Ruddism: some thoughts

It’s probably derriere garde—in some quarters—to use the language of blog posts and newspapers as metaphors for understanding contemporary government, but I wonder if it’s worth considering that the projects of the current Rudd-Labor Government are actually happening under or over the fold.

Two years into this Government’s tenure and there is a sense that the mainstream media are propagating a continuation of the sorts of commentator culture warrior, ‘balance’ reporting-interviewing practices, that came to dominate the end of the Howard era. Such techniques seemed to have worked effectively in the early to mid noughties, when economic and national security were presented as constantly under threat and the Leader’s ubiquitous radio presence was sought to establish the firm borders between those who were with us and those against. (We still listen to the ABC’s News Radio of a morning in our household, as we did in the Howard era, and one notable difference is the lack of the Leader’s voice on the radio). So, before looking at the so-called substance of the mediatized products of the Rudd Government, I want to consider the forms of the media-government mix

The current Leader is more a creature of television and the new social media: breakfast magazine-style TV, in particular. Rudd is narrowcasting more than Howard, and this has prompted some mainstream political journalists to draw attention to the repetition of Rudd’s sequences of narrowcasts, suggesting that this technique is redolent with spin and micro-managed manipulation.

Rudd is using media differently to Howard, and these different practices have left the broadsheet, TV and radio political journalist elite at a loss. Consider, for example, the weekly ABC TV show The Insiders. This one hour Sunday morning show is a magazine-style program, which comprises about 8 segments. The primary section of the show is an ‘discussion’ chaired by ex-Labor staffer Barry Cassidy, who presides over three TV, radio or print political journalists/ commentators, as they range over what they see as the main political events of the week. This panel is meant to be ‘balanced’—meaning that to the right of the screen is a culture-warrior News Ltd commentator, and to the left a social-liberal Fairfax or Labor-aligned journalist/ commentator resides. This segment is interrupted by a cross to The Senior Political Journalist—Paul Kelly—whose magisterial analysis is handed down in a language of absolute definitiveness that frequently clashes with the shifting ephemera of week-to-week politics.

The panel, the host, the doyen . . . these are truly insiders, but what they are inside increasingly appears to be the new outside. If Rudd is the king of spin, then these in-outsiders are often secondary spinners, offered one to two minutes to interpret the political rhetoric and events of the week in ways that rarely produce any insight into what is going on, under the fold.

Rudd doesn’t appear on The Insiders. He has, however, been appearing on a talk-variety TV show, Rove, which aims at something like the 18-39 demographic. He also appears on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs show, The 7:30 Report. The point is that the mix of media through which politics is both occurring and being reported is shifting, and that the insiders of the political journalism establishment have attempted to explain changes in this mix by drawing on a discourse which personalizes politics through the leader’s style of leadership. There is, of course, nothing new in this focus on the personal techniques of self of the Leader. But such a focus is, I think, bring prompted by a lack of understanding about what is going on under the fold.

So, as the techniques of governing through the media shift, what is going on? Can these changes be reported in the old ways? Maybe not. Maybe such changes need both a new language of abstract analysis and more narrative-based forms of testimony—even collective testimony—to articulate such changes. A mixture of what can be said and told about what is happening on the ground combined with an analysis of how these forms of practices and thought can be explained at the level of larger organizations, of the state, of NGOs and so on.

What was happening on the ground during the Howard-era was to some extent routed through the figure of the ordinary Australian who was defined in the media as someone whose freedom and values were not to be contained or directed by cosmopolitan elites. Such culture war tropes were neatly allied to the figure of the small-business owner, the mom and dad shareholder, and to nebulous family values. Thus a neoliberal-neoconservative amalgam of practices and pressures circulated through the figure of the ordinary Australian: a figure that was posited as being grounded; as living in the 'real world'. The short-circuiting of this amalgam in the Australian context arrived in various events, not least, the Schapelle Corby drug-trials, the Chaser’s APEC stunt and the anti-Workchoices campaigns. These events, among others, tore at the media complicity in these amalgams of the neolib-neocon project. But the tear in media fabric has been replaced by old ideas about social democracy—fed by Rudd himself—and about Labor’s Whitlamite propensity to fiscal largesse and hence self and national destruction. Rudd’s neoliberalism is thus presented as more of the same, but with a social-democratic heart. The mainstream characterization of Rudd as the King of Spin is to some extent, the judgment of journalists whose bearings are set in an earlier period of government: the Hawke-Keating period. Howard did much to persuade people that his Government was a type of permanent opposition, rolling back the cultural arrogance of the Keating era and its allies in the arts, the universities, the Fairfax press and the ABC. Rudd’s talk appears as spin, because it doesn’t rely on the modes of consensus amongst the political-journalist class that Hawke, Keating and Howard’s spin, did. But what is probably happening is that these forms of consensus are being mediated differently. What appears as repetition to an outsider who was once inside, appears as effective rhetoric and policy to those currently inside, or at least to those connected to government in ways that make the appearance of repetition, an irrelevance--background noise.

In short, what is needed, and what may well be circulating but I don’t know of, is a language that joins the social practices of the ground—of the local, the private, the bodily—to those of the region, the state, the corporate . . . In Foucauldian terms, there needs to be a language that can narrate and explain a new continuum of governmentality.

Now, maybe such a continuum is not a cause for celebration or affirmation, but rather invites and requires critique. Fine. But there is a preliminary need to more accurately narrate and analyse the current continuum. Which brings me, finally, to some suggestive fragments embedded in a recent Guy Rundle essay, “The End of the Whitlamists” in Arena Magazine (no. 102). Rundle’s topic is the residual Whitlamism that has affected the way that some on the Left view the prospects for cultural and social reform that the Rudd Government offers. I have previously analysed Whitlamism as a spectre that haunts the Australian Left, and have argued that its ghostly-ness is evidence of a loss to be worked through. Rundle is taking a similar tack, effectively arguing that one critical component of Whitlamism is that it lingers as a form of melancholy for sections of the Left intelligentsia, especially sections working in the arts and cultural industries.

Rundle has some sharp and, I would say, Foucauldian points to make about the forms of governmentality emerging in the Rudd-era. (He hints that this line of analysis will be expanded on in an upcoming essay in Overland.) So, to the quotes:

‘New Labour’ style regimes mark the end of one type of alliance between organized labour—or the suburban mainstream as it has now become—and an avant-garde intelligentsia, a model going back in explicit form to the 60s, and with its roots in the 19th century. Yet the artistic intelligentsia cannot successfully reflect on its own presuppositions—its rebelliousness hardened into orthodoxy—to mount a sufficiently new critical position on ‘Ruddism’ One can see this, for example, in the somewhat disappointing contribution of centre-left magazine The Monthly to publish contributions with a degree of critical or theoretical depth (some essays by Anne Manne aside) because its implicit ‘Whitlamist’ attitude to Labor, state and culture, lacks a framework with which to analyse the distinctive—and far from emancipatory—approach of the Rudd government to social and cultural life.

One can see this as a renewed push for an explicitly social democratic intellectual movement from a number of left and centre-left writers and activists, one which wears its acceptance of limits as a badge of pride, a sort of reverse radicalism, Yet such moves are occupying a space that has already been carved out by the Rudd-ALP—it is an intellectual movement drawing its legitimacy from a political process, rather than leading it through the application of a critical imagination. That secondary status shunts such people into the position of supply strategies of cultural management to a ruling party—hence a new-found focus on the nature of a progressive patriotism, and a search for ways to manufacture ‘belonging’.

For many the forces of darkness [the neoconservative reaction of the Rudd Government to media-based moral panics, which see Rudd condemn certain figures and which put pressure on censorship regimes: e.g. the Bill Henson affair] are attacks on the big freedoms, which are rarely seriously attacked, while increasing regimes of subjective re-shaping and microregulation of social desires go increasingly unchallenged, because they are wrapped up in various guises (preventative health measures appear to be the most recent) that maintain the old image of social improvement. Only when such processes swing round to take in the artistic community—and that is the Henson case in essence—do such people become aware of the profound transformations of state-society relations taking place.

The avant-garde intelligentsia, by and large, haven’t understood that [there could be different ideas of progress].

What's Rudd building in there?

What is Kevin Rudd? Can't he just tear off the mask and come clean?

Stop bloking around, bloke. Fella. Are you a social democrat with a Bonhoffer heart, or a Neoliberal with shaken sauce bottle dollops of moral populism ?

Australians like their leaders to embody some simple, straighforward ethos. That leaders might craft a persona that sometimes cracks open to reveal - gasp - contradictions, media techniques, or even an ambitious driven politician, is unremarkable. The sense of something manipulative, power-mad or even fundamentally false behind the mask(s), has less perhaps to do with Rudd's all-too-common politician's contradictions, than with his 1st term government's position in the electoral cycle (the honeymoon period is waning, and it's time for the "tough" decisions), and with the convulsions that Neoliberal-Finance-Capitalism has been through since he came to power.



Rudd ALP was elected on a cyclic turn away from the hubris of the 11 year-old Coalition and with four main pitches: to roll-back the Neoliberal excess of Howard's Industrial relations laws; to install a carbon trading scheme; to invest in run-down national infrastructure; and to be more fiscally prudent. The collapse of the global mineral commodity market has undercut government revenue significantlty and the second and fourth of these election pitches have been let go, or deferred. The first has been achieved, but with so many qualifications that Unions are pushing for more roll-back.

That leaves national infrastructure, which has been tied into the "stimulus" packages. Certainly, the direction and nature of these investments have been affected by the convulsions in the global credit markets, but what is surprising here is how long it took the government to argue for these investments; how they were framed in the media as soft infrastructure, or wasteful, because the money invested didn't appear in the guise of hard things like roads, rail, ports, or appear in small business investment. The media framing of the story and debates around infrastructure investment reveals that Australia is a place for men who run small businesses. The Howard government did much to normalise this culture, which imposes itself on Rudd and the Mournings with Mel an Cholia constituency that forms part of his public. It's no surprise that Rudd reaches into his own version of this culture when appealing to the ordinary Australians that Howard did so much to form.

I think the frisson over Rudd's persona, arising out of his use of arcane colloquialisms, is tied up in these difficulties and reversals. Rudd has the aura of certain traditions about him, but these are aligned with his bureaucratic techniques, and with his suburban Christianity. The sort of Australia that Rudd and his government is building raise questions about the builders and the project manager: the traditions and techniques he's using.

However, looking for the one real Rudd won't reveal anything except our own desire to know what's going on in this conjuncture. And that is both too difficult, and too complex, to know. At present.

Unbecoming of age: Australia's financial deregulation

After Kevin Rudd's post-Neoliberalism manifesto it was only a matter of time before his predecessor -- John Howard -- would appear to both set Rudd straight and to provide a set of scissor-ready quotes that can be cut'n'pasted into further Labor rhetoric about the defence and affirmation of neoliberalism residing in the Liberal party.

Howard, in his inaugural speech last night at the Menzies Research Centre, did voice the common-sense argument that the Hawke-Keating governments must be included in the list of those who Neoliberalised Australia. This is the central political flaw in Rudd's polemic: that any repudiation of Australian neoliberalism can't reasonably ignore the great neoliberalisers who floated the exchange rate, relaxed banking restrictions -- including permitting the entry of foreign banks --, oversaw the shift of the Reserve Bank's primary goal from unemployment, to the current account deficit, to the focus on inflation --effectively from protecting jobs to protecting finance capital --, privatised former government enterprises, reduced tariff protection, and used the increasingly hollowed out Accords to both dismantle the Arbitration system and de-unionise labour.

Yet Ruud's essay signals that there has been a change in rhetoric, or at least ideology, as David McKnight argues, which constitutes an opening for much needed government intervention in the face of the climate and financial crises. Let's hold Rudd to his anti-free market ideology, is McKnight's preferred response to this shift in political language. This is a useful goal, but there are lessons here from the long Labor decade that might be worth revisiting as a warning to such pragmatic support for what might merely be a change in ideology, rather than in governing practices.

Firstly, we need to admit that the ALP neoliberalised Australian society. Not just the economy. Neoliberalism is a political, social and cultural project, and not just a doctrine about free markets and minimal government. Neoliberalism is a political project equally at home in the Labor and Liberal parties.

Secondly, there might be elements (practices) of neoliberalism that are worthwhile, that promote equality and justice. Just as the New Liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th century did much to establish the social and economic protections that stabilised many sections of Australian society during the twentieth century, there are also techniques and rationalities of neoliberal forms of governing that promote social justice and democratic participation better than so-called social democratic techniques. The desire to wholely repudiate neoliberalism from the Left is an understandable yet dangerous one. For example, flexible work practices are odious when they are used to casualise and make precarious the lives of manual labourers, so that employers can minimise costs and committments to employees. On the other hand, flexibility in working hours for parents or carers is to be encouraged. The sorts of practices of flexibility that result in job-sharing could do much to reduce job-losses as employers increasingly look to cut labour costs as turnover suffers. James Ferguson has developed this line of thinking based on his anthropological work in Africa.

Thirdly, the Hawke-Keating government modernised aspects of white, male, heterosexual Labourism that needed changing. This modernisation, however, was caught up and entwined in the national coming-of-age narrative that had financial 'deregulation' as its central event . Those worthwhile elements of Australian Labourism -- elements which articulated to those social democratic practices that Whitlam sought to implement -- need not be cast off as part of the adolescence of Australian political culture: as the eczema of Australian modernity which was cured by the mature openness and independence that opening the financial arteries of the Australian economy achieved. Neoliberal globalization is essentially a project aimed at installing a political culture which serves the movement of finance capital to all reaches of the globe. Neoliberalism is the (political-)culture of finance capital, and it's that nexus that needs to be broken and rearticulated to other political-cultural forms.

To that end, Steve Keen has a useful breakdown of the emergence of Neoliberalised finance capitalism, Australian-style, here. Keen, in response to John Howard's specch last night, writes:

how anyone could champion the first reform–the deregulation of the financial system–as a “great” reform in today’s climate beggars belief.

As I argued in the Roving Cavaliers of Credit, financial deregulation was based on a misguided belief that the financial system operated like an ordinary market for goods, where the market itself would work out a sensible volume of and price for credit. A proper analysis of how money is created shows instead that a deregulated financial system will pump out as much credit as borrowers can be enticed to take on. In a world in which leveraged speculation on asset prices is possible, that will lead to the economy taking on so much debt that it will ultimately fall into a debt-induced crisis–which is where we are now.

Once in this situation, deregulated finance then amplifies the problem by going from supplying too much credit to cutting off the credit tap in a manner that reduces overall economic activity.

So the financial deregulation that Howard championed last night, and that successive Labor and Liberal governments introduced, led not to a better functioning economic system, but to a financial catastrophe that is still in its infancy.

To argue that the entire crisis was due just to the subprime scam, and lax financial regulation, is to ignore the obvious signs in the data that too much credit was being generated relative to income. These signs go back to mid-1964 in Australia, and to Armistice Day in the USA.

I expect that the belief that the Australian banking system is immune from the problems that have beset the rest of the world will be sorely tested in the next year or two, as the macroeconomic crisis caused by financial deregulation strikes at the heart of Australian homeownership. The level of household debt in Australia is as high as in America (when measured in terms of each country’s GDP), and though all the focus has been on the USA’s irresponsible lending to the Subprimes, in fact household debt in Australia grew three times as fast as it did in America in the last twenty years.

The Australian financial system is thus dependent on all Australian mortgage holders being able to service their debts, when the only source most of them now have to do that is their jobs. As jobs go as the crisis deepens, the solvency of the Australian financial system will be sorely tested.

No-one will then claim that financial deregulation was a “great reform”.

Rudd's post-Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism can become dominant as governmentality without being dominant as ideology -- the former refers to governing practices and the latter to a popular order of belief that may or may not be fully in line with the former, and that may even be a site of resistance to it.

Wendy Brown "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy" Edgework: 49

The retreat of the state which is supposed to constitute neoliberalism in fact corresponds to an extension of government.

Jacques Donzelot interview with C. Gordon. Foucault Studies 5. Jan 2008: 53.

Ideology -
a society's unconscious tailoring of criteria of objectivity to fit its own interests.

Paul Hamilton, Historicism:4.

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Neoliberalism is a political project which treats citizens as consumers and entrepreneurs, and treats democratic politics as best pursued through market relationships. The rhetoric, or ideology, of Neoliberalism, rather than its full implementation, is what is now rightly in retreat. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's essay in the social-liberal magazine The Monthly is a political intervention: concerned with the language of politics and the orthodox ways of thinking about the relationship between states and markets. In other words, it is ideology, rather than governmentality, that is being contested by Rudd in his essay. The heat and noise in the op-ed pages of the Australian is about ideology, and what is fascinating is to watch the rhetoricians of Neoliberalism at News Ltd admit that, of course, government plays a role in regulating markets, and that the danger is governing too much, not government as such.

There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time: barely a decade into the new millennium, barely 20 years since the end of the Cold War and barely 30 years since the triumph of neo-liberalism - that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time.

The agent for this change is what we now call the global financial crisis. In the space of just 18 months, this crisis has become one of the greatest assaults on global economic stability to have occurred in three-quarters of a century. As others have written, it "reflects the greatest regulatory failure in modern history". It is not simply a crisis facing the world's largest private financial institutions - systemically serious as that is in its own right. It is more than a crisis in credit markets, debt markets, derivatives markets, property markets and equity markets - notwithstanding the importance of each of these.
Kevin Rudd

Since the early 1970s Chicago School liberalism -- a.k.a Neoliberalism -- has been ascendant and has been presented in terms of Government (state authoritarianism) versus markets (civil libertarianism). The mantra was get government out of our lives so we can be free and prosper. The reality during the past 35 years was that states acted in concert with forms of markets that redistributed risk down the social scale, and made life more precarious for millions of people. The state never retreated from governing (as Foucault puts it - conducting conduct) over the last 35 years, but, as many neoliberal commentators are now admitting, states governed in the interests of finance capital. Rudd's anti-neoliberal rhetoric is the antidote to the pro-neoliberal rhetoric of the past 35 years and needs to be seen within the basic terms of liberalism which opposes markets to states: always a false opposition. Arguing for a greater role for the state, as Rudd does, is code for redistributing risk more evenly across social strata, and hopefully, between generations.

Here are some links to previous posts on this blog which attempt to expand on and explain what s meant by Neoliberalism as governmentality. Here, here, here and here.