Deconstructing Greer

Now the Left are turning on a feminist icon

Dominic Perrottet

Recently I received a letter, as NSW Finance and Property Minister, demanding that I urgently remove the ‘Germaine Greer’ plaque from the Sydney Writers Walk in Circular Quay.The reason for the demand, sent from a concerned, vigilant citizen, was that Ms Greer holds horrifically bigoted views on transgender issues, so her name can no longer defile public places in NSW.

Although it was just one letter, it’s a telling example of the Left’s ruthless totalitarian reflex. As Stalin erased Trotsky from Soviet photographs, so Ms Greer must be expunged, our public places sanitised – that’s progress, comrade.

Ms Greer is a particularly interesting target for the Left because she was once its darling; a feminist pioneer at the vanguard of the gender revolution. She stuck it to the man, and is still sticking it to him.

Unfortunately for Ms Greer, these days the man sometimes identifies as a woman, which means the once-celebrated feminist is now guilty of le thoughtcrime du jour: transphobia. Explaining her position on Q&A last week, Greer didn’t retreat: ‘If you’re a 50-year-old truck driver who’s had 4 children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong.’ See, this insolent fuddy duddy refuses to grasp that such thoughts are no longer ‘acceptable’. In the ever-shifting hierarchy of progressive issues, the trans-agenda now trumps feminism. So for Ms Greer, it’s confess, recant, conform, or you’re out.

That anyone would think it appropriate to denounce Ms Greer to a Minister of the Crown came as a shock to me. But this is the world we are in: public office holders are under increasing pressure to use state power to enforce the ‘progressive’ agenda. Sadly, too many are caving.

Take Germany, where a comedian is now the subject of a government-approved criminal investigation – for making jokes about the president of Turkey. Or Tasmania, where the Catholic Archbishop is being dragged before the anti-discrimination commission for publishing a pamphlet explaining his own Church’s teaching on marriage. Or Scotland, where the Glasgow police – providing locals with some helpful advice on the perils of social media – recently tweeted: ‘Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend…’

That’s right McDougall: you’re just one Facebook post away from hearing the friendly local constabulary’s jackboots crunching up your driveway.

Defending freedom doesn’t mean agreeing with every offensive statement anyone makes. A case in point: a few weeks ago some unruly footy fans unfurled a banner at the MCG emblazoned with ‘STOP THE MOSQUES’.

The reaction was swift and ruthless. Eddie McGuire told the ABC that those responsible should be banned from footy. AFL boss Gillan McLachlan got busy ‘talking to the Victoria Police to see how they may prosecute’. No matter that there are no grounds for prosecution: where there’s a will, there’s a gulag.

When a similar banner was unfurled at a game in WA, the police jumped straight in, marching the fans out and banning them from the ground.

When I’m watching a match, I pre- fer not to be distracted by louts with offensive banners trying to stir the polit- ical pot. But if footy codes are going to politicise games with statements about refugees and rounds where players wear rainbow bootlaces and the like, it’s not clear to me why one set of political statements is permitted, and another isn’t; why we’re free to use the game to spruik (invariably left-wing) political views on some issues, but get bundled away by cops for voicing opinions on others.

If you’re banning the Sydney University Evangelical Union for the unspeakable crime of requiring its executive to believe in Jesus (Marx forbid!), more power to you. If your target is George Pell, or Tony Abbott, or some other conservative punching bag, go ahead and spew your hate-filled bile from the rooftops. You’ll be lauded as brave and a hero and get interviewed on ABC, and maybe even nominated for Australian of the Year (or at the very least a Logie).

But if you want to use your freedom to challenge the dogmas of the new orthodoxy, I’m sorry comrade, that’s not what freedom’s for, so put a sock in it. Or else.

As Ms Greer’s cautionary tale illustrates, conservatives aren’t the only ones liable to find themselves on the wrong end of a progressive truncheon.

The revolution always eats its own, because there is no rhyme or reason to the opinions ‘progressives’ endorse from one day to the next. Their beliefs – no matter how ruthlessly enforced – may be useful in advancing ‘progress’ to some fabled utopia, but once their utility has expired, those beliefs can be discarded like last season’s flared corduroys. That’s where serious thinkers like Ms Greer run into trouble. Because serious thinkers have serious arguments rooted in serious principles that can’t simply be jettisoned.

When you abandon your principles, it’s hard to see the point of debate, other than to see who can shout the loudest. Contests of ideas degenerate into contests of fists. That’s not progress.

True progress demands a truly free exchange of ideas, because the best ideas are forged in the furnace of fierce disagreement – the battle of ideas, where wits are sharpened, arguments blunted, minds expanded, and gradually, truth revealed.

Nothing has made this clearer to me than the responsibility of legislative decision-making. Free debate is simply indispensable in that process. But I have felt the chill setting in – the reluctance to speak out, even among colleagues, on matters of huge importance, for fear of falling foul of the PC police.

This is the path to dead-end, unthinking government. If democracy is to survive, we must defend freedom. We must resist the growing pressure to deploy the state’s firepower to enforce a ‘progressive’ agenda that criminalises dissent. Because you can only have progress with a contest of ideas. And you can only have a contest of ideas if you are free.

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Biodegradable bags aren’t better than regular plastic bags,  report finds

CONSUMERS like to believe we’re doing the right thing for the environment. Purchasing plastic bags or coffee cups marked “biodegradable”, “compostable” or even plain old “environmentally friendly”, helps us sleep better at night.

But a new Senate inquiry into the threat of marine plastic pollution in Australia has found that “biodegradable” plastic bags are just as bad as regular plastic bags.

“While consumers might feel they are ‘doing the right thing’ by choosing biodegradable or degradable plastic, these products simply disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces to become microplastic,” read the report based on the senate’s findings.

“The committee also notes that there is some community confusion regarding the differences between biodegradable, degradable plastic, compostable and traditional plastic.

“The committee strongly considers that education campaigns are required to ensure consumers make informed choices about the alternatives to traditional plastics being offered.”

Normal plastic bags are usually made from petroleum, while biodegradable bags are made from plant or organic material which can decompose much faster.

But UNSW biodiversity expert Mark Browne, one of several scientists who made submissions to the inquiry, says the biodegradable material has the “same level of environmental impact” as that in regular plastic bags.

“These pieces of microplastic can be ingested or inhaled by animals,” Mr Browne told news.com.au.

“They can enter their lungs or guts and can transfer chemicals into the blood and surrounding tissues, which can affect how well they’re able to fight off infections.

“In plants, they can block the plant’s access to light, and plants need light to photosynthesise and produce food,” he said.
Plastic bags can kill marine life. Here a scuba diver swims over a discarded plastic bag tangled on a coral reef.

Plastic bags can kill marine life. Here a scuba diver swims over a discarded plastic bag tangled on a coral reef.Source:Getty Images

These microplastics can also affect how much food and water animals can consume.

“The particles fill up the animals’ guts and they’re not able to consume as much water or food. They may die from dehydration or starvation or being infected because their immune systems have been reduced,” Mr Browne said.

“The public is buying or using these bags thinking that they’re a quick fix, but there is not enough testing to prove they’re safe.”

Clean Up Australia managing director Terrie Ann Johnson told the inquiry marine plastic pollution is a growing global threat to biodiversity.

“[It’s already having a devastating impact on the Australian environment with significant potential to disrupt our lifestyle and lead to substantial economic loss,” she wrote in a submission.

Ms Johnson said it was a common misconception that marine debris and plastic pollution in Australia is a result of international pollution, or waste generated “at sea”.

According to the CSIRO, around 75 per cent of our marine debris is generated by Australian people, “not the high seas, with debris concentrated near cities”.

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ABC inconsistent on sexism

Twitter provides a wonderful insight into the real thoughts, leanings and character of public figures — especially journalists. Last year, on this very day, for instance, we discovered what SBS sports reporter Stuart McIntyre really thought about the hundreds of thousands of men and women who risked their lives or sacrificed them in defence of our freedom and security.

Paul Bongiorno is a MWW favourite for his green Left commentary on RNBreakfast. We often ponder why he is paid by taxpayers to add his hard Left views to a radio network that already defies its charter obligations on balance to run a green Left agenda.

My theory is that Radio National pays Bonge to make the likes of Fran Kelly, Phillip Adams and Jonathan Green appear more mainstream.

Bonge is often first to harangue anyone from the right-of-centre over any comments that could be construed as sexist, xenophobic or insensitive. Yet in a revealing moment last week he tweeted about an American actress, Bel Powley, who was suggested to play Monica Lewinsky in a telemovie. “The actress not ugly enough,” tweeted Canberra’s Italian stallion.

Really? The former priest chose to publicly ridicule Lewinsky — surely a victim of sexual harassment if ever there was one — as ugly. Apart from being absurd and nasty it raised the question of why he would want to demean a woman in such a way.

We are left to presume it had something to do with how Lewinsky’s treatment helped to harm the reputation of progressive hero Bill Clinton. Clinton, of course, cops no abuse from Bonge; he saves that for the victim. Given the way Bonge (rightly) railed against sexist attacks on Julia Gillard, he is left looking like a misogyny hypocrite — just the sort we might expect Kelly to call out on RNBreakfast. We’ll listen with interest.

We couldn’t accuse the ABC of being inconsistent on border protection. Well OK, they went a little quiet on it for six years of chaos under Labor. But when they focus on it, they are consistent — in short, they are against border security and are prepared to run, unchecked or unverified, all sorts of claims about the mistreatment of asylum-seekers.

In an exchange related to border security last week the host of ABC radio’s PM, Mark Colvin, tweeted: “It’s the job of journalism to ask government for facts.” Had Colvin suddenly developed a naive faith in government? No, it transpires that Colvin was backing his ABC colleague, Peter Lloyd, in a rant against the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, apparently because he wasn’t responding to questions about an asylum boat turned around by the Sri Lankan navy.

Yet it seems Lloyd only knew about the turn-back because Dutton had announced it, and talked about it on 2GB. On Twitter, the Minister included a link to the Sri Lankan navy’s website for additional information. Still, Lloyd and Colvin were publicly chastising Dutton for his failure to respond to a list of 20 questions — there was “no reply” as yet, tweeted Lloyd as Colvin tweeted this was despite the “large numbers” of media types employed by the department.

As is the way in the new unbearable lightness of journalism, Lloyd also tweeted his questions. He wanted to know the date and port of the boat’s departure, when it was intercepted, how many people were on board etc. Well, I can tell him. There were nine people (five men, one woman, two boys and a girl) on the fishing vessel Rishna Duwa, intercepted at 6am on April 19th, about 30km off Negombo, the port of its departure. It was a colourful little boat painted bright green, yellow and orange. I can tell you this because all this information, and more, was available on the Sri Lankan navy website via the link Dutton had tweeted nearly 24 hours before the Colvin and Lloyd twitter protests.

Perhaps, in future, when the Sri Lankan navy does something in Sri Lanka, Lloyd and Colvin will contact the Sri Lankan government. Or perhaps they’ll click on the link supplied by the Australian government to help out. Or perhaps they’ll get on to Twitter complaining about another Coalition government conspiracy of silence over shameful border security policies.

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English to become compulsory in Qld schools

English is set to become a compulsory subject for year 11 and 12 students in Queensland. While most students in those years study English, it is ultimately up to schools to decide whether it is compulsory.

The Queensland government wants to make all students to complete an English subject in their final years of school to ensure they have necessary communication skills for the digital age.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said about 98 per cent of students in years 11 and 12 currently studied English. "Let's make it compulsory and get the other two per cent," she said while launching the 2016 Premier's Reading Challenge on Tuesday.

Education Minister Kate Jones said a taskforce examining senior assessment and tertiary entrance would next week decide whether English would be made compulsory. "Our view is that we think that this sends a very strong message about the quality of education in Queensland," Ms Jones said. "We understand that in the digital economy having good quality communication skills is critical."

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Through the end of Fiscal Year 2015, back on 30 September 2015, we estimate that the ratio of the United States' total public debt outstanding to the nation's median household income is approximately 263%. While down slightly from its peak of 267% in ...

Sometimes, I throw around the term neoliberalism as if everyone knows what it means.  Part of this is due to an allergy I have towards folks who like to reduce their debates to definitions.  I was on the debate team in high school and whenever the debate degenerated into some meaningless hairsplitting over definitions, I just wanted to quit.  I always thought that debate was a process that was supposed to yield better answers and definition debates never did that.  Worse, hairsplitting is something Protestant clergy pride themselves on and as a preacher's kid, I pretty much had my fill of this sort of posturing by 12.

The fundamental problems of debates over definitions are several:

1) because we can never really know exactly what is going on in someone's head, we don't even know if they are expressing their position accurately;
2) even the most devout hairsplitters have to acknowledge that there is probably widespread agreement on the basics so there is already enough agreement on terms to continue debating more essential issues; and
3) debates over definitions is a loser tactic—its what you do when you know your position is weak—a tactic designed to deliberately waste time.

Having said this, I do appreciate when someone with the writing chops of George Monbiot decides to define and explain some of the more serious problems associated with the practices of neoliberalism.  And the following effort is especially clear.  I approve of folks who include outcomes in a discussion of theory.  I have discovered in life that this is a highly useful practice.  Turns out it matters almost not at all what people claim to believe as religious or similar practice because at the end of the day, the only important issue is, "Are they good neighbors?"  This makes it easy because neoliberals are nightmare neighbors.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

George Monbiot, 15 April 2016

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all phone services and soon became the world’s richest man. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

***

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.   more

Just a "boy".  No mention of a terrorist suspect's religion.  How strange!

The "extremist" literature he had was Presbyterian, perhaps?  Presbyterians can be pretty extreme about discouraging gambling

A 16-year-old boy has been charged with planning to carry out an Anzac Day terrorist attack in Sydney. The teenager was arrested near his home in Auburn, in Sydney's west, on Sunday by counter terrorism police.

On searching his home, police did not find any weapons or explosives but they did uncover extremist propaganda, 9News reported. They also allege the boy was trying to source the method and the equipment for carrying out the attack.

The boy was charged with one count of acts in preparation for or planning a terrorist act, which carries a maximum penalty of a life imprisonment.

Police say he was acting by himself and he was refused bail to appear before Parramatta Children's Court later on Monday.

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said it was 'really concerning' to see a 16-year-old charged with the offence.

'We will be suggesting that there was a proposed attack to happen on this day [Monday] and that being Anzac Day, it is very, very concerning,' he said.

Comm Scipione would not reveal which suburb the boy had targeted but he did confirm the attack was planned for Sydney.

He also urged families heading to Anzac Day services not to be deterred by the incident.

'The risk from this particular threat has been thwarted... Do not let an event like this stop you from going out,' Comm Scipione said.

'So, please, don't be perturbed. We are doing absolutely everything we can to keep people safe. This threat has been dealt with. Enjoy your day.'

The boy appeared to have been acting alone in planning the alleged attack.

'People shouldn't have concerns that this person may have other associates out there that may have been joining in the threat,' Comm Scipione said.

'We believe it was one person by himself and at this stage we are satisfied.'

Comm Scipione said NSW Police had increased their presence around the state following the arrest.

'At this stage it is a noticeable increase... we are not leaving anything to chance at the moment,' he said.

Comm Scipione said counter terrorism police were forced to act on Sunday afternoon in order to ensure public safety.

'Clearly we have taken swift action to ensure community safety on the eve of a sacred day on the Australian calendar,' Commissioner Scipione said.

'I want to assure the NSW community that our counter terrorism capability is such that we were able to move quickly to prevent harm.

'The age of the individual is obviously a concern for us, and it remains a measure of the ongoing task facing law enforcement and the community.'

AFP State Manager Sydney Office, Commander Chris Sheehan, said family and friends are vital when it comes to connecting with those young people who may be susceptible to carry out criminal acts that attract significant penalties.

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African gang members who attacked Chinese students during a spate of home invasions were out on bail for similar attacks

"Suspected Sudanese Apex gang members who were arrested after allegedly assaulting a group of Chinese international students were released on bail for similar attacks.

Five teens - aged 16 to 19 - of African background were arrested on Saturday night over a recent spate of violent home invasions and car thefts in Melbourne's south-east over the weekend.

According to the Herald Sun, several of the youths were freed on bail accused of carrying out similar violent offences.

The revelation comes after detectives from the Taskforce Tense arrested five teens over an alleged crime spree in Brighton East and Ormond in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Investigators executed warrants at neighbouring suburbs Cranbourne and Hampton Park later that night, and allegedly recovered a stolen BMW, Honda CRV, mobile phones and a computer.

According to the Herald Sun, five Chinese nationals living at the Ormond home were awoken at 6am on Saturday when six African youths broke into their townhouse.

'I thought, why did they choose our house? What's their aim,' one of those Chinese students, named Tony, said.  'One or two of them had weapons — hammers. I don't want to die, I thought about that,' he said.

'I've got no idea why they picked here. I now think Australia's not a safe place. I thought it was safe before, but not now.'

The rampaging youths allegedly demanded car keys and sped off with a stolen Honda SUV and white BMW 7 series car.

Two of the arrested men have been charged with aggravated burglary, assault, theft of motor car, handle stolen goods and possess proceeds of crime.

They remain in police custody and will appear at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Sunday.

A third man, 17, will appear at a children's court at a later date to face the same five charges.  Two more men, 18 and 16, were released without charges.

The Herald Sun reported that Chinese nationals were being targeted by the infamous Apex gang because they are seen as unlikely to fight back when threatened by gang members.

Victoria police say the arrests are 'part of an ongoing commitment toward dealing with violent gang-related offending seen across southern metro region suburbs in recent months.'

Last month, a violent gang-related riot in Melbourne shut down parts of the city and terrorised the public. 

The Apex gang were filmed causing chaos on March 12 as more than 100 members clashed in Federation Square and on Swanston Street in front of families attending a Moomba community event.

The Apex gang had threatened on social media to return and run amok again on Sunday night but police managed to disperse the group.

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Channel Seven slammed for crossing to an ad break while the Last Post was being played

Leftists have long mocked ANZAC day so I think we can guess the politics of the person who did this

Channel Seven has come under fire from viewers after the broadcaster cut to an ad break during the Last Post before the Richmond-Melbourne game on Sunday night.

The Last Post was being played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) when Seven cut to an ad for one of its other programs, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

The bugle call, which signifies the end of the day's activities in military tradition, is sounded at commemorative services such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.

Seven reportedly cut to an ad for an episode of My Kitchen Rules.

Viewers took to social media to share their disappointment at the broadcaster's action.

One person wrote: 'An actual human being, made a conscious decision, to press a button, to interrupt The Last Post'.

Another questioned where Channel Seven's Anzac spirit was, while a further person commented that they 'weren't surprised'.

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Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison defends anti-gay commentator at Australian Christian Lobby event

Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison has defended the right of a Christian commentator to make controversial statements concerning homosexuality, which have included likening the advancement of gay rights to the rise of Nazism in pre-war Germany.

"I respect everybody's opinions, I just hope and wish others would do the same," he said, after speaking at the Australian Christian Lobby conference. "I have always respected everybody else's faith and always sought to respect everybody else's view."

The ACL has been criticised for inviting conservative American commentator Eric Metaxas as keynote speaker at Saturday's event in Sydney. The author and radio host has drawn parallels between the current push for equality and the Church failing to stand up to the Nazi party.

He is also a supporter of gay conversion therapy and claims "normalising" homosexuality is an attempt to break down all sexual boundaries.

The Treasurer's speech to the 600 people attending the ACL's "Cultivating Courage" conference focused on the importance of marriage and the family, which he called "the most sacred national institution". "To protect our country, to protect our society, to protect our economy and to protect our children, we must protect the family," he said.

He thanked the "millions of people … who I know pray earnestly for our political leaders".

"I'm a big believer in prayer, I've seen the impact of it in my own life and I know it works," he said.

But the Treasurer declined to discuss further his own strong Christian beliefs. "My faith is not my politics. My faith is an important part of who I am, as it is of every human being, whatever their faith might be. Judge me on my policies. My faith is my business."

ACL managing director Lyle Shelton told the conference that it was becoming harder to be a Christian in Australia. "We face false slurs and labels, designed to demonise us into silence," he said.

"Bigot, homophobe, hater, are just some of the pejorative terms that have been used to characterise us ordinary Australians, who simply believe that marriage [should be] between a man and woman."

A small group outside the Wesley Conference Centre staged a protest in favour of same-sex marriage and gay rights. Cat Rose, from the Community Action Against Homophobia, criticised Mr Morrison's decision to speak at the ACL event. "We've got no problems with the Christian lobby but all they do is talk about gay rights and how to stop them," she said.

Conference attendees were asked to "refrain from going outside at any time" to avoid protesters.

Mr Shelton also criticised public support from large corporations, including Telstra, for marriage equality. "If you work for a big corporation like Telstra, you'd better keep your head down because you might end up with a tap on the shoulder by the diversity officer," he said.

"Such has been the capitulation and capture of corporate Australia by rainbow politics."

In 2014, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten used his appearance at the ACL conference to make a case for marriage equality and argued that freedom of worship did not mean freedom to vilify.

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Labor is taking Europe’s road to ruin

It is easy to understand why Labor wants to increase taxes on higher-income earners. And it does not take much nous to figure out why the government might feel under pressure to do so too. But what does require explaining is how the need to raise taxes in next month’s budget has become an unchallenged part of the conventional wisdom.

After all, we are hardly slouches in the revenue stakes. On the contrary, data from the Inter­national Monetary Fund shows Australia is exceptional in the reliance we are already placing on higher revenues, rather than on better controlled public spending, to restore budget balance.

Taking the advanced econo­mies as a whole, about 25 per cent of the projected fiscal improvement over the decade will come from increasing the share of taxes in GDP, with the remaining 75 per cent being achieved by slowing the growth of outlays. In Australia, however, virtually all the fiscal ­effort will be on the revenue side, with public spending growing at a rapid rate.

Yet there is little reason to think that our lopsided emphasis on raising revenues makes any sense. Rather, simple economics suggests the emphasis should lie squarely on public expenditure ­restraint.

An example illustrates the point. Assume the last dollar of public spending yields 10c in net benefits, but that by reducing the incentives to work, save and invest­, the additional dollar in taxes required to make that spending fiscally sustainable would impose 30c worth of costs. In that case, cutting spending would clearly be preferable to boosting taxes. Conversely, it is only if the net benefit from the last dollar of public spending exceeds the cost of raising taxes that a tax hike might be justifiable.

The question, in other words, is how the social loss from higher taxes compares with the social benefit of sustainably higher expend­iture. And while such comparisons are inevitably fraught, the former is likely to greatly exceed­ the ­latter.

That is partly because the options for tax increases have been narrowed to the point where only the most inefficient possibilities remain on the table. Obviously, no tax is costless, but some are plainly more distorting than others. And with the top rate of income tax already at 50 per cent (and closer to 58 per cent when the GST is taken into account), plugging the deficit by raising that rate could reduce national income by up to 60c for each additional dollar in revenue raised. Such a tax increase would therefore only be sensible if each dollar of public expenditure yielded $1.60 in benefits.

The hurdle would not be any lower were taxes hiked on superannuation or capital gains. An effic­ient tax system should be neut­ral between consuming today and consuming tomorrow; ours isn’t, taxing many savings heavily.

Aggravating those distortions would have substantial economic costs. That doesn’t mean total savings would necessarily fall were taxes on savings raised. Rather, just as higher income taxes — by making taxpayers poorer — may force them to work longer hours, so taxpayers, faced with steeper taxes on savings may offset some of the impact on future incomes by maintaining their savings effort.

But much as it would be absurd to believe the longer working hours meant the higher income taxes had not distorted decision-making, so it is foolish to claim, as the Grattan Institute’s John Daley regularly does, that the near constancy of total savings implies raising taxes on savings is harmless.

Instead, put in the jargon of economics, the “income” effects of the tax hike — which raise savings — disguise the “substitution” effect­s, which reduce them; but it is those “substitution” effects that measure how seriously efficiency is being undermined.

The efficiency losses would be every bit as great were negative gearing abolished. In simple terms, this would raise the cost of providing rental housing, compared with the cost of owner-occupa­ncy, by a further 6-10 per cent in a market where that choice is already severely distorted.

Of course, those costs could be worth bearing if the spending they made sustainable had high net benefits. In reality, as public spending has burgeoned so its quality has deteriorated, to the point where its benefits are far below the thresholds needed to justify raising taxes.

For example, real commonwealth expenditure on childcare has increased from $1.8 billion in 2002-03 to just less than $7bn, so that spending per child under the age of five has literally trebled; yet there are few signs of any social return­s from massively boosting outlays. Merely reversing that increase would yield savings that exceed­ the revenues that could plausibly be obtained from abolishing negative gearing and halving the capital gains tax concession.

Equally, real commonwealth school spending per school-aged child has doubled since 2002-03, but the proficiency level of lower performing students has barely increased­, while that of higher-performing students has dropped. And in healthcare too there is a great deal of “flat-of-the-curve” spending, which yields no health benefits, and evidence of widespread waste.

Obviously, reforming spending programs is tough. But it is not the substantive difficulties that impede reform: it is the fact that in those areas and others the benefits of the spending have been captured by producer lobbies, going from the teacher unions to the self-appointed welfare advocates, whose swarms of petty appetites are as vicious as their rhetoric is sanctimonious. Taking them on is far harder than shafting taxpayers, all the more so when the slugs can be cloaked in the mantle of “fairness”.

That has been Europe’s road to ruin. And it has long been Labor’s chosen road too. The test for Scott Morrison is whether the Coalition can do better.

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