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Blog: Skewed View Of Alp Obscures Reality, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Skewed View Of Alp Obscures Reality, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the Labor government lies embattled, ready for a substantial defeat at the polls today, facts about the Australian economy and overseas understandings of Australia's performance over the last six years are emerging. Far from being the basket-case fashioned by the opposition and much of the media, the Australian economy's growth has actually lifted the average standard of living. A study by Ben Phillips from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) shows wage growth has outstripped inflation and produced an economic benefit for the average Australian family that is quite significant. We do not hear much about …
Blog: Petty Politics Overshadows Policy, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Petty Politics Overshadows Policy, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The coming federal election is already highlighting aspects of Australian politics that are cause for concern. The "mock menu" (which initially was thought to be for a Liberal Party fundraising dinner) with its vulgar and demeaning reference to our Prime Minister is not only ample confirmation of Julia Gillard’s argument about misogyny but also a further signal of the decline of civility in Australian political life. When school children see it as somehow natural to throw sandwiches at the Prime Minister, we can sense this decline vividly. The media are partly responsible for this, whipping up hysteria around all sorts …
Blog: Costings Become A Guessing Game, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Costings Become A Guessing Game, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Labor’s “Gotcha” moment seemed to have backfired badly with Treasury and Finance Secretaries, together with the head of the Parliamentary Budget Office, distancing their units from claims about a $10 billion black hole. Labor’s advice from these Departments was provided with regard to policies outlined prior to the period of caretaker Government. Rather than point to a specific mistake related to earlier policy calculations, Labor could have just kept hammering the point about costings in general. Nonetheless, as Crikey correspondent Bernard Keane observed: ‘‘I’m of the view that the costings imbroglio doesn’t matter a jot: voters are aware that the …
Blog: Australia's Rude, Crude Election Debate, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Australia's Rude, Crude Election Debate, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Tony Abbott's spin on the de Niro catchphrase reveals the depths to which we have sunk, writes Anthony Ashbolt. Like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, Abbott turned to his sparring partner and said, in an admittedly less than menacing voice, “Does this guy ever shut up?” Abbott’s tame version of “You talkin’ to me?” sent a jarring note through the debate on Wednesday night and was a reminder of the lack of civility in politics I discussed in my first blog. This is simply not the stuff of genuine debate and in an ordinary contest might have sent Abbott …
Blog: Parlous State Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Parlous State Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Two events in the last week serve to highlight both the parlous state of politics and the importance of investigative journalism. First, the revelations of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) hearings; second, the verdict finding Bradley Manning guilty of espionage. These decisions both have profound ramifications not only for journalism but also for federal politics. The stench of corruption surrounding the NSW Labor Party has become stronger following the ICAC recommendations that Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald be charged with criminal offences.
Blog: Refugees A 'Political Whipping Boy', Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Refugees A 'Political Whipping Boy', Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd has taken up where he left off, but the vexing question of asylum seekers is yet to be answered by either party, writes Anthony Ashbolt. It is almost as if Kevin Rudd never stopped being Prime Minister. Such is the surreal nature of politics I referred to in the last piece. I noted also the Hollywood-like imagery the leadership battle evoked. Yet I did not mention the most glaring instance of this. Gillard marched into the caucus room that would decide her fate surrounded by a posse of loyal colleagues, only to be followed by the lone ranger …
Blog: Campaign Dull And Boring, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: Campaign Dull And Boring, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The Federal election week started with a non-debate and didn't really improve after that, writes Anthony Ashbolt. The prelude to this week in federal politics was provided by a non-debate on Sunday evening. The debate failed not only because there was no real engagement and exchange between the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition but also because the format itself was so managed and staged that even the press gallery questioners appeared awkward and unsure of where they were meant to be.
Blog: The Language Of Election Speak, Anthony Ashbolt
Blog: The Language Of Election Speak, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Language is often the first thing that suffers during an election campaign, writes Anthony Ashbolt. We are, as the first week of election campaigning draws to a close, in a period that George Orwell might have called “election-speak”. Language is used in increasingly magical ways. When Humpty Dumpty noted that words meant what he wanted them to mean, he might have had political campaigns in mind. Language is very often the first thing that suffers during such contests and along with that genuine meaning departs rapidly. Until last week the Gonski (or now Better Schools) proposals were anathema to the …
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The American alliance is simply too costly for Australia both in terms of human lives and international relations. While our political leaders prattle on about “getting the job done”, an Orwellian nightmare persists in Afghanistan and the police we train torture detainees and are deeply enmeshed in the drug trade, the troops we train turn into Taliban and the Government we prop up is no better, in moral or philosophical terms, than its enemy in the field. The American Century is well and truly over and it is time to forge new associations and to think not in terms of …
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
History repeats itself, endlessly and sometimes tiresomely. Numerous writers and scholars have worried about the divisions - social, political and cultural - which began permeating American society in the 1960s. The unravelling of America, the coming apart of America, became familiar refrains. During the 'sixties itself, Daniel Boorstin's new left barbarians were at the gate threatening the very genius of American politics which Boorstin had postulated in the previous decade. This genius, itself a cousin of American exceptionalism, revolved around the erosion of ideological division, and the lack of vigorous difference within the American polity. Rather than this producing a …
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Transcript of an interview with Professor Michael Paul Rogin, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, conducted in the Cafe Grace, Berkeley, November 1, 1995.
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
When Julia Gillard became Minister for Education and Everything Else That Moves, as well as de facto Prime Minister, she expressed a desire to have a conversation about school funding. This politics of inclusion (social inclusion is one of her many portfolios after all) was short-lived and it became clear that conversation was code for acceptance of the status quo. So Julia went off and had a conversation of her own with utopian dreamers whose vision of the good society revolves around testing regimes, job credentialism, disciplinary control of schools (particularly teachers), and whose heights of ecstasy are only achieved …
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, Anthony Ashbolt
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to challenge. This Government's persistent embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, Anthony Ashbolt
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy.
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Perry Anderson is a towering figure in the annals of contemporary Marxism. As such, he deserves a special sort of intellectual history, one that engages and illuminates and challenges. Blackledge only succeeds in a partial and rather unsatisfactory way. In a sense this is a book in two parts, even though it is not divided as such. The first deals with the Anderson of the 1960s and 1970s, the second with Anderson’s later developments. The first part is very dry and somewhat confused intellectual history, the second has a few acute observations about the shifts in Anderson’s thinking. I suspect …
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In a splendid essay in The London Review of Books (11 September, 2008), Ross McKibbon took the hatchet to New Labour. He expressed particular distaste for the ‘democracy of manners’ that has made Britain resemble Australian and American society. This democracy of manners is, of course, all surface egalitarianism concealing profound inequality. He bemoaned ‘the moral exclusion of those who were once considered part of Labour’s constituency – the social underdogs’ (p. 22). The government, in particular, sidelined young working class men, portraying them as outside ‘the sphere of moral worth’. McKibbon acknowledged that Britain ‘is a very much more …
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The steady rise of the radical Republican right as an electoral force since the mid 1960s is an intriguing, albeit chilling, feature of contemporary politics. What was once considered fringe and unacceptable, to the point where Goldwater was decimated by Johnson in 1964, has now become mainstream. We now have an administration that compels National Parks bookstores to stock a book which argues that the Grand Canyon is only 4500 years old, being the result of the global flood described in Genesis. This reflects both the persistence of fundamentalist beliefs in ordinary Americans and a dramatic transformation in American political …
Reviews: Suburban Warriors - The Origins Of The New American Right; The Book Of Jerry Falwell - Fundamentalist Language And Politics; Blinded By The Right - The Conscience Of An Ex-Conservative, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The triumph of a neoliberal economic doctrine in America has been accompanied by, indeed partly propelled by, a conservative social and moral agenda. The paradox is this - as neoliberalism cuts its swathe through tradition, remaking the social order out of the ruins of a New Deal consensus, it removes the material conditions that can sustain social and moral conservatism. Thus it is that the Supreme Court recently upheld the doctrine of privacy in Lawrence vs. Texas and effectively challenged state laws banning sodomy. In a dissenting decision, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the Court had taken the wrong side …
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt examines the funding inequalities in education and problems with policies of social exclusion.
Labor’S Education Policy Buried By An Untrue Tale, Anthony Ashbolt
Labor’S Education Policy Buried By An Untrue Tale, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
There is a perplexing myth pervading journalistic commentary and even Labor party thinking. The persistence and predominance of this myth not only illustrates the power that the media wield and the ignorance they fuel but also shows how a certain mode of thought, including key terms and phrases, saturates public discussion.
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2009-10, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2009-10, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As brand Labor, otherwise known as Rudd Labor, begins to look more and more like an extension of the Howard administration, things get stranger and stranger. In one week we had the appointment of Peter Costello to the board overseeing the Future Fund. This so enraged Paul Keating he almost sounded like a class warrior. We had Martin Ferguson telling Sharon Burrow that the ACTU only represented a sectional interest whereas the Government had to act for everyone. We had an unholy squabble between the soft left and the hard left about the future of Martin’s brother Laurie Ferguson. It …
I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill: Woodstock, 1969/Berlin, 1989, Anthony Ashbolt
I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill: Woodstock, 1969/Berlin, 1989, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Woodstock music festival have gone dangerously close to transforming it into another commodified spectacle. Yet the spirit of the original Woodstock lives on to remind us of another way of thinking about the world. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 featured a galaxy of performers who had contributed significantly to the alternative zeitgeist that spoke of peace and love in ways that may sound corny now. The peace and love of the Sixties was grounded in a strong antiwar sensibility and a sense of collective solidarity against the American war in …
Time For A Real Education Revolution, Anthony Ashbolt
Time For A Real Education Revolution, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
News that elite private school fess are becoming increasingly less affordable hardly comes as a surprise. What would be genuinely surprising is news that they had become increasingly accessible to poorer sections of the community. That, of course, is not going to happen. Elite private schools service the elite. Forget the occasional dramatic publicity about Aboriginal scholarship students. They are publicity tokens propping up the illusion that social justice informs these school's charters. Elite Catholic schools are particularly good at manufacturing images of social concern and commitment. The images disappear at the front door. Rigorous selection criteria, based now more …
Education Aims To Nurture A Thinking World, Anthony Ashbolt
Education Aims To Nurture A Thinking World, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
One of the main tasks of education is to nurture inquiring minds. Equipping students with a capacity to think about the world is as important as gaining a formal qualification. Indeed, the two should not be separated - what use is a qualification which has not also enabled you to be a thoughtful citizen? A democratic system is dependant upon an educated and informed public. When both education and information are restricted, democracy suffers accordingly.
Us Failing To Heed Any Lessons From History, Anthony Ashbolt
Us Failing To Heed Any Lessons From History, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the world witnessed the cold ferocity of terrorism last week - the shattering loss of life, the enormous suffering of the American people - it became clear quickly that madness was to be met by madness. It is perhaps understandable that irrational policy flows from seemingly irrational events. It is not, however, good for world peace or even good for the fight against terrorism. Xenophobia, jingoism and racism are not logical or considered responses to international terrorism.
Latham Had It Right, Anthony Ashbolt
Latham Had It Right, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
While Tony Blair's war on civil liberties has been checked by the British Parliament, Labor in Australia fails to challenge the threat to democracy which the terrorism legislation represents. Instead, Kim Beazley is happy to declare that Labor is with Mr Howard in "the war on terror". That is somewhat remarkable, given that Mr Howard sees the invasion of Iraq as part of "the war on terror".
The Myths We Are Taught About Schools, Anthony Ashbolt
The Myths We Are Taught About Schools, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Certain mythologies pervade the assault upon public education. One of these is that Labor's education policy at the 2004 election damaged the party electorally. I will explore this next week. First, however, I will address a more recent intervention in the schooling debate which has received much attention. Emeritus Professor Brian Caldwell, publicizing his book published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), has pointed repeatedly to an AC Nielsen survey conducted for the ACER showing that a significant number of public school parents would send their children to private schools if they could. The survey, from July 2004, …
A Market Model Of Education?, Anthony Ashbolt
A Market Model Of Education?, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Milton Friedman introduced the concept of vouchers in education over fifty years ago. Thankfully the world ignored him. Nonetheless, the various victories of neoliberal doctrine from the early 1970s on in the USA, England and Australia placed vouchers on the agenda but not as a central platform. It is one of those policy ideas that is embraced with enthusiasm periodically only to retreat into the recesses of think tanks whose priorities are tax relief for the wealthy and real or imagined wars. When the governments of choice for these tanks are replaced by ones with a thin veneer of progressive …
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
While thinking about the contemporary state of politics, it is very difficult to shake off a recurring image from the brilliant television series A Very Peculiar Practice. In that show, a wonderful aging character was writing a book about the parlous state of higher education in Great Britain. 'Death of the University' muttered Jock into a portable tape recorder, between swigs of Scotch, as he wandered around campus despairing at the shattered values and distorted priorities of the new university. Jock spoke for all of us who care about education. I hope to be speaking to all of us who …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the new Industrial Relations legislation prepares the labour movement for wider and more militant struggles, it is good to be reminded of industrial action that resulted in trade union victory.