the Banner Bright

Alistair Kitchen: “The sad, joyful truth of democracies is that they are held together with sticky tape and goodwill. They are the result of symbiotic, mutualistic behaviour between participants who, from day to day, operate as enemies, but when the time comes find faith in one another. Functioning democratic states are not simply the result of laws. They are made up of laws, and conventions, and norms, and practices, and sheer, sheer, unadorned faith. All of these are necessary to liberal democracy. The Republican Party knows this and takes advantage of it. The choice from the Republican Party and its propaganda arm, Rupert Murdoch’s media apparatus, to act against these foundational requirements of democracy has given it a structural advantage in our political culture. And the failure of liberals to understand the extent of that bad faith — to be fooled over and over again — has allowed this anti-democratic spirit to run unchecked. Their failure to reaffirm the value of democracy, which has its expression in egalitarianism, has allowed that shared simultaneous commitment to dwindle in our political culture. No democracy can survive without it. It is after all because of, rather than in spite of, the fragility of US democracy that Americans insist their system is imbued with ‘checks and balances’. But it must not disappoint us that the life or death of what we call liberal democracy will depend not on laws but on that irresolute quality of human beings, faith. Instead the beautiful fragility of this system asks that we are clear-eyed in our view of those who act against its spirit.”

Australia’s leaders don’t understand the experience of poverty, says Rick Morton: “It would be nice if they tried, though. Money is a force that acts on time and space. It can extend both, quite literally prolonging our lives, if there is enough of it. And its absence can shrink the borders of our world. The lack of it can and does cut short our time on this Earth. Vast chunks of the Australian welfare apparatus, and especially the malignant employment services sector, exist because we just do not trust poor people with cash. In the latter case, it actually costs money to enforce this instinct. There has been no effort to understand the psychology of bare-knuckle survival. Rather, a prodigious, emotionally barren attempt at blame and punishment has taken root. And, like the foundations of prosperity gospel, we have allowed it to happen because many of us believe in the atomic truth of these welfare proposals: that money measures worth and moral character. It never has.”

Liam Hogan: “Courts are premodern entities surrounding power. The monarchs of old régime Europe had them; most famously at Versailles and at Madrid, but they seem to have been a common habit everywhere where power centralised, and existed around the Sultan in Istanbul, around Mughal princes, at the Forbidden City in Beijing, and around the Emperor and Shogun of Japan. The cultures of Australian State and Federal government, containing as well their press galleries and lobby groups, are a new-old democratic form of ‘court’, with everything that implies. The personal role of the monarch has simply been abolished in our case and replaced with the symbolic sovereign of ‘the election’, an arbitrary absolute presence that demands complete obedience, even reverence. In the gigantic-kitsch New Parliament House in Canberra the court even finds its own bakufu in which all the arms of State (elected, public service, press, military) can gather, physically-symbolically. … The culture of courts was and is marked by intrigue, powerful charismatic leaders-behind-the-scenes, small constantly forming and re-forming groups, favourites, juntas, camarillas, ostentatious displays of virtue and shaming, and a ‘spill’ culture of sudden shocking changes. In societies where politics is genuinely conducted at a level of secrecy and many-levels-of-intrigue, conspiratorial and magic thinking takes hold with the public at large. Does this sound familiar?”

ANU’s Elise Klein: “[T]he government continues to rely on anecdotes and the widely criticised 2017 evaluation by ORIMA Research as ‘proof’ for the roll out of the Cashless Debit Card. In 2018, the Australian National Audit Office found the ORIMA evaluation was methodologically flawed and unable to provide any credible conclusions regarding the real impact of the trial.” Meanwhile: “Peer-reviewed research has consistently shown the card, and income management more broadly, do not meet policy objectives. A 2020 academic study of multiple locations found compulsory income management ‘can do as much harm as good’. Survey respondents reported not having enough cash for essential items, while the research found the card ‘can also stigmatise and infantilise users’. My research examining the card in the East Kimberley shows it makes life more difficult for people subjected to it, including making it harder to manage money. People also reported the card made it more difficult to buy basic goods such as medicine and groceries. Other research from the Life Course Centre suggests compulsory income management has been linked to a reduction of birth weight and school attendance. The majority of these children are First Nations kids. … The protracted life of the Cashless Debit Card … shows the continued slow violence against thousands of Australians who deserve much better from elected officials and the structures set up to support them.”

Joel Fitzgibbon continues to wage his sabotage campaign against Labor, this time by quitting the frontbench after undermining Albanese’s plan to pressure Morrison on carbon emissions. “The Labor Party has been spending too much time in recent years talking about issues like climate change,” said the MP who spends all his time ensuring Labor can do nothing but bicker about climate change. “We have a diverse range of membership… There has been a cultural shift and too much of an emphasis on our more newly arrived base, and not sufficient emphasis on our traditional base” — gee, I wonder what he is hinting at with this contrast between “newly arrived”, “diverse” membership and “our traditional base”? Of course, what it all really comes down to is this: “I have no intention of running for the leadership. I mean, I would have to be drafted.” Fortunately, it seems Fitzgibbon’s leadership fantasy is just that [$]: “About one quarter of the caucus supports Fitzgibbon, another quarter supports his views but not his methods, while the remaining half ‘hates him'”. Perhaps he would have more luck in the parties whose policies he so passionately supports [$]? “Joel Fitzgibbon was greeted with a round of applause at Aussies Cafe from Liberal and National pollies, after word spread of his resignation. Witnesses say he took a bow.”

It’s hard to keep up with the revelations of corruption in the ranks of Victoria Police. Using lawyers as informers against their own clients, bribing witnesses for evidence, using police information to carry out complex property fraud, carrying out fake breath tests to game the statistics, high ranking Professional Standards officers posting racial abuse and sexually assaulting people… and now this [$]: “Sgt Buchhorn, dubbed by the Herald Sun as ‘The Fixer’, begins tying the police accounts together. Statements will be shredded and new statements will replace old ones. Evidence will be left off the police brief, hidden from view, as if it does not exist. And to hide the trail, police will commit perjury. Officer Pullin is put in this unenviable position. When he is approached by Sgt Buchhorn in mid-1999 to make another statement, about 10 months after the shootings, he complies. His account becomes critical to the prosecution case of two offenders. Officer Pullin’s second statement is then fraudulently backdated to the morning of the murders, as if it is a contemporaneous account — the events fresh in his mind. … His original statement made just hours after he comforted and spoke to the dying Sen Constable Miller, was buried. The Court of Appeal on Tuesday said this conduct corrupted the trial ‘to its roots’.” Five original statements have disappeared… Remember — this was only revealed because a whistleblower kept a copy of one of the shredded statements. How deep is this iceberg?

John Quiggin: “There’s nothing inherently desirable about competition. If the alternative is collusion against the public interest, competition is a necessary evil. Far better, when it can be achieved, is cooperation to be the best we can at what we do. That’s the core value of the service professions, professions derided by market reformers as ‘producer interests’. Much the same is true of choice. As far as flavours of ice cream are concerned, some people will like butterscotch, some will go for mango and some might even prefer Neapolitan. The more choices the better. But for the human services that matter most to us, it’s not a question of how many choices we have. What matters is the quality of the best choice. We want our doctors and nurses to keep us well, our teachers to educate and inspire us, and our carers to give us comfort and dignity. Trying to achieve this with financial incentives will only benefit those who can game the incentive structure. What is needed is not the maximisation of shareholder value but an ethic of service.”

Sangeetha Thanapal: “[T]he truth about population growth and its impact on the environment is obscured. The places with high levels of population growth account for just 10 per cent of lifestyle consumption emissions while the richest in the world make up half of the total emissions. Activist Naomi Klein points out that the places with ‘… the highest levels of population growth, (are) the poorest parts of the world with the lowest carbon footprints.’ Since most of the people in countries with rapidly growing populations will be poor (by Western standards), this means their consumption of per-capita resources will be low. Simply put, the people having too many babies are not the ones causing environmental degradation. The environmental movement’s focus on reducing population growth does not make sense in the light of the actual numbers. Instead, looking at capitalism and western colonialism makes more sense. The use of resources and pollution levels are not divided equally across the globe. Environmental devastation is not directly caused by individuals or households, but by corporations. Just a hundred companies are responsible for 71 per cent of the world’s emissions. … [E]nvironmental movements that use the overpopulation argument seek to reduce the human population so that the wealthy can continue to plunder the earth’s resources.”

Scott W Stern responds to various proposals for reform of the US Supreme Court: “[N]o matter the fix, the courts will always be political — law is inherently political — and politics will always be about power. The Right understands this, which is why they have been so successful in court of late. Conservative political and legal activists aren’t looking to fix the courts or even formulate superior legal arguments; they know that winning in court is simply about having more power. … The point of progressive court reform should not be to fix the courts, but rather simply to use the courts to enact left policy goals. And the best way to do that right now is to pack the courts. The problem with the courts is not that they’re too political or too powerful or too partisan — it’s simply that they’re too far right. The structuralists are misguided because the courts can never be made spaces shielded from political struggle. Stronger courts, weaker courts, ideologically balanced courts, ideologically unbalanced courts — all are political courts. The way to achieve a more just world through law, then, is not to try to fix the courts, but for the Left to utterly dominate them — as the Right currently does. The structuralists are probably right that courts have become far more powerful than they were supposed to be, but no matter. Politics is not about achieving some sort of Montesquieuian ideal — it is (or, at least, should be) about improving people’s lives. If the most effective way to do that is to win in court, and the most effective way to do that is to pack the courts, then pack the courts.

While Christine Holgate has resigned from Australia Post before her full corporate credit card expenditures have been investigated, John Quiggin points out that the latest Australia Post scandal is the result of neoliberal reform: ”The biggest public relation misstep in Christine Holgate’s leadership of Australia Post was … her statement to the Senate that she had not used taxpayers’ money to buy the watches, since Australia Post was a commercial organisation. This statement would be odd even if it were made in relation to the shareholders of a private corporation — after all, the company’s money ultimately belongs to them. When applied to a statutory corporation like Australia Post, it created a firestorm. … The advocates of privatisation have repeatedly failed in attempts to sell off Australia Post. The next best thing is to turn it into a quasi-private corporation, with lavish provision for its senior managers… The transaction that brought Holgate undone … involved securing annual payments from major banks in return for Australia Post’s provision of banking services in areas the banks themselves had abandoned… it was merely a continuation of an arrangement that dated back more than 100 years. For most of this long period, … unthinkable would be a suggestion that renewing the arrangement on a regular basis, or arranging the financial transfers necessary to balance the books, was an achievement deserving of a luxury watch, on top of a million-dollar salary. The Australian public has long since seen through the claims made for privatisation, even if the financial and corporate sectors (the real ‘inner city elites’) continue to push the ideas of competition and choice. Australians want basic services to be delivered cheaply and reliably, by organisations set up to serve the public, rather than to maximise profits.”