View From The Couch - 03/Dec/2015

The Shambolic 729 Days Of Abbott

Some time earlier this year, I simply gave up with Tony Abbott. He was doing and saying crazy stuff, and you could only really chalk it up to stupidity day after day. If you search this blog for 'stupidity' you will find it coupled with Tony Abbott at an ever increasing rate during his tenure as Prime Minister. You were left shaking your head most days and then you noticed your neck muscles were getting well toned because thanks to the Prime Minister, you were shaking your head so much. Now that he's gone, it seems redundant to be jumping all over his tawdry miserable execrable record, but Peter Hartcher is doing a five part series over at the SMH.

I was going to leave it until he was done before I wrote anything about it, but each day has brought fresh misery with its revelations. Here is today's revelation:

Malcolm Turnbull was nothing if not forthright in telling Tony Abbott his shortcomings. On one occasion, Turnbull found himself in an Adelaide pub drinking beer with a group of workers from the Australian Submarine Corporation.

Abbott, the workers told him, was an idiot. 

Of course he isn't, Turnbull replied. The man is a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics from Oxford University. He's actually very bright. 

The argument went back and forth for a bit till one of the ASC crew delivered the line that ended the argument: "If he's not stupid, why does he keep doing stupid things?"
Other ministers might have kept such an exchange discreetly to themselves. But Turnbull took it straight to the prime minister. 

The communications minister related the anecdote. He told his leader that it was important to explain things to the people, not be limited to slogans.
Yeah, yeah mate, was Abbott's response. If he was annoyed, he didn't show it. He certainly didn't heed the advice.

There are some disturbing points in that exchange that do need remarking. It is of course a universally accepted point that Tony Abbott did stupid things. The onus was on Malcolm Turnbull to explain how such stupid things weren't actually stupid - a feat he would not attempt - or the appearance of stupid things in fact obscured deep thought. He clearly could do neither because on some level, stupid is as stupid does, and just as a rose is a rose is a rose, stupid is stupid is stupid.

So Turnbull had to go back and tell Tony Abbott that anecdote; which is striking in its boldness, but also tinged with a surprise, a Eureka moment. Amazingly, we're told Abbott for his part was dismissive - "yeah yeah mate" - but also incapable of seeing how he looked to the world. Either he was dismissive because it came from a political rival and therefore he waived the message, or his narcissism was so strong that the anecdote simply did not register as a problem.

The other disturbing thing is Turnbull's defence of Abbott's intelligence rests upon his credentials. That surely a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics could not be stupid. Surely somebody with such credentials was actually very bright. We understand that Turnbull is very bright, and has been known to the world as being bright for a very long time, and he too is a Rhodes Scholar so he probably drew some kind of equivalence and assumed Abbott had to be bright. Maybe not as bright as the great Malcolm Turnbull, but certainly bright enough to be at the same table talking politics.

Today, we know that Abbott's Rhodes Scholarship had much more to do with political and ideological inclination than actual academic merit, so it would actually destroy the argument mounted by Turnbull that somehow the credential of having been a Rhodes Scholar was proof positive that Abbott was "very bright".

It doesn't exactly reflect all that well on the bright Malcolm Turnbull, that he even mounted the argument because what this tells us is that Malcolm Turnbull sees things in very categorical, broad terms. This is a man for whom the Ruddean 'programmatic specificity' would be an anathema. It also shows Malcolm Turnbull has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. That is to say, he can see Tony Abbott doing stupid things, but because he is aware of Tony Abbott's academic credentials, he is willing to pretend the stupid things are not stupid, and somehow there is a political program worth defending. But it takes an ASC worker to point out that stupid is in fact is as stupid does; and when this short-circuits his cognitive dissonance, he can't help but try to place the cognitive dissonance back onto Tony Abbott who is incapable of feeling the very same cognitive dissonance because he's actually politically stupid.

I point this out, not to further dump on Tony Abbott, but to point out the degree to which politicians operate under such cognitive dissonance, and what that might mean for policy. George Orwell's explanation was that through propaganda, politicians can argue white is black, truth is dead, ignorance is strength and so on. Reading the excerpt above, it seems far more likely that politicians argue white is black, truth is dead, and ignorance is strength simply because they are unaware of their own cognitive dissonance. The propaganda is merely a subsequent phenomenon.

More Stupidity

Fear & Loathing In Idiotsville

For some time now, every time I blog about the Abbott Government, I inevitably end up tagging the same post with the word 'stupidity'. If you click on the tag, you'll find a whole bunch of entries to do with Tony Abbott and his government. Lately, the tag has become automatic in a way that not even in the darkest days of the Howard Government would I have labelled every government move as a piece of stupidity. Yet this government? Never fails to find a new act of stupidity that cannot go unremarked.

And if you thought I was the only one beating this drum, no, it has become evident that many in the  media are now pointing out just how self-defeating and lacing in basic intelligence this government can be. If Peter Hartcher is asking what is the point of this government, then you can be well assured that the entire media gallery is running with the Abbott-is-an-idiot meme.

The government is so lost, its standing so poor, its members so sick of Abbott's captain's picks, that the party is sullenly contemplating, once again, whether it needs to replace the captain. 

"In February he asked for time," as he pleaded for his job in the party room, says one Liberal MP. "He asked many of us for six months." It's been six months, a deadline that expired this week. 

"The reality is that nothing's changed and nothing's improved. He asked some people to give him to the end of the year. Well, we aren't quite there yet.

"This government is doing some good things. But there isn't anyone who thinks this is a good government." The Abbott government is approaching an existential moment. The existential question: What is the point of the Abbott government?

There is no point, is the answer to the rhetorical question. The problem now is how the Liberal Party goes about replacing Tony Abbott with the aim of winning the election next year; but given the two budgets and the 22month long slog of entrenched low opinion polls, there may be no panacea.

The best thing that could be said of the Abbott Government is that it will end. At some point in history. Beyond that, is anybody's guess as to how and when the historic inevitability happens. Until then we will bask in each and every stupid thing this government does as it fights a pointless rearguard action for the lunar right. 

In case you missed it, the most recent bit of Stupidity-ridden Tony Abbott-ism was his denunciation of the court decision to halt the Adani mine, calling it sabotage. This earned him a quick lesson in the notion Separation of Power from the NSW Bar:

"These comments demonstrate a lack of understanding of the independent role of the courts in our democracy," she said. 

"The courts exist to make decisions according to the law, not to further the interests of particular individuals or organisations, including government. 

"They are an independent arbiter of disputes, and politicians need to understand and respect their non-partisan role." 

Ms Needham said courts were not the servant of the government, and "any such implication is inimical to the basic principle of the separation of powers", which is fundamental to the Westminster system. 

She said it was critical that courts made decisions on the basis of the legislation they were charged to interpret, and the facts of each case before them. 

"Legislation imposes strict conditions on developments such as coal mines, and the courts' task in these circumstances is to scrutinise the executive's actions to ensure that any approvals fall within legislative parameters," she said.

That looks like a resounding verbal thrashing. It's good that the NSW Bar isn't taking the Stupid-is-as-stupid-does sort of approach to such statements.

Still, that's just how things go in the land of the Abbottoir where Captain's Picks turn out arse. 

The Dark Shadow Of Student Politics Of A Generation Ago

Way back in the 1960s and 1970s, way before I hit even tertiary education, Student Politics was big. It was a world wide phenomenon wheretoBay Boomers - rightly - went activist and supported the case of not fighting in Vietnam and reforming various institutions. It gave birth to Feminism and Feminist Theory, as well as usher in the Post-Modernity whereby traditional frameworks for judgment were broken down by a new kind of criticism emanating out of France where the street fights around barricades were the fiercest. 

By the time I got to University, this flame had died down, but not for reasons commonly used to explain it. The radical-ness of student politics in Australia reached an apotheosis whereby it blew it self up on the national stage in 1983. It was acrimonious, pungent, arcane, riddled with misinformation about itself, and then silence followed. The last President of the Australian Union of Students was none other than Julia Gillard. The most active students in demolishing the Union, were Peter Costello and Tony Abbott. These names don't come from nowhere. They came from this very cauldron of ill-will, hate and rancour. 

By 1985 when I arrived on campus, there was just a smouldering ember of it left on campus at the University of Sydney.  The guy who ran for SRC president was Joe Hockey. Again, these names don't come from out of nowhere. They started early at University and made careers out of this kind of thing. The flipside is that if you want proof that these people are nothing but apparatchiks and careerists, well, you only need to look at their history. Make no mistake, the utter absence of substance in Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership is not very surprising given who and what he has been over the years. The incompetence, the gratuitous point-scoring, the rancorous partisanship-over-policy, didn't just evolve out of nowhere and nothing. These people carried it with them from their student politics days and now they are inflicting it on the nation (as they hurriedly draw down their benefits and entitlements). 

All of which is to say, there are days I genuinely regret not involving myself in politics - if but for the adage credited to Socrates where in it is said that those who do not involve themselves with politics are doomed to be ruled by men lesser than themselves. Every time I look at this bunch, I am forced to think of Socrates' line.  

The World Is A Con(spiracy)

Try This On For Size

Alan Greenspan was the consummate Reaganomic Federal Reserve bank chief of our time. What if he was secretly an un-reconstructed acolyte of Ayn Rand? That's exactly what Peter Hartcher is postulating in the SMH today.

So why is Greenspan opposed, as a matter of principle, to any attempt at reform? Four possibilities come to mind. First, he is senile. But although he is 85, his statements were not the product of a wandering mind. Second, he is in the thrall of the big banks that oppose change. But while he has been taking handsome speaking fees from them in recent years, he has never been interested in money, selling his profitable Wall Street business to work at the Fed on a relative pittance.

Third, he is a blind ideologue who will not concede that any regulation could be good regulation. This is entirely possible. But he knows full well the terrible damage he inflicted on his country.

Or fourth, he is not a fool but a fox, playing a double game.

Greenspan's view is so absurd that it tempts us to wonder. In 10 days we will see the premiere of a movie of the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. This cult 1957 novel is a warning against government intervention, a sermon on the virtues of laissez faire, and a reminder that Alan Greenspan was once a close acolyte of Rand and her Objectivist movement. Her 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal included an essay by Greenspan on the virtue of the gold standard.

The young Greenspan advocated a return to a system where a government could only issue currency backed by a physical hard asset - gold. He wrote that "gold and economic freedom are inseparable". He derided the current system of fiat money, where a dollar is backed by nothing more than a government promise to honour its debts, as "paper reserves".

In Atlas Shrugged, the libertarian heroes smoke cigarettes branded with little gold-coloured dollar signs. It's unsubtle. The cigarette represents freedom of choice over government regulation; the dollar sign is a campaign message for economic freedom in the form of a gold standard.

It has often been observed that it was ironic that Greenspan, a leading critic of the paper money system, went on to become its chief, his signature appearing on every dollar bill.

But maybe it wasn't historical irony. What if Greenspan never did change his view, instead covertly dedicating his life to destroying the system he so despised? Could it be that he remained a secret agent of Ayn Rand all these years?

Talk about wild speculation. Long time readers would know that I've had a high opinion of Mr. Hartcher in the time I've been keeping this blog. He's always struck me as astute and level-headed to the point of boring. It's nice to see that he actually has a wildly imaginative side. This is the stuff of conspiracy theories and spy novels. We may never find out for sure, but if it's true Greenspa might have been a mole for the ideological lunar right all these years. If not true, then we have to face the other 3 possibilities - that he is senile, greedy or caught up in his old ways - none of which seem unreasonable in of themselves. That being said, it's a remarkable bit of connecting the dots. Ayn Rand to Alan Greenspan to Gold Standard vs. Fiat Money and the Fed to Cheap Credit and Low Interest Rates to Global Financial Crisis. The guy in charge was the guy trying to destroy it all. It wasn't the butler, it was the chief banker at the Federal Reserve!

It's all pretty good and makes for a gripping conspiracy theory-in-the-making. I think Mr. Hartcher missed April Fools by 4 days.