A Wave of Unreason John Biggs

1 A Wave of Unreason A WAVE OF UNREASON BY JOHN BIGGS IN MEMORY OF MAX BOUND 2 A Wave of Unreason For the cover My god this is an important book. It restates so very many obvious truths. Chief among them … neoliberalism, the predominant philosophy of recent (largely white) Western humankind, is stuffed … It is a false path … doomed. John Biggs makes this point very powerfully Read this most important book. John Biggs details how the drift to neoliberalism received a huge impetus under a ‘socialist’ Labor government during the Hawke-Keating era. We have been sliding backwards ever since; no more exemplified than during the Abbott government (PM Turnbull is now Abbott-lite). If Australia continues along the path of neoliberalism the immense divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots will inexorably increase. Pray we do not … Lindsay Tuffin, Long-time journalist and news editor, founder and editor of Tasmaniantimes.com 3 A Wave of Unreason INTRODUCTION Many Australians are disgusted with politics as it has been played during and since the Howard years. In this book I explore why people are so turned off. The rot started, had we but realised it, when the Hawke-Keating governments introduced Australians to neoliberalism. Deregulation, cutting corporate taxes and privatising government owned businesses such as the Commonwealth Bank and QANTAS, transferred billions of dollars from the less wealthy to the already very wealthy. But this was Liberal territory! Indeed it was. Our two party system, which was designed in a simpler world to offer two distinct alternatives to the electorate, now gave us a choice between neoliberal hard (Liberal) and neoliberal soft (Labor). The many who do not agree with neoliberalism are therefore not adequately represented in our so-called representative democracy. Consequently, governments over the past twenty years have become increasingly dysfunctional and out of touch with the electorate. Neoliberalism, today the predominant political ideology in Western countries, asserts that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual liberty, private property rights, and especially commercial liberty such as free markets and free trade. Neoliberal thinkers asserted that neoliberalism would create more individual liberty and a more efficient allocation of resources.1 Not to the majority of people it doesn’t, as chapters in this book attest. The book is in five parts. Part I: Neoliberalism in Australia. The title chapter describes how a wave of unreason has distorted our political system. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, and the following Abbott and Turnbull governments, each displayed their own forms of unreason. One certain result of Labor dysfunction was the unreason of the Abbott years that in turn led to a further recycling of prime ministers. Turnbull’s deposing Abbott as prime minister led to a wave of optimism that swept the country. That optimism was misplaced. Was Turnbull held hostage by his extreme right; or had his nice smile hidden one as red in tooth and claw as they? Neoliberalism has also distorted and debased Australian universities. There were three phases in the history of our universities: state control, federal control, and managerialism. In the last phase neoliberal managerialism fundamentally changed the nature and function of universities. We need a new model for tertiary education. Part II Neoliberalism Gone Feral. The Trump explosion of contradiction, belligerence, and pathological egotism saw neoliberalism go feral. The question for Australia is how we cope 4 A Wave of Unreason with Trump: do we continue to be ‘joined at the hip with our closest ally’ as Turnbull puts it, or do we develop our own national strategies at some distance from where the US is at present? Could a Trump emerge in Australia? Part III: Crony Capitalism. Crony capitalism, a primitive precursor to neoliberalism, uses government to legislate for the benefit of selected favoured businesses to the detriment of the public. Tasmania, due no doubt to its small size and mateship amongst the powerbrokers, is given inter alia to crony capitalism in: the forestry industry, salmon farming and poker machine licencing. Errol Flynn provides us with a sordid metaphor for Tasmania’s polity. Part IV: Social Democracy. Are the political systems of other Western countries as chaotic and as dysfunctional as Australia’s has recently been? A trip through Scandinavia told me they are not. Scandinavian countries typically have multi-party parliaments working cooperatively and while they adopt some free market policies, they finance social welfare and rural infrastructure with high taxes – and their citizens like it that way. New Zealand also manages a polity that keeps their citizen happy, politically speaking. Why have Scandinavia and New Zealand got it right and Australia hasn’t? Part V: Back to the Enlightenment. The two pillars of the Enlightenment, the ways of reason and of humanity, provide a framework for analysing neoliberalism, trumpism, crony capitalism and social democracy. Each system prioritises in different ways the major concerns for government: the economy, social wellbeing, environmental sustainability and being a good global citizen. Some structures of government – two-party, multi-party and issues-based – are more effective than others in effectively achieving these priorities. We urgently need to sort out these priorities and how best to achieve them. *** Earlier versions of some chapters have been previously published on the online Tasmanian Times, as end noted at the chapter heads. I have updated them and altered their focus as appropriate. Other chapters make their first appearance here. I finished the book in May 2018, just as Malcolm Turnbull was swinging harder and harder to the right in order it seems to stave off attacks from his predecessor Tony Abbott and his extreme right cronies such as Eric Abetz, Peter Dutton, Craig Kelly, George Christensen and others. Turnbull, however, could do nothing right by their standards so Dutton challenged for leadership. He lost against Turnbull, but Turnbull withdrew on the second round, and Scott Morrison was put up as a ‘centre right’ (!) candidate against Dutton, and won. Morrison’s behaviour as PM has been pugnacious, unreflective and out of touch, and since the devastating Wentworth by-election is obstinately refusing to face issues like climate change, transparent asylum seeker policy, and gay issues. 5 A Wave of Unreason These events only strengthen the case that party politics as it is being played in Australia and elsewhere is quite dysfunctional. There must be a better way, . I am indebted to Lindsay Tuffin, the generous and miracle working editor of Tasmanian Times. My wife Catherine Tang’s editorial eye helped make these essays cleaner than I had left them. I was inspired in this venture by the fiercely principled Max Bound, with whom I became closely associated in the last years of his politically heroic life. Some of the more important of his writings were published just prior to his death as Greed or Survival? (Search Foundation, 2012). Max’s three word title sums up precisely the dilemma we are facing in the twenty-first century. John Biggs Hobart October 2018 6 A Wave of Unreason CONTENTS Introduction Part I: Neoliberalism in Australia Chapter 1. A Wave of Unreason Chapter 2. Maxine’s Story from the Trenches vs Julia’s Story from the Benches Chapter 3. Was the Abbott Government Fascist? Chapter 4. The Transmogrification of Malcolm Turnbull Chapter 5. Neoliberalism and Australian Universities Part II: Neoliberalism Gone Feral Chapter 6. Trumpism PART III: Crony Capitalism, Chapter 7. Crony Capitalism in Tasmania 1: The Forest Industry Chapter 8. Crony Capitalism in Tasmania 2: Salmon Farming and Gaming Licenses Part IV: Social Democracy Chapter 9. Why Have Scandinavia and New Zealand Got it Right and We Haven’t? Part V: Back to the Enlightenment? Chapter 10. What Constitutes a Good Government? 7 A Wave of Unreason PART I THE UNREASON OF NEOLIBERALISM 8 A Wave of Unreason CHAPTER 1 A WAVE OF UNREASON2 ‘A wave of unreason’ is a phrase author Edgar Wallace used in a 1920s Gothic horror story, wonderfully entitled ‘The Black Abbott’. I use this phrase in another horror story about a wave of unreason that is currently sweeping the Western world and Australia in particular. The way of reason The Enlightenment saw the Western World start thinking in a way that derives from science, using evidence that is publicly available, and the conclusions drawn therefrom argued logically and transparently. Let’s call this the way of reason. Humanism joined the way of reason as summarized in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of Mankind is Man. Thus, political policy should follow the ways of reason and of humanism. In the way of reason policies should be internally consistent and in accord with what we know about how the social, economic and physical worlds work. The American Declaration of Independence nearly gave us this new politics but not quite: this issue is discussed in the last chapter. Garnering votes however allows all sorts of unreason to cruel the issues: self-interest, spin, collusion, corruption, and so on. An educated citizenry should be able to sniff those falsifiers out, but we are a long way from that, as shall unfold. The way of faith Prior to the way of reason was the way of faith. We usually associate faith with religious beliefs but it can be faith in any dogma, including political beliefs. Faith is by definition its own validation. Faith is based on authority and its truths are absolute, not evidence-based and provisional as they are in science. It is a profound and dangerous error to confuse the way of faith with the way of reason.

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