Australia has a hung parliament with the balance of power being held by three regional independents as a result of a growing discontent with the Westminster system of two party system of liberal democracy and a desire for multilevel democracy. Australia is taking the first hesitant steps towards recognizing that the world as a whole is changing towards more complex and multi-party politics.

The reforms requested by the three regional independents are contained in this letter to the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though limited---they do not address the executive being in a powerful position relative to the legislature, nor proportional representation for the House of Representatives--they are significant and they may help to sway some more voters and politicians towards backing reform.

TO JULIA GILLARD and TONY ABBOTT

Requests for information

1. We seek access to information under the ‘caretaker conventions’ to economic advice from the Secretary of the Treasury Ken Henry and Secretary of Finance David Tune, including the costings and impacts of Government and Opposition election promises and policies on the budget.

2. We seek briefings from the following Secretaries of Departments:

1. Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
2. Health and Ageing
3. Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
4. Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
5. Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
6. Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water
7. Defence
8. Resources, Energy and Tourism

3. We seek briefings from caretaker Ministers and Shadow Ministers in the above portfolio areas to discuss their program for the next three years.

4. We seek advice as soon as possible on their plans to work with the Clerks of the Parliament to improve the status and authority of all 150 local MP’s within parliamentary procedures and structures. In particular, we seek advice on timelines and actions for increasing the authority of the Committee system, private members business and private members bills, matters of public importance, 90 second statements, adjournment debates, and question time.

5. We seek a commitment to explore all options from both sides in regard “consensus options” for the next three years, and a willingness to at least explore all options to reach a majority greater than 76 for the next three years. Included in these considerations is advice on how relationships between the House of Representatives and the Senate can be improved, and a proposed timetable for this to happen.

6. We seek a commitment in writing as soon as possible that if negotiations are to take place on how to form Government, that each of these leaders, their Coalition partners, and all their affiliated MP’s, will negotiate in good faith and with the national interest as the only interest. In this same letter of comfort, we seek a written commitment that whoever forms majority Government will commit to a full three year term, and for an explanation in writing in this same letter as to how this commitment to a full term will be fulfilled, either by enabling legislation or other means.

7. We seek advice as soon as possible on a timetable and reform plan for political donations, electoral funding, and truth in advertising reform, and a timetable for how this reform plan will be achieved in co-operation with the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Financial Times is hosting a debate on the new austerity on the new austerity which they've constructed in terms of austerity v stimulus. This is a debate in economics in which the stimulators say the danger lies in spending too little and the austereians from spending too much. Each side also has their own economic champion: the stimulators follow the banner of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, while the austereians are forming up behind the recently reformed former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial Greenspan argued that the best economic stimulus would be for the world’s leading debtors (the United States, U.K., Japan, Italy, et al) to rein in their budget deficits, a strategy dubbed “austerity” by the press. Greenspan explains that because lower deficits will restore confidence, diminish the threat of inflation, and allow savings to flow to private-sector investment rather than public-sector consumption, the short-term pain will lead to gains both in the mid- and long-term. Rather than redistributing a shrinking pie, this approach allows the pie to grow. Greenspan’s austereian view has been echoed loudly in the highest policy circles of Berlin, Ottawa, Moscow, Beijing, and Canberra.

Australian conservatism has a neo-liberal strand and a statist one. These can be seen in its responses to the welfare state, which is celebrated by social democrats as civilizing capitalism. However, the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficult of the key terms of political theory now having a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings.

The term "the welfare state," commonly denoted an industrial capitalist society in which state power was deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces. There are three types of welfare state activities: provision of minimum income, provision for the reduction of economic insecurity resulting from such "contingencies" as sickness, old age and unemployment, and provision to all members of society of a range of social services.

In Australia, as in Britain, where the crisis of the 1970s was diagnosed as one of Keynesianism, neoliberalism emerged as a radical anti-Keynesian movement that sought to dismantle major Keynesian institutions and policies. In this context, the welfare state, a fundamental Keynesian institution, was identified as a part of the ‘problem,’ and became subject to the neoliberal ‘solution.’ The welfare state was a problem in that it has discouraged people from seeking work, and it has created a large, centralized, uncontrolled and unproductive bureaucracy.

The aim of the neo-liberal mode of governance is to roll back the welfare state in order to limit government. This tendency can be seen in the various proposals to reduce welfare dependency and getting people to stand on their own two feet. The phrase "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is often used.

Neoliberalism is is usually characterised in terms of the free market, small government, privatisation, and the separation of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and the rule of law. It is frequently traced to Friedrich Hayek's classic text The Constitution of Liberty. The neoliberal state ensures individual liberty through the provision of ‘choices’, which individuals then take responsibility for. Social solidarity is downplayed in favour of the virtues of self-reliance.

A neoliberal state can include a welfare state, but only of the most limited kind.Using the welfare state to realise an ideal of social justice is, for neoliberals, an abuse of power: social justice is a vague and contested idea, and when governments try to realise it they compromise the rule of law and undermine individual freedom. The role of the state should be limited to safeguarding the free market and providing a minimum level of security against poverty.

I've just come across The Journal of Public Reason--one of the few open access e-journals in philosophy---via Public Reason, a blog for political philosophers.

In the June 2010 issue there is a review of G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) by Kevin Gray. Cohen's text is insightful critique of elements of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice and on a certain strand of liberal thought that has emerged from dominance of A Theory of Justice.

This is a liberalism that holds that, so long as the well-being of the worst off members of society is not made worse, any arrangement that increases the well-being of better-off members of society is morally acceptable. This is a liberalism that allows rampant inequalities and holds that justice does not in fact require equality.

Cohen wants to rescue equality and justice from Rawlsian liberalism, and to restore the rightful place of social existence to political theory. Gray says that in the first section (‘Rescuing Equality’), Cohen attacks what he sees as the inequality countenanced in Rawls’ name. Gray points out that:

... it is thought just, under most Rawlsian approaches, to sanction differences in income if they benefit the worst off in society. The question is, however, in what way are they likely to benefit the worst off? And why is it the case that the best off need be better off to help the poor? In many cases, it is thought that differences in income will benefit the worst off by causing the more talented (and presumably better off) to work harder: a rising tide raises all boats, so to speak. If it is the case, however, that the best off will only work harder if they them- selves will benefit, at a minimum it would seem that we are rewarding people’s selfishness; second, it would be a very poor argument indeed to allow the rich to argue for greater wealth based on their own greed.

Fundamentalism, at least in its U.S/Australian Christian form is related to the outdated values and repressive code of small-town Australia; it has an inclination toward the lowbrow and the vulgar; is s marked by authoritarianism; is characterized by a lack of historical consciousness and the inability to engage in critical thinking; is identified by literalism, primitivism, legalism, and tribalism; and is linked to reactionary populism and the "paranoid style."

Is this a liberal stereotype of fundamentalism as a "cultural system"? One plausible argument is that religious fundamentalism can be seen as a counter-movement, or backlash, to the onwards march of secularisation, a process which ultimately leads to the political and public marginalisation of religion in liberal democratic societies. Karen Armstrong writes in the Harvard International Review:

Religious fundamentalism represents a widespread rebellion against the hegemony of secularist modernity. Wherever a modern, Western-style society has been established, a religious counterculture has developed alongside it in conscious rebellion. Despite the arguments of politicians and intellectuals, people all over the world have demonstrated that they want to see more religion in public life. The various fundamentalist ideologies show a worrying disenchantment with modernity and globalization. Indeed, every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation. All are convinced that the modern, liberal, secular establishment wants to wipe out religion. Each fundamentalist group has sprung up independently; each even differs significantly from other fundamentalists within their own faith tradition. But at the root of all these movements is the same visceral dread that is rapidly being transformed in some quarters into ungovernable rage. This should not surprise us; culture is always contested, and the proud secularism of Western modernity was almost bound to inspire a strong religious reaction.

Opponents of the secularisation thesis argue that the current era is characterised, not by the decline of religion, but by the widespread resurgence of religious ideas and social movements, which is one of the most unexpected events at the end of the twentieth century. The social upheaval and economic dislocation associated with modernisation leads to both secularisation and a renewal of traditional religions as a response to a general ‘atmosphere of crisis’.

Michael Christie at Eurhythmania makes an import distinction between neo-liberalism as ideology and governmentality in his Governing the biosphere post. He says that despite claims that the Global financial crisis is the death knell of Neoliberalism, as a set of practices and techniques that are combined with forms of reasoning and goals, Neoliberalism continues as the dominant governmentality, if not as the dominant ideology.

Then he adds:

The distinction I am making here between ideology and governmentality is essentially a Foucauldian one, and it seeks to cut through the seeming paradox of an essay in which Rudd professes his social democratic beliefs, offering a critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, while his government continues to practice key Neoliberal techniques of governing our conduct, such as an unemployment services sector where the unemployed person is subject to a barrage of self-monitoring and self-governing actions designed to empower and enable them to make choices through which a more flexible and entrepreneurial self is formed. I’m not arguing that the regime of deregulation, privatization, financialization and so on is not Neoliberal. Rather, I’m seeking to make what I think is an important distinction between the social democratic or even Marxist critiques of Neoliberalism—whose essential argument is that the state has abandoned its protection of the citizenry while the capitalist market has been given free reign—and the Foucauldian critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, which seeks to understand it as the governmentalisation of the state rather than its shrinking and disappearance. It is not so much that under Neoliberalism the market is what governs us as the social state has vacated the field, it is that in many of the significant spheres of life we are conceived of as human capital, and thereby we are conducted to be entrepreneurs of ourselves: to risk manage our lives, make investments with our time, to manage a portfolio of interests and activities, to seek to appreciate our assets.

In The Great Mortification: Economists’ Responses to the Crisis of 2007–(and counting) in The Hedgehog Review Philip Mirowski draws attention to an obvious point since the global financial crisis that those neo-classical economists with their “vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system” got things badly wrong. They'd been caught with their pants down.

Mirowski says:

Economists have not comported themselves with much dignity of late. Normally so quick off the mark to ferret out and expose irrationality in others, currently they have been distinctly loathe to recognize a pandemic within their own ranks. I refer here to the outpourings spewn forth by the economists themselves, provoked by the numerous embarrassments that have been visited upon them consequent to the onset of the world economic crisis...General interest magazines, from Business Week to The Economist to The New York Times—previously cheerleaders for the economics profession—turned openly hostile in 2008, hectoring whole schools of thought for their failures, grasping randomly for “new paradigms,” rooting around for sixth-round draft picks and telegenic wicked rebels to replace their prior stable of catallactic pundits.

Leading active members of today’s economics profession…have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might generally expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen.… They oppose the most basic, decent and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs. And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not reexamine their ideas. They do not consider the possibility of a flaw in logic or theory. Rather, they simply change the subject. No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong.