant time in western history: a black woman judge.

The individual had arrived.

What then? Is not the sky the limit for the individual? The western human being had achieved its spiritual exultation, by fully realising The Individual. Or had it?

What good is the fully realised individual if it cannot be sustained by its natural environment. What good is a fully realised individual of the future, dead, extinct?

Is there anything, anything, on the planet that does not rely on something else for its existence?

And so again we come to relationship.

In this short but seemingly long road since the fifties, haven’t we learned that the human being is most comfortable and happy and, indeed, feels loved and fulfilled when addressing and satisfying his or her inclusion in some form of group?

Is it possible that the human condition has evolved, that is, that our understanding of the human condition has evolved, to a point where the need for the focus on the individual has been superceded by the knowledge of the need for quality relationships.. knowledgeable quality relationships…. not only with each other closely at hand, but outwards through community, state and nation, on to quality relationships eventually and happily with all other countries – and all of us with the environment ??

If so, does that not place the individual within a framework of other individuals and environment such that it’s that framework that is the thing of importance??

Therefore, isn’t the framework the thing our political parties should be philosophically focused on?

Have we grown up from that individual focus, and moved on??

Where not so long ago we relished the focus on our individuality, do we now find a blind and dangerous sense of “If I am ok, the world is ok” in the Liberal belief ??

Is John Howard the embodiment of that strident me-please individual from yesteryear, thrown up by its party’s 1944 philosophy, so that, if his Prime Ministership is ok, the world is ok?

And as we’ve moved on, and he hasn’t, is Howard blindly taking the Liberal movement down with him?

Is that much change afoot, that the arc of the Liberal Party philosophy has come, peaked and is going ??

Do we need this perspective to see more clearly what Howard has done to Australia’s development?

Surely, to look at humanity in these times of massive change since the fifties and hold the individual as the central core of communal prosperity is as ridiculous as thinking the world is the centre of the universe.

Surely we have come to understand that the philosophical focus must be on relationship.

Surely we have come to understand that there is ultimately pain and destruction in the focus on self?

Has Howard, with his full intensity of commitment sunk his own party ship through his self determined efforts, where such clinging and urgent intensity, like rigid unforgiving steel in fast-motion rusted disintegration, self destructs?

Is Howard captain of his beloved Liberal Titanic?

Is Malcolm Turnbull to bring a new Liberal philosophy, to modernise it? Or is he the embodiment of individualism personified as a mirror catalyst to set off towards the party’s swift decline – with every man for himself – should it be that, yes, we have moved on from the investment of focus in the individual as the philosophical core of humanity’s prosperity?

And while we’re at it, what can the Labor Party do to throw off ideals of yesteryear now become shackles holding it back? Mark Latham is leading now, and there is a very real feeling this can happen.

We are hungry as a society. We are not complacent, though it sometimes appears so. We want relevance and we want results and when we want them we want them now. The parties must listen. Are we talking loudly enough just yet, or has the modern request just begun? I’m excited.

Hello again. Former star Webdiarist Tim Dunlop will write a column for Webdiary this year. ‘Blogjam’ will surf the net and suggest political web logs and articles you might find interesting. Tim has been in Washington for a couple of years, where he launched his successful weblog Road to Surfdom. Tim’s Webdiary pieces include the brilliant Pauline Hanson’s gift to democracy, Rebuilding the left, Two Nations tragedy and his most famous Webdiary piece Pull the udder one.

On the subject of blogs, I’m looking for Webdiarists who’d like to report regularly on the federal seat they live in in the lead up to the election and during the election campaign. If you want to have a go, send me an opener – describe who you are and the seat where you live. Please disclose your affiliations, and if you want to hide behind a nom de plume, please explain why.

Blogjam

by Tim Dunlop

Welcome to the first instalment of a Blogjam which we hope will be a weekly round-up featuring what the blogs are talking about. With an election likely in Australia this year, and one due in the United States, and little matters like Iraq on the agenda, this is going to be a big year for politics and therefore a big year for the political blogosphere as well.

For this first Blogjam, I thought I’d give you some links and general information about a range of blogs – my heavily biased cruise through some of the ones I like best – though future instalments will try and link not so much to blogs per se but to specific pieces bloggers have written.

If you’re new to the blogosphere, can I suggest you read the piece I wrote for the Evatt Foundation about what blogs are and why I think they have a part to play in democratic politics. I don’t want to oversell you on the concept, but I like the fact that the web of interactive discussion and writing they create by linking to each other and to other material available online has created a public space that brings together the expert and the non-expert in a medium where they can interact in a way not normally available.

Let’s start with John Quiggin’s blog. John is a Professor of economics at the University of Queensland and he is one of a number of economists who blog. You’ll find some others over at Catallaxy, run by Jason Soon. The hallmark of John’s writing is his ability to explain even complicated matters in a non-condescending but accessible way.

Another academic’s blog worth checking in on is Back Pages put together by historian Christopher Sheil. Chris has a background in Labor politics so brings an insider’s view to his political discussion, but like John Quiggin, writes about a range of topics (including sport and music) to balance out the more serious topics. Then there is Rob Schaap at Blogorrhoea, who doesn’t update all that often but who brings a unique perspective to current events. Absolutely not be missed – one the blogosphere’s best writers.

For a constant stream of current events, including key stories that might otherwise fall through the cracks, there is Alan over at Southerly Buster. Always worth clicking through to. As are Sandgropers Gareth Parkerand Robert Corr. Gareth is a journalism student in Perth whom I often argue with, but who always plays fair. Rob is another West Australian blogger who covers politics with insight and enthusiasm.

There are a couple of excellent sites which deal with the events of the day in a more quirky way. First up, there is Gummo Trotsky, one of the blogosphere’s real discoveries. Then there is David at Barista and the inimitable Sedgwick, who is, despite what you might have heard, Australia’s governor general.

And no general introduction to the topic would be complete without mentioning sites like She Sells Sanctuary, Blogger on a Cast Iron Balcony, Hot Buttered Death, William Burrough’s Baboon, A Yobbo’s View, and the official site of the Australian Libertarians.

Not all these are strictly speaking political blogs, but then again, politics isn’t just what happens in Canberra or Washington D.C..

I’ve stuck pretty much to the Australian blogosphere here, but the international scene is huge, growing and impressive – a veritable Valhalla of hot topics and good writing. Impossible to narrow it down too much but all of the following will repay your investigation: Atrios, Calpundit, Lean Left, Body and Soul, and Crooked Timber. All have a political focus, but that’s not all they do.

Okay, I’ve only really scratched the surface here. You can find a lot more sites permanently linked at my blog, The Road to Surfdom, and it is worth taking some time to explore what’s available. You might also like to check Cursor, which is a daily compendium of key stories throughout the blogosphere and beyond and that is more or less the model for Blogjam.

Forget all the guff you hear in the mainstream press about people being disengaged from the process, turned off by politics, fed up with issues, sick of big ideas, not willing to talk. Blogs have shown that if you strip away the spindoctors, the PR people, and the media consultants, talk to the punters like they are thinking adults with their own opinions to express, and then provide them with a steady stream of fact-based argument (spiked with fringe-festival humour) they’ll show up by the train-load.

More next week (and apologies to those I left out!)

First published in yesterday’s Sun Herald.

 

G’day. As we head towards NSW local council elections, has anyone else pondered the total disconnect between the behaviour of the Carr government and Mark Latham’s promise to help rebuild our communities by handing power back to the people?

Maybe it’s because I’ve been holed up at home for three months writing a book that this obvious problem for Labor in NSW has stuck out like a sore thumb as I’ve skimmed the papers.

Great speech in February, Mark, the one where you reported to the powerful what the people had been telling you during your travels as leader. “Governments need to create the space and opportunities by which civil society and community politics can thrive. To some extent, this means giving power away,” Right on!

“There’s a strong feeling in society that too much power has slipped from the people’s grasp and has been concentrated in the hands of big corporations and big bureaucracies. I want to see greater devolution of government power to the community.”

“In many cases, government needs to act as a junior partner to community effort, backing local initiatives and civil society. I also want to see greater public participation in the decisions of government.”

“For too long, the political system has been talking at people, instead of with them. It looks more like an elected aristocracy than a genuine democracy. Only by deepening our democracy can we encourage more people to get involved in civic life, rebuilding communities and social capital. I want this to be the hallmark of a Labor Government.”

Meanwhile, the NSW Labor government rips power away from the grassroots against the wishes of communities. Carr didn’t say a word about council amalgamations before the March 2003 election, although if you read the Australian Financial Review property section, you’d have known that’s what he planned as a reward to his Labor’s big developer donors. The plan was explicit – do forced amalgamations in the first year of a new term and hope the people’s anger would dissipate by the next election!

So after the election, Carr told voters they could not elect their local representatives as scheduled in September 2003, but would keep the old lot for another six months while councils considered amalgamations. No compulsion, we were promised. Another lie. There’s just been a forced amalgamation on the NSW north coast, and in Sydney the government ran a sham consultation over the summer holiday before forcibly amalgamating Sydney City Council and South Sydney Council in the dead of night to head off a legal challenge to its validity. The reason? To get a Labor controlled council, and thus State government control over development.

For all its faults, local government happens where we live, and we meet the decision makers on the streets and can look them in the eye. We can intervene when we’re unhappy by rocking up to the council meeting and having our say, and organising local campaigns and meetings.

Not only that, but local government is streets ahead of State and Federal governments in accountability terms. A councilor must declare any conflict of interest – and the nature of the conflict – before a decision is made. In State government, Carr and his ministers announce decisions without disclosing that the beneficiary is a big Labor party donor, and even sells access to companies wanting a favourable decision for thousands of dollars, again without disclosure.

The Carr government has a long history of stripping powers from local government and overriding them to suit itself. Only the Cape Byron Trust has survived as community land run by the community with profits ploughed back into the community. All the rest has been taken by the Sate Government to snatch revenue and rip it out of communities. It also starves local government by not letting it increase rates, and mandates that councilors get only $13,000 a year for what is often a 60 hour a week, desperately stressful job, guaranteeing that many people who want to contribute to their community can’t do so.

Each local government has to have a four year management plan setting out its objectives and its expected budget, which is reviewed quarterly to track how programs and budgets are going. The State government could have done with something like that, as we’ve seen in the year since Carr won office for a third term, when the results of top down government dominated by spinning perception instead of dealing with reality has become shockingly clear.

The trains are in disrepair after years of underinvestment. Our public hospitals are in crisis. Our water is running out, and Sydney is choking on population growth in the absence of any decentralisation planning.

My point is – how is Latham going to counter a Howard attack along these lines in NSW come the federal election? His pledges are intoxicating, but the reality of NSW Labor is toxic.

Maybe Latham hopes that NSW voters fully vent their spleen at Labor at the council elections, and elect non-Labor councils to protect themselves against a rapacious, power drunk, irresponsible State government.

Otherwise, Latham will have to hope Carr cleans up his act in the next few months, or tell NSW voters how he’ll take on the NSW Right if he wins office and give power back to the people despite Bob Carr.

G’day. Webdiary has a new conservative columnist in 2004, long time Webdiarist Noel Hadjimichael. Noel is a suburban solicitor and a member of the Liberal Party in Sydney’s West, that territory Mark Latham is hell bent on winning back for Labor.

Shifting frontline

by Noel Hadjimichael

News that Liberal Party researchers and campaign pundits have identified the Federal Government as open to defeat is good news for coalition voters and bad news for Latham groupies.

Any potential backlash against the John Howard style, the Free Trade Agreement or WMDs by conservative voters will now evaporate when the thought of young Mark running the country or his Shadow Cabinet controlling the economic and policy levers seems possible.

In 1996, the demolition job done on Paul Keating�s government (otherwise known as the �true believers gone arrogant�) was fuelled by widespread disenchantment from Labor voters and outright anger from middle ground conservatives.

The next seven years saw the Coalition muscle up in East Timor, deliver the GST-induced economic recovery plan, court then condemn the Hanson crusade and generally oversee a new conservative game plan for the Australian nation. No more �sorry marches�, no more Asian adventures at the expense of other markets and no further pandering to special interest groups associated with a grievance industry.

This year we have seen the emergence of a powerful, articulate and hungry Opposition Leader hell bent on making history. We now have real competition on ideas, policies and programs.

The intelligentsia in the triangle of power (inner city metrosexual Sydney, inner city caf� latte Melbourne and Whitlam-era Canberra) cannot but hate the current Federal Government for its part in destroying all the good bits from the Hawke-Keating power trip.

You know, the rush to become a Republic, any republic. Pity about the details and that horrible colonial relic the Referendum process.

 The commitment to multiculturalism as long as the definition allowed lots of easy grants for fellow consultants and plenty of ambiguity over the Australian national identity. Pity about that Flag, with the annoying British bit in the corner.

A recognition that indigenous Australians are disadvantaged and over represented in the Courts, on welfare rolls and in social distress environments. Pity about any calls from grass-roots leaders to get employment, family structures and substance abuse corrected. Rights and self-determination will fix that up. We hope.

The uncomfortable aspects of the last Labor government are trivialised or treated as not important.

What a surprise that mainstream ordinary Australians, the very people that inhabit the suburbs and regional cities, remember the early 1990s recession we had to have. What a bore that interest rates should be so low now and that inflation is under check.

It is terrible that social programs have been restrained and defence spending boosted. Butter for the well connected is always better than guns.

The battleground for the 2004 contest, in the suburbs of marginal seat Australia, will revolve around a mix of domestic and international issues.

Border control is fixed: most of us want tight borders and decent intake programs. Few want the scramble for places via the big dollar smuggler networks.

 The war on terror demands a focus on security arrangements tied to alliances with like-minded and friendly powers. No government in training should get relaxed about the current situation.

Troubled health and education sectors need to be addressed. Not so much with more money but better policies to offer affordable choice, cost control and true innovation. Ten world-class universities are better than 38 cash-starved dinosaurs. More self provision is desired if the quality can be guaranteed in health provision.

For aspiring pollies, the shopping malls of Penrith, the quiet streets of Camden, the commuter trains of the NSW Central Coast and the low-fee private school playgrounds of outer suburban Melbourne will be the battleground. Visit these communities and you will see what John and Mark might be saying in the near future.