Ethics and politics

Yes I know, ‘political ethics’ is an oxymoron. However, I don’t accept that it was always thus. In fact, I believe that political amorality and fashionable cynicism have increased hand-in-hand to degrade the political process substantially over the last 20 years.

Spin and exaggeration may always have been part of political discourse, but it is only recently that deliberate, blatant lying has come to be regarded as routine tactics; something that the parties do well or badly but in either case do not feel any compunctions about doing in the first place.

I’m not referring here to lies of the variety that say A didn’t occur when the speaker knows that A actually did occur. Fortunately we still have some vestiges of ethics in our political system and people caught out in this kind of lie can expect to pay a price … which explains why politicians still go to extreme lengths to establish ‘plausible deniability’, a condition which allows them to plead ignorance and thus innocence of lying, even if (as in the AWB affair) it makes them look comprehensively thick and careless. The latter have never been considered serious flaws in National Party politicians.

No, the sort of lies I am talking about are lies of the kind that assert that if A happens, then B will happen. The recently defrocked prime minister built a dazzling structure of lies of this nature about terrorism and Australia’s involvement in American imperialist adventures in the Middle East. Defeat in Iraq, he insisted (whatever ‘defeat’ means in a country which was thoroughly defeated four years ago and is under the control of a US occupation force) would mean that the terrorists would be ‘emboldened’ all throughout South East Asia, thereby increasing the threat to Australia many times over. Needless to say there wasn’t the slightest evidence to support these extraordinary fabrications, nor were there any intuitive grounds to accept his speculative hypothesis. It was all a work of fiction, a pack of lies invented to justify a dreadful mistake by Bush with which Howard chose to associate himself.

The casual way in which politicians have come to accept that these kinds of lies are all part of the rough and tumble of Australian electioneering was brought home to me last night while watching the election coverage. Nick Minchin on the ABC, at about 8.25pm, said words to the effect that ‘interest rates worked very well for us last time’. I was so struck by his words and the nonchalant way he uttered them that I made a note at the time.

What Minchin said in effect was that the Liberal Party in 2004 dreamed up a lie to use as an election tactic - a lie which had no foundation in fact or theory and which they knew to be a lie. The lie, if you recall, was that the Liberals would keep interest rates at record lows and that interest rates would always be higher under Labor. It was apparent from Minchin’s demeanour that he felt no shame at having used this tactic, nor any special pride either - it was just an everyday part of campaigning.

Lest I be perceived as bashing only one side in this argument, let me quickly add that the ALP engaged in exactly the same kind of lying in this campaign. Their target was WorkChoices. Against all the evidence, and defying the stated commitment of the whole Howard cabinet, they stated repeatedly that if re-elected, Howard’s mob would amend WorkChoices in unspecified but dreadful ways. Like the Libs’ use of interest rates in 2004, this was a deliberate attempt to have gullible voters believe something which the politicians had no reason to believe was true - in fact, had every reason to believe was not true.

Does any of this matter? After all, we are constantly bombarded with spin and exaggeration and outright lies in the form of corporate advertising. It’s arguable that citizens in the 21st century should be able to tell the difference between truth and propaganda, and if they can’t, well they deserve whatever comes to them.

I don’t believe we should accept that cynical argument, at least with regard to statements made by members of parliament and especially by members of the government. Unlike actors in television commercials for breakfast cereal, MPs hold privileged positions in society. They have been given what is known as legitimate authority - power that resides in the positions they hold independent of their personal qualities. Citizens expect that they will not abuse that power and citizens are entitled to have that expectation. For society to function effectively, all holders of legitimate authority, be they police officers or public servants or judges, have a duty to use that authority in the interests of those who have bestowed it on them, namely ordinary Australians. Once individuals use their legitimate authority for their own self interest, the implicit contract that allows a free society to operate effectively begins to fray … as it certainly has in this country over the last several years.

Abuses of authority cause consequences. In politics, they inspire a race to the bottom, until the kind of vicious stunt pulled by Jackie Kelly’s mob last week is all part of the great game. Often this generates a response from concerned sections of the community and inevitably, when voluntary adherence to a code of ethics breaks down, the community resorts to increased levels of regulation. While this might cause a temporary improvement, it transforms the whole issue of correct behaviour from an ethical one to a legal one, fostering the mentality that anything goes as long as a way can be found to evade legal punishment. Since the law can seldom keep pace with human ingenuity, the outcome is an endlessly growing amount of regulation and bureaucracy. Tax matters and traffic regulations are good examples.

Kevin Rudd and most of his cabinet are an unknown quantity. For a considerable time, they will not have to worry about any plausible threat to their electoral dominance. If they want to make a lasting contribution to the quality of Australian governance, they could do a lot worse than systematically restore proper standards of ethical behaviour not just in public administration, but in the manner in which they conduct party-political discourse.

Sydney celebrates

Sydney today hosts its first ever Christmas street parade. With a bit of luck it will turn into a giant party to celebrate the end of the most divisive, mean-spirited, narrow-minded government in Australian history.

The irony is that Howard helped pay for it

Election Eve

Yet another poll has forecast a Labor win tomorrow.

In response, Mr Howard said he would just have to work harder. Or to be precise:

“I will spend every waking hour between now and six o’clock tomorrow night talking to the Australian people.”

The response of the Australian people is not recorded, but is generally believed to be along the lines of “How about you try listening for once you annoying old man?”

I’ve posted on my underwhelming excitement about the election here, in the unlikely event that anyone’s interested.

Random ramblings on climate change

I’ve written before that I’m a fatalist when it comes to global warming and climate change. The human race will work its way through it - or not - in a reactive, pragmatic fashion that will doubtless leave plenty of misery and devastation in its wake. There is no chance of a managed international response that actually slows, stops and eventually reverses global warming. The issues are too enormous for our political institutions to cope.

It’s tempting to believe that authoritarian governments, or better still totalitarian regimes, are the answer. By concentrating power in the executive government, could we not create command societies in which all the required changes could be imposed by force? Well, probably not, even if people accepted that desperate times demanded that kind of desperate measure. The history of totalitarian regimes in modern times demonstrates that they are lousy administrators. Black markets and corruption thrive, administrative inefficiency becomes endemic, and there is virtually no chance that lofty plans made by the central authority will ever come to fruition.

So can the answer be found in free participatory forms of governance?

Theoretically, democratic societies should be able to develop a managed response. Theoretically. The population should be capable of being informed about the crisis, and once informed, they should voluntarily support action taken by an elected government. However, once again history doesn’t offer much comfort that the theory has any chance of being converted into effective action. Democracies have a generally poor record of bringing long-term change about through deliberate planning. Attempts to do it are usually marked by unexpected problems and unanticipated consequences. More often than not, the private sector finds ways to circumvent the snail-like pace of democratic decision-making, leading to an outcome far from the one intended.

One only has to look at the fate of town planning strategies over the years, at either a regional or local level, to see how ineffectual governments are at environmental management. About the only successes they have had have been with simple one dimensional issues like banning CFCs. On the other hand, government-orchestrated campaigns to do the simplest things like encourage recycling or cut the use of plastic shopping bags have been comical in their clumsy ineffectiveness.

One of the problems of course is that few people in positions of authority seem to really believe that we are facing a crisis like the one described so persuasively by the vast majority of informed scientists (and most recently summarised by the IPCC). If people truly believed the IPCC’s findings of what was ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’, the situation would be regarded as critical. There would be calls for governments of national unity and so on. Needless to say, nothing of the kind is happening. As our prime minister put it, “the world is not coming to an end tomorrow and that like all of these things we have to get a commonsense, balanced approach.'’

It might not be coming to an end tomorrow, but the IPCC has made some quite scary findings about things that are likely to happen by 2020, which would only a bloke who will be 80 by then could face with the careless equanimity that Howard displayed. Mick Keelty of the Federal Police showed a sense of urgency in predicting that global warming would become the century’s greatest security threat, but I think Howard has read the public mood accurately. By and large there is no sense of urgency. By the time one develops, it will be far too late. That’s why I’m a fatalist.

Until recently, I had been comforted by the thought that people would simply go ahead and adapt to climate change, much as they’ve adapted to other environmental changes, with a lot of casualties along the way but no outright catastrophes. Now, I’m not so sure. Certainly some of the changes will be incremental but it’s a bit hard to adapt to fires and floods of an intensity never experienced before. The chances therefore seem to be depressingly high that climate change is going to ensure that the 21st century is every bit as violent as the one that preceded it.

In a recent post, Tom Engelhardt wrote eloquently about the bewilderment he feels when he experiences the wilful silence being practised by governments and the media over looming disasters that may well be caused by something as prosaic yet cataclysmic as a major city running out of water. He cites the case of Atlanta, Georgia, a city of five million people, ‘with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as 80 days or as much as a year, if the rains don’t come.’ What do you do if a city bigger than any in Australia runs out of water? It’s a bit of a challenge to truck it in from another city, even if one exists with that much water to spare. Engelhardt goes on to discuss similar crises that could potentially engulf many countries, not by the end of the century, but within a matter of a few years. The countries concerned are not in third world Africa but in the developed world, where until recently water was used to hose leaves off the driveways and to keep vast areas of grass bright green, not for any practical purpose but because they gave every middle class home its own little reinterpretation of the stately mansions of Europe.

One gets the distinct impression that politicians and public administrators everywhere are gritting their teeth and desperately praying that if crises there are to be, they will be delayed until the next bloke’s watch. Because frankly, they have neither the will nor the means to do anything useful to avoid them. In this respect I have to give a rare bouquet to the Iemma and Bligh Governments for persevering with desalination plants in Sydney and the Gold Coast. The recent outbreak of ‘cancel the desal plant!’ madness in Sydney just because the dams had recovered to a bit over half full was a good indication of the extent to which the message of climate change hasn’t really penetrated most people’s consciousness. Deep down, they still believe we’re experiencing a drought and that sooner or later it will all be over and we can go back to normal.

One of the reasons for this mentality must be the way some media figures use climate change as a means of satisfying their insatiable need for public attention. Media whores in the USA like Ann Coulter, along with people like Australia’s own Tim Blair, have used climate change to help craft their public identities. They treat it as a joke, pretending in the most puerile fashion that they are qualified to assess and pass judgement upon the considered work of thousands of scientists who have devoted their scholarly lives to their disciplines. The Coulters and Blairs of this world haven’t the slightest conception of scholarship or science; to them, words are simply things to be manipulated in the hunt for a quick laugh or another day of notoriety.

Complementing these media clowns is a much larger number of right wingers who are determined to portray climate change as just another partisan political issue, like income tax scales or the education system. These people’s pathological devotion to blind partisan warfare is beyond pathetic. They have abandoned any pretence to rationality or evidence-based decision-making. Determined to present the world in ‘with us or against us’ terms on every conceivable matter, they noted long ago that concern for the environment was owned by ‘the left’. They therefore adopted a reflexive opposition to any and every program put forward by anyone to preserve the environment. These are the people for whom expressions like ’save the whale’ and ‘tree-hugger’ still cause great hilarity … people who feel a vicious contempt for the Greens and anyone vaguely sympathetic to them.

Their intellectual vacuity is amply demonstrated by their incoherence once they get past the juvenile lampooning and faux-science that they love to engage in. Their case rests on the proposition that the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists have made a huge mistake and/or have perpetrated a gigantic hoax on humanity as some kind of attention-seeking scam to gain access to research dollars. Whichever they believe is true, it suggests a gross crisis of confidence in the whole academic infrastructure that underpins our global society. If the academy is capable of such behaviour in something as fundamental as the future of our habitat, how can we trust them on less important issues affecting our health and well-being?

So if these right wing denialists were fair dinkum, they would be screaming from the rooftops for a thorough overhaul of our universities, in order to prevent frauds like global warming ever being repeated. Needless to say, they do nothing of the sort. Their minds are incapable of grasping the systemic implications of their deranged conspiracy theories. To them it’s all a game of endless point-scoring, which has long since come to preoccupy their nasty little minds to the exclusion of any considerations such as what the evidence might indicate.

The other observation worth making about these wingnuts is the extent of the inconsistency in their asserted values. They allege that ‘the left’ promotes the notion of anthropogenic global warming as either a deliberate conspiracy or an unthinking obsession to impose social controls on individual freedoms. They are very big on personal freedoms, these guys. Until, that is, they come to the scary War on Terror, where with the richest irony these fuckwits assert with bugger-all evidence that terrorism is a ginormous threat that justifies giving the state all sorts of draconian powers that have never been contemplated before outside periods of declared shooting wars with other known nations.

Why do these wingnuts exhibit such cognitive dissonance? Why are they appalled at any suggestion of increased regulation to prevent climate change but all in favour of it to control some over-hyped minimal threat from a few loonies in the Middle East? Well it’s because action to respond to climate change would have to be of necessity co-operative. These guys don’t do co-operation. Their whole world view is based on us v them, with us or against us, American exceptionalism (with which our local morons lust desperately to associate themselves) and generally in their compulsive desire to run the joint from an elitist position and keep all the other billions of blacks and Asians and Latinos and most of all Muslims in their place. For people who think like this, authoritarian government to minimise the risk of terrorism is just fine because they automatically think of themselves as the authority figures but the slightest hint of regulation in the interests of the collective to minimise the risk of running out of water in 20 years is an outrageous attack on personal liberty and not to be tolerated.

These climate change naysayers will come in the fullness of time to be recognised for what they are - the contemporary equivalents of cretinous 19th century aristocrats who were too smug and stupid to understand the tide of change sweeping over their world - but unfortunately that won’t do the rest of us much good. Their pernicious activities are the final reason why it will prove impossible for governments to act until it’s too late; they provide a rallying point for all the sordid selfish interests who couldn’t give a shit what happens to the rest of humanity as long as nothing interferes with their worship of the great god ‘Teh Economy’.

Apologies for the long and unwieldy the post … it’s symptomatic of the nature of the complex maze of issues that together constitute climate change, and illustrates as well as anything why it is beyond the capacity of our social institutions to do anything useful about it.

Andrew Podger

In recent years I’ve enjoyed reading about Andrew Podger, who retired not long ago as Public Service Commissioner after previously having a distinguished career in the APS, including a stint as Permanent Secretary of the Health Department if memory serves me right.

The reason I’ve taken such a personal interest is that Andrew was a good mate of mine a longass time ago, from 5th class through to 3rd year high school, after which he went off to a private school and we lost touch as you do at that age.

Club Troppo linked to an interview with him and it was nice to see that he was ageing nearly as gracefully as I am, and has equally managed to retain his intelligence and sense of humour. One day I must write about the remarkable group of kids that I was privileged to be a member of nearly 50 years ago, in one of the first NSW ‘opportunity classes’. Andy is only one of several members who have gone on to make outstanding contributions to the country.

If you’re bored you can try and pick which one is him (clue … he’s in the front row). I’m there too if you’re really bored, along with a university chancellor, a few doctors, a headmaster, a lawyer turned merchant banker and so on. Apart from the lawyer/merchant banker, few of them have been too concerned with making lots of money. Perhaps that was just a characteristic of that generation.

A couple of them are dead now too … yet if figures are to be believed, those still alive have more than 20 years of life ahead of them on average. It will be interesting to see what they and thousands like them do as the first generation to have such an extended average lifespan; one in which they will not only be comfortably off and well-informed but also have access to instant means of communication. Somehow I can’t see them being content to while away the hours on the golf course or the bowling green.

Birth of the brews

According to this article:

Chocolate began as beer-like brew 3,100 years ago

And they passed the secret recipe on to the Guinness people, who have followed it to this day

Gender roles

Systematic research on MySpace … well all right, casual observation … has revealed something that I had never noticed before.

In their profile pictures, most women are content to use an image that is a recognisable likeness of their face … usually looking at the camera.

Men, on the other hand, prefer to be pictured doing something: riding a bike, drinking a beer, pulling a cretinous face, and in a surprisingly high number of instances, holding a dead fish.

I’m sure it just goes to show something very significant about the differences between Mars and Venus, and I’ll let you know what as soon as I figure it out.

The demon drink

The whole Ben Cousins thing got me thinking about drugs and alcohol. I have to say my thoughts about booze are ambivalent … and what’s more I can see a lot of arguments for and against.

I grew up in the era before there were even breathalysers, let alone RBTs. Those were the days when people drove long distances and drank a great deal and then drove home again. The law, quaint as it seems now, prescribed that nobody could get a drink on a Sunday unless they’d travelled more than 30 (if my memory serves me right) miles … so thousands of us used to hop in our cars and drive to Wiseman’s Ferry and the Blue Mountains and Gosford just so we could sign the book saying we’d driven more than 30 miles, and then we’d drink piss all afternoon and drive home shit-faced. A normal Saturday night after cricket or football involved driving to a pub and drinking lots of beers followed by driving to a party and drinking lots more beers and then driving … well you get the idea. Once I drove with a mate from Killara to Terrigal about midnight Saturday to check out a rumoured party, and when we couldn’t find it we turned around and drove back. He went to sleep, the bastard, leaving me alone with the esky.

They were the days when people made jokes like “I had to drive, I was too drunk to walk” and it was a mark of distinction to have a story about doing something witless while blind drunk. My best effort was driving straight into a street sign in Manly after a solid day on the grog. The sign, which in those days was a hefty timber arrangement, bounced up under the Austin A40 I was driving and bent the gear linkages, so I only had 2nd and 4th. I still drove home to Normanhurst though … and my passengers thought it was hilarious.

It’s really no wonder the road toll has declined so dramatically since the 1970s.

For many years it was routine for me to get somewhere between tippy and off-my-face at least three times a week. I cringe now at the memory of some of the things I did when I was pissed. I was enormously lucky not to end up either badly hurt or with a criminal record or both; equally lucky not to hurt somebody else … and I know quite a few blokes of my vintage who weren’t so lucky.

And yet … and yet … it’s not like alcohol is all bad. I’m not generally a sociable person and there have been many many occasions which have only been made vaguely tolerable for me because people are drinking. After a few drinks I become a much more likeable person, and that’s not just a figment of my imagination because I know a lot of other people whose conversation is stilted and uninteresting until they’ve had a few, after which they get to be quite entertaining and enjoyable company. I think the value of a social lubricant as effective as this can’t just be disregarded, especially when we spend so much of our time in the wholly unnatural act of having to make pleasant conversation with strangers.

Moreover, there’s a positive side to the risk-taking that alcohol encourages. Sure it’s made me do some things that even now make me flush with embarrassment but it also gave me the courage to do a few things that paid off big time … things I never would have done sober.

Grog also helps me engage in contemplative thinking. I can still remember vividly the circumstances in which I took two of the biggest decisions of my life: both were made in an extended session of solitary drinking. Not paralytic-drunk drinking, just the drinking that brings insight and establishes priorities and provides sudden grateful clarity. It’s a mental condition that from my reading is also associated with some of the hallucinogenic drugs and it makes it easy to understand why they are so attractive.

These days I rarely drink much, although that’s an elastic term I suppose. Put it this way … I’d be happy to hop in the car and face a breathalyser just about any night of the week. Partly it’s because there are few occasions for me to drink much now and partly it’s for health reasons. My body I think appreciates the respite … I’m not so sure about my mind. While it’s true that I find it easier now to do a few hours work after dinner without falling asleep, I don’t believe I’m as creative as I used to be. Or to put it another way, my academic writing has probably improved but my creative writing lacks the spark of old.

All of which means that I am loath to find fault with anyone who uses drugs of any description. Except cigarettes. That’s just retarded.

On the wings of song

It’s a new era in diplomacy.

The French and German foreign ministers, Bernard Kouchner and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, are to record a duet together for release on YouTube. Fortunately professional musicians will be on hand to help out the two crooning politicians.

Yeah well you’ve already guessed where I’m going with this, haven’t you.

Who can we pair Lexie up with?

Well there’s only one choice really isn’t there ….

Condi plays a mean piano apparently and of course Lexie’s got form as a cabaret artist.

All that’s left is to pick a song. Something suitably camp I think … an old Marlene Dietrich number? Something by Charles Aznavour perhaps … it would let Lexie show off his fluency in French.

But wait … I can imagine the most awesomest YouTube video, with images of John Howard and George W Bush forming patterns on a giant screen while their two foreign ministers do a heartfelt rendition of ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’. It’s genius, even if I do say so myself, and is bound to be one of the top online hits of 2007.

A job for Leightons maybe

I read that they’ve unveiled the design of London’s Olympic Stadium.

I hope they allow an Australian company to build it like Multiplex built the new Wembley Stadium … it’s always nice to give something back to the mother country