I'm in Melbourne for a few days

The uninspiring and sometimes vindicative Rann Government im SA may have won the 2010 election, but it is on the nose after a tough budget that reducedworking conditions for public servants. There is growing unrest in the party with the current leadership with unions calling for generational change in the leadership of the Rann/Foley Labor Government.

The Rann/Foley leadership is coming to an end. Rann's popularity continues to decline, and he will be forced to depart sooner rather than latter. Foley, the Rights preferred choice, is far too unpopular with the public to become the new leader. Foley is becoming unhinged, as he is now taking to attacking a fellow minister on the floor of the parliament.

The challenge of Jay Weatherill from the left for leadership is another indication that the factional system in SA Labor could be starting to break down. Behind the technocratic facade is a neo-liberal mode of governance run by the conservative economists in Treasury in love with austerity economics, and the bankruptcy of ideas amongst the Right faction for a reform agenda beyond boom times are acoming. Boom times means better service delivery according the spin.

Lying behind this lies the decaying flesh of the ALP---exemplified in the history of dirty tricks, corruption allegations, civil rights abuses, deals with developers, secret lobbying and personal scandals. We smell the decay of the old “powerful forces” of the major parties. Change is being forced on SA Labor, which is reluctant to change.

I've been watching Question Time off and on in the last fortnight in the context of both the anti-Labor bashing by the Murdoch Press' echo chamber (“Labor has no vision” or “Labor stands for nothing”, or "Labor lacks direction") and Australia’s two-party system being over.

I wanted to see how a minority Gillard government is dealing with a situation in which the power of the executive is counterbalanced by the power of Parliament in which members have more power to put different issues on the agenda. The Green did this with gay marriage and euthanasia, and this will become more pronounced when the Greens command the balance of power in the Senate from July next year.

In his 'The leader who needs to get a grip' column in last weekends AFR Geoff Kitney says that the assertion of Green power poses a big problem for the Gillard Government:

The Greens are likely to cause headaches for Gillard by imposing on her issues that appeal to sections of the Labor Party but which risk alienating more conservative traditional labor voters and voters in the uncommitted centre. This presents Gillard with arguably her greatest challenge--to find a way to stop the bleeding of Labor support to the Greens without capitulating to them and losing the vital political middle ground ... But how to deal with the threat posed by by the erosion of Labor support to the Greens is a question that deeply divides federal Labor.

As expected the Irish government's austerity budget involves deep spending cuts and tax increases to help pay for its banking crisis and meet the terms of an international rescue deal.The plan includes tens of thousands of public sector job cuts, phased increases in the VAT rate from 2013, social welfare savings, reduced minimum wage.

The result of a process that places private bank losses on to public balance sheets is that it could leave its governments insolvent too.

Things are going to get much worse for the Irish than they already were. The great hope is that the 12.5% rate of corporation tax – preserved after a fierce fight with the EU – will continue to attract multinationals to Ireland to counter the deflation and stagnation and to provide economic growth to reduce the debt load. Paying down past debts, is nearly impossible through austerity alone.

Janet Albrechtson in The Australian is offering free policy advice (free for how long with Murdoch's shift to paywalls?) to the Gillard Government. She says in her PM, blow apart the Greens op-ed that:

Julia Gillard's leadership is flat-lining.....What Gillard really needs is a big idea, one that demonstrably works from the reforming centre...Gillard can take control of a real reform agenda by championing the nuclear option...power as a rational part of the solution to climate change....

Albrechtson goes to say that that the political advantage of nuclear opower as a rational part of the solution to climate change is that it splits:

rational climate change voters from the Greens, and driving them back to the ALP. A credible energy policy will drive a wedge between the two strands of Green voters without sacrificing support from the centre. The die-hard anti-nuclear rump of the Greens will limp away into irrelevance, leaving more sensible, realistic Green voters who recognise the need for carbon-free power to vote for "a credible response to the imperative of climate change".The impact for Labor is equally instant. It will signal bold leadership where at present there is only nervous reserve. It will take the sting out of climate change scepticism within the opposition.

The Australian is having yet another go at the national broadband network (NBN) in its Labor should go back to basics on carbon and NBN. It is more on its standard line---'common sense says that the NBN is flawed and costly'--- and it says little that is new.

In fact, the editorial is so caught up in its own rhetoric that it fails to address the substantive policy issues that are currently being addressed by Parliament. Nor is there any indication in the editorial that they are even interested in these policy issues.

What we can infer from this is that The Australian is about politics not policy, and that it will use anything to attack the NBN as a way of undermining the Gillard Government. It is the publicity machine of the Coalition.

Alan Kohler makes an excellent point in his Added value needed for online media survival on the ABC's The Drum with respect to the future of the fourth estate.

His general point is that industries are being disintermediated by the digital economy and are having to reinvent themselves to stay afloat:

The most urgent of these is retailing. For thousands of years we have had to travel to a shop to buy goods because the shopkeepers have controlled their distribution, just as media companies have controlled information.Now we can go direct to the source of the goods, wherever they are in the world. The volume of shopping online is now ballooning and just about everything is now being bought on the internet and delivered to homes in packages - books, shoes, clothing, food, household items.Traditional retailers sitting behind the counters in their stores in shopping malls and strips are now facing huge challenges; many won't survive. Those that do will provide something extra that can't be bought online, some sort of added value or service.

The bubbly Irish Celtic tiger on the European periphery is no more, if it ever was. Dublin house prices have fallen by 25% and the properties are unsaleable because banks cannot lend to buyers. The country's budget deficit is forecast to reach 32 per cent next year and it faces E30 billion cuts to state expenditure.

The suits from the International Monetary Fund will arrive in Dublin next week to clean up the mess from the fat cats economic model that provided growth based on a great deal of debt (casino capitalism?) and to bail out the Irish state with emergency funding from the collapse of the vast property bubble. Ireland will eventually seek and get a package of financial support from the EU and the IMF.

Like Greece more public debt is piled onto a nation that is probably already insolvent. The response to the global financial crisis has been to bail out the bank creditors while foisting the burden of adjustment on taxpayers. The Irish government had, for no good reason, nationalized the debts of its failing private banks, passing on the burden to its increasingly poor citizens. One reason is that banks became too large relative to the Irish economy and along the way, they captured their regulators.

As the authors of Baseline Scenario argue if the state takes on too large a debt in response to the global financial crisis, then sovereign default is the natural outcome. Greece and Ireland need debt relief---a reduction of the public debt.

Will Hutton was among those who argued for a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the days following the 2010 election. He has adopted a critical stand to the neo-liberal mode of governance in which only the market could determine priorities rationally – the role of the state was to provide a “level playing field” for market forces to work optimally.

His picture of Britain since the 1980s is that of a society dominated by the City of London, whose inflated wealth is unmerited by the value of its contribution. He paints a picture of the City run wild, with politicians incapable of providing the leadership to challenge its dominance.

In an extract in The Observer from his Them and Us: Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society Hutton says:

The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society.

The Gillard Government hasn't lost its way on the national broadband network (NBN). It's strategy is perfectly clear: a future of trying to regulate Telstra as the operator of an effective and national fibre network with open access was unrealistic. The option of creating a public natural monopoly was a better one. This is what the Coalition opposed.

I agree with Rob Burgess' argument in The NBN is in Xenophon's hands in Business Spectator that the Coalitions' attempt to prevent this has failed.

Yesterday, November 18, was a crucial moment in the long push by first the Rudd government, now the Gillard government, for the structural separation of Telstra and the rebuild of Australia's fixed line communications network. It was, in effect, the last stand of the opposition in trying to prevent the rollout of the most expensive infrastructure project in Australia's history – and they knew it...Malcolm Turnbull['s]... private member's bill [for a Productivity Commission analysis of the NBN that] he hoped would force the government to subject its NBN project to a full cost-benefit analysis... was narrowly defeated.

Paul Austin in The Age argues that The Greens electoral surge has been halted due to the Liberal Party's decision to put the Greens last on its how-to-vote cards. He says:

The message is that if you want to play with the big boys, you'll have to survive on primary votes, not just preferences.This will hurt the Greens, big time...And the danger for the Greens is that the Victorian Liberals' decision will become a model in other states and federally - and for other parties.Don't rule out Labor doing something similar in future....It mightn't prove hard for Labor in future to prefer the Liberals to the Greens.

Austin's argument can be questioned. First, the shift to The Greens in the inner city seats of the capital cities will continue, due to the ALP's turn away from its progressive values as a result of the domination of the NSW Right. It is just going to take longer to win the seats off the ALP without Liberal preferences.

I have to agree with Brian Toohey's argument in his Rethinking the Murray–Darling buybacks at Inside Story that what happens with irrigation water in the Murray-Darling Basin is one of the great public policy failures of recent Australian history. This failure is not just the past--it is also being continued by the Gillard Government.

His argument is that despite COAG agreeing in the 1990s that full cost recovery would apply to “all rural surface and groundwater based systems” except for some small community services that meet social and public health obligations, the Australian Government has no intention that the $5.8 billion public investment to upgrade commercial irrigation infrastructure will not be recovered.

In line with Rudd’s approach, Gillard has no intention of recovering a cent of this public spending from the irrigators who benefit. The $5.8 billion is meant to “save” water by reducing leaks and seepage from canals and pipes, with half the savings going to irrigators and half retained for the rivers. Much of the savings, however, would have found their way back to the rivers and groundwater systems as part of the basin’s normal hydrological processes.Apart from large-scale spending on off-farm engineering works of direct benefit to farmers, at least $720 million has been allocated to upgrade on-farm irrigation infrastructure. This spending gives an even bigger boost to the value of these farmers’ properties without any of the costs being returned to the public purse.

What will define the 21st century? Is it the end of cheap oil?

The concept of 'peak oil’ holds that the peak occurs when world oil production reaches its maximum level at the point when half the world’s reserves of cheap oil have been depleted, after which it becomes geophysically increasingly difficult to extract it. This means that passed the half-way point, world production can never reach its maximum level again, and thus continuously declines until reserves are depleted.

Has this point been reached? It is not a sensible question for neo-classical economics, which the obvious reality of the embeddedness of the economy in the natural environment. Sure, they understand that for the economy to grow requires increasing inputs of energy, obtained from exploitation of natural resources – currently, for the most part, fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

Orthodox, neo-classical economists generally argue that capitalism can solve the energy-dependence problem by maximizing efficiency, so that the greater the economic growth, the more efficient the use of resources, and thus the less actual energy is required. This sort of argument underpins government support for the oxymoron of ‘high growth, low carbon’ societies.

In a couple of paragraphs in The Age Kenneth Davidson describes the form of government in Victoria as a form of corporatism.

Davidson says:

Since the election of the Kennett government, Victoria has mutated into a corporatist state. Real decisions are taken well away from the Parliament by executive government working in a closed loop with powerful, rent-seeking vested interests - most notably property developers, the roads lobby and the private schools lobby.Changing the government won't shatter the corporatist state. Victoria's rent-seeking class have shown they can move seamlessly from one government to the next. The only way decision-making can be brought back into the parliamentary arena where it belongs is through a minority government.

I cannot find the OCED's Economic Survey on Australia 2010 online apart from this brief chapter summaries. Behind it sits this overview which, surprisingly says little about the national broadband network (NBN). The Australian interpreted it as a critique of the NBN---as a rejection of Labor's broadband monopoly.

So what does the OECD say? Unfortunately, the overview doesn't say that much. It says:

In the telecommunication sector, the government’s project of building a new fibre network, the National Broadband Network (NBN), holds the promise of delivering potentially large benefits. However, as the cost amounts to 31⁄4 per cent of GDP, it also entails substantial financial uncertainties. The authorities’ strategy will improve Internet services for the entire population and promote a fairer competition between private firms on retail services. Part of the plan is to shut down the existing copper network and the country’s main cable network. While establishing a monopoly in this way would protect the viability of the government’s investment project, it may not be optimal for cost efficiency and innovation. Empirical studies have stressed the value of competition between technological platforms for the dissemination of broadband services. It would therefore be preferable to maintain competition between technologies in the broadband sector and, within each technology, between Internet service providers.

The communique of the G20 Seoul Summit said that g they had agree to “get the global economy back on the path of recovery.” Good oh.Unfortunately the specifics were lacking as to how they would do this , apart from phrases stressing the importance of “rebalancing” the global economy, “coordinating” policies, and refraining from “competitive devaluations.”

There there was no mention of Ireland, which may need a European ballout. Financial markets were unmoved by the bland promises to deal with imbalances and they now have Portugal in their sights.

There was no substantive progress on anything to do with exchange rates; little substance on the "regulation” of the global megabanks; and few steps on the reform to the governance of the IMF. There was no confronting the power of Wall Street head on, which means breaking up the big banks and imposing hard limits on bank size so they can’t reassemble themselves.

The function of the Conservative Party in the UK, like that of the Liberal Party in Australia, is to defend inequality: to make acceptable the social and economic unfairness inherent in a predominantly capitalist economy; to preserve the interests and privileges of social elites. They have had recourse to many specious slogans or rhetoric in the defence of inequality.

Martin Rowson

In Nothing to do with the economy in The London Review of Books Ross McKibbin argues that the Conservatives large spending cuts don't have very much to do with the economy. He says:

The importance of the cuts is not economic but political and ideological. First, they restore an apparently coherent, specifically Conservative and politically useful identity to the Conservative Party, distinguishing it from Labour...The cuts have to be big in order to confirm the Conservative explanation of what happened. That they saved the country from the brink, from disaster, from national bankruptcy – in other words from Labour’s incompetence and profligacy – is a line the Conservatives use well and often.

What is up with the NSW Right these days? The mates are stirring. Are they uncomfortable with a critical light being shone on them? Do they dislike the critical light of public reason? Or are they into destablising mode?

The right wing unionist Paul Howes--the one opposed to climate change---is busily reinventing himself as a genuinely sensitive soul and a progressive at heart; albeit one manning the barricades against the Green hordes. He's even talking about re-education camps for young Laborites. And Mark Arbib? He is also reinventing himself as he is all for gay marriage these days, even though that is a Green policy?

Meanwhile Karl Bita, the national secretary , is busy denying political reality about the recent election campaign and the ALP's continual slide in the opinion polls---its the ghost of Mark Latham that's haunting the ALP apparently. Oh, and Kevin Rudd of course. Can't forget him, can we. He was the bearer of hope and unfilled expectations. Bita is trying salvage his reputation.

And Graham Richardson? Well, he's flexing the NSW Right's muscles in The Australian, where he is launching a direct attack on Gillard.

I always wondered about Gary Johns, as a conservative being both at home in The Australian and being a member of the ALP. Then I recalled that the ALP has been in the process of shedding its progressive base and becoming more mainstream for quite some time. It is now being outflanked by The Greens permanently.

John's deep conservatism around indigenous issues is troubling. He appears to have returned to, and to speak from, the Australia of the 1930s. 'Troubling' means that it is a still a shock to this kind of voice in 2010.

In his Referendum must not be used to settle old scores in The Australian he writes:

The Gillard government's intention to discuss the wording of a constitutional amendment to recognise Australians of Aboriginal origin provides the opportunity to ask where we are headed in Aboriginal affairs.Should this amendment be seen by activists as a chance to settle old scores, they had better think again. The long-run trajectory for Aborigines in Australia is integration. The experiment with separate development in the past 40 years has been a dismal failure.To appreciate the nihilism of Aboriginal Australians sitting on their land being fed by the Whiteman, just watch the film Samson & Delilah. Two black kids sitting on their land eating from tins, drinking bore water and staring into space is not much fun.That does not mean there has not been a flowering of the talents of people of Aboriginal descent, but do these people warrant a special mention in the Constitution?

The G20 meets in Seoul, South Korea, this month. The continuing agenda is global recovery, rebalancing growth, financial regulatory reform and governance reform at the International Monetary Fund—plus the two new issues added by the Korean hosts: financial safety nets and closing the development gap. The agenda is whether a new international order can be created that would move from the framework established after World War II in which the Group of Seven advanced economies managed the world economy.

The reality is that the G20 is a self-appointed body that has little legitimacy, has achieved precious little since it started holding two yearly summits two years ago, and it provides a better forum for the powerful to pursue their own agenda.

The conflicts over achieving a strong, balanced and sustained world recovery will surface at the G20 in the form of the "currency wars":

The background is multilayered:

(1) The political background is visceral public anger towards banks, the activities of which severely damaged the real economy to the extent that full recovery will take years.
(2) The US is juggling the agenda to support US economic growth and job creation through US dollar depreciation at the expense of East Asian economies and oil and commodity exporters.
(3) The economic background is that the core of the world’s financial system has become unstable, and reckless risk-taking will once again lead to great collateral damage.
(4) The secular decline in economic growth rates and the long-run increase of financial fragility and instability.
(5) Financialization, or the shift in the center of gravity of the capitalist economy from production to finance, is a compensatory mechanism to a long term decline in growth that has helped to lift the economic system under these circumstances, but at the expense of increased fragility.
(6) a rapidly growing industrial base in emerging markets is being hard-wired to intensive use of coal. This, coupled with the reliance on cheap local coal in the US and Australia, will make it exceedingly difficult to reverse the trend in the future.

Did anyone doubt that Australia would align itself ever more deeply with the US as the latter increases its security presence in the Asia Pacific region? That increased US presence is designed to counter China's increasing economic political influence in the region and Australia has decided to strengthen its network of alliances with the US. China's rise is radically shifting Asia's strategic balance.

China's rise presents the US with a serious challenge to its leadership of Asia for the first time in decades and raises the possibility of direct strategic confrontation between the US and China.

The problem for Australia, of course, is that China is Australia's main trading partner. Our economic prosperity in the near future now depends on us being a quarry to provide the raw materials for China's ongoing economic transformation.

If the global financial crisis proved that Australia’s bank regulation, and the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) itself, is in pretty good shape, then the aftermath of that crisis indicates that the government's support for the big four banks (a fee structure for the bank guarantee for an oligopoly), has been, and continues to be, is at the expense of competition in the financial system.

As Milind Sathye points out at Online Opinion

The four major banks - the ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac - dominate the banking system. They hold 77 per cent of total banking assets, 82 per cent of deposits, 83 per cent of total loans and 88 per cent of home loans. In other words, Australian banking is significantly concentrated.

If the oligopoly cannot be broken up--ie., a demerger of Westpac and St George and of Commonwealth and BankWest---then there needs to be increased competition in a market economy--ie to provide incentives to consumers of the major banks (eg., small exit fees) to switch to smaller banks or credit unions and building societies.

Ronald Dworkin in his Americans Against Themselves post in the New York Review of Books blog has a go at interpreting what the Tea Party--a rightwing populist movement--- are saying with their slogans “Save America.” “Take the country back.” “Armed and dangerous.” “Lock and load.”

These populists not only reject Obama administration policies, and political liberalism in general, but also cast their rejection in questing, confrontational language as an epic battle for the soul of American democracy, which they accuse liberalism of defiling.

Dworkin says:

We must take seriously what so many of them actually say: that they feel they are losing their country, that they are desperate to take it back. What could they mean? There are two plausible answers, both of them frightening. They might mean, first, that their new government is not theirs because it is not remotely of their kind or culture; it is not representative of them. Most who think that would have in mind, of course, their president; they think him not one of them because he is so different. It seems likely that the most evident difference, for them, is his race—a race a great many Americans continue to think alien. They feel, viscerally, that a black man cannot speak for them.

Jennifer Hewitt in her Fibre to the bootstraps: how Labor shackled its future to broadband in The Australian is at it again. Hewitt has long been an opponent of the national broadband, as has News Ltd. The latter's opposition is defence of its Foxtel pay TV interests from competition, as more and more TV and other rich interactive services come online.

I know that the debate on the NBN has become boring and tedious, but we need to be clear about the implications of the position Hewitt is defending in the guise of a big picture article that puts recent history into perspective. She says:

The $43bn promise also would prove to voters -- and to Telstra -- that the government really was serious. And just to make sure of that, Canberra threatened Telstra with all sorts of punishments such as forcing it out of Foxtel and cutting off access to wireless spectrum if it didn't co-operate.The political strategy worked brilliantly. The voters were dazzled by the digital future and the magic pudding promise it wouldn't really cost them because there would be a commercial return to government.

Hewitt's position is this: many people in cities already have "high-speed broadband" that is adequate for their needs, even if others in outer urban and rural areas are frustrated; that public policy should try to overcome problem areas and leaving the market and competition to sort out the rest; that there will be breakthroughs in alternative technologies such as wireless and cable to overcome the current spectrum limits.

Angry white Americans make good media copy, especially when they are fronted by suburban housewives with the attitude of Mama grizzlies, and backed by big Republican money. The angry Americans are the majorities of white men and women, suburbanites and older Americans whose nostalgia is for a lost America, and whose often cynical and fearful view of the future is coloured by this sense of loss.

Martin Kettle in his Boris Johnson could be the Sarah Palin of a British Tea Party in The Guardian says that the Tea Party:

stands for individualism, libertarianism, low taxes and small government. It is nationalistic, overwhelmingly white and not interested in the rest of the world, which it views as a hostile force. An insurrectionary party of that kind – stripped of the distinctively American aspects like guns, capital punishment and cultural conservatism – is surely at least conceivable in a British and European context. In fact, such parties exist in most European countries already, albeit on the margins. In this country Ukip comes quite close to this template, and it shares a lot of ground with parts of the Tory party.

The Obama administration has some problems on its hands after the Republicans gained control of the House in the historic mid-term elections. It faces a hostile opposition, and even if the Republicans do not have the power to move the Republican agenda forward, they will be determined to stop the Obama administration from doing some of the things it wants to do.

Will the Democrats tack to the right? Will they stand and fight for Barack Obama's liberal agenda, including health reform? Or will they declare that liberalism, American style, is dead as the Blue Dog (conservative) Democrats want them to: ie. legislation serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power. No doubt the corporate media's questions directed at the administration will become essentially Republican talking points reshaped as questions.

The state election in Victoria is underway, with Victorians voting on November 27. It looks as if the Brumby Government will be returned with a reduced majority. The Brumby government has a thumping majority - 55 of the lower house's 88 seats, compared to the Coalition's 32 - and the opposition would need to attract a landslide swing of about 6.5 per cent to snatch victory in its own right.

The real interest is how many inner city seats in Melbourne will the ALP lose to the Greens? Some say up to 4 (Melbourne, Richmond, Brunswick and Northcote). The Greens are the new third force and public transport is a hot issue in Melbourne's inner city seats. Labor now fights permanently on two fronts, the Greens on the Left and the Coalition on the Right.

It does look as if the ALP is increasingly being pushed to the centre as the progressive vote with its concern for equity, social justice and compassion)shifts to the Greens, and right wing Labor is increasingly willing to bash the Greens (the “attack the Greens at all costs” approach) and run smear campaigns --as they did in Tasmania.

In this review of Robert Reich's After Shock: The Next Economy and America’s Future in the New York Times Sebastian Mallaby summarizes Rich's main argument about the stagnation of middle-class incomes and exploding inequality in the USA in the context of the global financial crisis.

Reich addresses the wide, glaring disparity of income between the rich and the middle and working classes and the way that Wall Street blames a reckless, overspending working class (and the poor) for bringing on the recession. His is a Keynesian narrative.

Mallaby says:

Caught between rising aspirations and stagnant wages, Reich says, middle-class Americans have gone through a series of coping mechanisms. First, women joined the workforce, giving families a second income. Then husbands and wives put in longer shifts, creating a species of family called DINS — “double income, no sex.” Finally, families went into debt. In this sense, inequality helped to stoke the credit bubble. Now that the bubble has burst, these coping mechanisms are exhausted...

Americans will “face a necessity they have managed to avoid for decades: They have to make do with less.”The belt-tightening is not likely to be popular, and Reich goes so far as to suggest that it could trigger a political convulsion. People are very likely to resent material losses bitterly if these are not broadly and fairly shared. And in the wake of the financial crisis, fairness has gone by the wayside: millions of Americans have lost jobs, but the financial sector has bounced back; eye-popping bonuses have returned;

Frank Rich in The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party in the New York Times argues that the Tea Party movement, despite its 'take back America' campaign supported by Fox News, is going to hit the wall of political power in The Republican party after the mid-term elections.

Rich says:

the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s [retirement savings plans].

Australian journalists are not known for their critical reflections upon the practice of journalism, nor for their acknowledgment of the decline of quality in journalism associated with the emergence of the internet and the new media. If they ignore the criticism sit is mostly to shoot the critics. Critical arguments about journalism have been only open to practitioners and journalism academics - a closed circle of gatekeepers.

Annabel Crabb in her The end of journalism as we know it (and other good news) at the ABC's is a text version of Crabb's AN Smith lecture in journalism, delivered on October 27, 2010 at Melbourne University. It is a serious look at the state of journalism, how journalism is adapting to the changing technological environment, and the future of journalism as emerging opportunities. Crabb describes the new media landscape thus:

It's what happens when the damn system is democratised. News journalism as we have known it in the past - a sort of daily feeding-time in which news is distributed to a passive audience at a designated hour and in the order selected by the zookeeper - is over, or well on its way to being so. Audiences are splintered, but demanding. They want new news, and if something complicated has happened, they want instant analysis. Commonly, they want an opportunity to express their own views - not only on the event itself, but on how it has been reported...This loss of control is such a hallmark of the new media. And that's true for everybody it touches...For journalists, the loss of control is about the loss of centrality.

Christopher Pearson in his Great education available outside the mainstream in The Australian advocates homeschooling. It is part of the broad criticism of public education from the right, which has traditionally demanded vouchers for education in the clash of ideas around education. This clash is between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector

Pearson says that the thriving home-schooling movement in Australia is:

born of a warranted mistrust of the ideological baggage of the state system and, increasingly, of the Catholic parochial and independent systems. Parents tend to rely on unfashionable textbooks that teach you how to parse a sentence, to construct a paragraph and to mount an argument in 500 words. They do not pander to the fads for dumbed-down literary studies but offer English as we once knew it. Similarly, the maths and science books are usually at least 20 years old and quaintly insistent on the difference between a right answer and a wrong one. Because the parents learned from similar texts, they find them relatively easy to teach from.

Obama's supporters say that he would usher in an era of post-partisan harmony, enabling America to transcend its divisive, partisan political conflicts by commanding support for his policies across the political spectrum. I was always unclear what 'bipartisanship' actually meant in this context, especially when The Republican Party has no interest in it beyond mere lip service. The political payoff for the Republicans came with obstructionism.

Tariq Ali in Obama hope was all hype in The Guardian says that:

In times of crisis, the incumbent suffers. And the bigger the crisis the greater the punishment inflicted on those in power, unless they do something that makes a change. Obama has not done so. Instead, both at home and abroad, the continuities between Obama's administration and that of Bush-Cheney far outweigh any differences.Whenever vested interests resisted, Obama caved.

Howard and Costello continue to publicly squabble over the leadership of the Liberal Party prior to 2006. Who cares? It's political history. The Liberal Party had done its dash after a decade in Government. Changing leaders at the last minute wasn't going to turn things round. Peter Costello could not have saved the Coalition government.

Howard is spruiking his book and he's using used his memoirs to settle personal scores with Peter Costello. Costello bites back. Yawn. We've all moved on and we couldn't care less about the Howard/Costello bun fight.

Conservative commentators ---eg., Janet Albrechtsen --- go on and on about the Howard haters lining up to whack the former PM. She seems to be living in some parallel universe.