This is a useful discussion, and the kind we don't hear enough. I fear that the vacuous pronouncements of Julia Gillard are unlikely to help. Will someone please tell the Prime Minister that her empty slogans just don't cut it from the chief policy maker in the land. Is she really so lacking in the art of politics that she can't talk intelligently but plainly about issues? Or does she really think the electorate is full of morons who can't tell empty rhetoric from real ideas? Even stirring rhetoric seems to be beyond her, given the bland and banal language she employs in public. The Australian people to whom she so often appeals want and deserve better.

Good article.
What is progressive? Is the fine art of balancing "freedom" with waste due to inequality.
Once wealthy, the marginal benefit of $100 is minimal compared to the marginal benefit of someone on the street, who might sleep undercover and eat well for that sum. For the wealthy folk, the $100 is a night on the fine wine or fine steak.
This is *not* to say that we should equalise all wealth nor steal from the wealthy...just that diminishing returns means that vast inequality is not optimal for generating utility from economic wealth.
More importantly, the wealthy get more value and the economy is more stable and productive when inequality is lessened.
The freedom of the well off to work and achieve more should not be curtailed (on that the loony Left are wrong), however their ability to leverage that wealth and keep the poor poor *must* be curtailed: hence anti-trust, anti-monopoly, and "progressive tax" laws.
In the last decade or so real wages have fallen, real corporate profits have risen, executive salaries have exploded and housing inflation has boomed. Full time work is now not sufficient for most people to raise a family, so taxpayers are bailing out all parents, wealthy or not. Those fortunate enough to have paid off their houses before the age of easy credit came along made hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing nothing! The effect of this has been massive wealth transfer from asset poor youth to the asset rich older gens.
The GFC was a reset moment, when the fake credit profits should have been dissolved like the digital figments they were...instead the governments took on the risk and allowed the faux-profits to be realised. By doing so we now face an ongoing depression: all that fake money will take years to pay off because it is the entire economy doing so. All this to maintain the "profits" of banks and bankers.
This is the opposite of progressive: It is regressive (and Evil!) to protect the profits of billionaires by stealing from the rest of us!

godo "does she really think the electorate is full of morons who can't tell empty rhetoric from real ideas?"

Yes, and it seems to be working for her

How long do you give abbott at the front. 3 months.

In a word... yep.

h and 579

Are you blokes so one eyed that you cannot evaluate history accurately?

Really how long do you think it is going to take Hawker/Britton, Shorten, Arbib, Howes and the rest of the faceless morons, who still run the Labor Party, to twig to the fact Julia is still unelectable.

I reckon till the first Abbott engineered crisis.

After Rudd was elected I predicted he'd disappoint a lot of people.

Now I predict between them Brown and Gillard will confuse people, try to take advantage of that confusion and then will enrage people.

She's only PM because David Hawker, from Hawker/Britton, as chief adviser to the two witless cranks, managed to find their basest price. Windsors was to protect the fortune he's received from the coal miners and Shuttlecocks was the stench from ministerial leather.

We'll have to change the term "proud to be australian to proud to be a moron" Australians are now a minority in their own country. A great democratic example , just like Fiji.

Any person who believes that we have had or likely to have good government with the same type of party people,"To join any party, you have to sign a promise that you will agree with the decisions of the majority", and that means that those people who sign that, have no integrity, and about as much intelligence. Well that is what we have in parliament. Harold Holt was the only treasurer and Prime Minister who was worth his salary, those who have been in since then, should have been paying the people for the wrorts and perks they have taken and the damage they have done to the economy of Australia. The mining exports have required a trade of goods, and the goods we are getting, are the clothes, Tools and many other goods that we had been previously manufactured in Australia, I bet you can't find those factories where your Father, Mother, Aunty or Uncle or any of their friends used to work, I doubt if any of them exist any more, these mining exports and our big companies buying in those goods have destroyed them.

Why the presumption that only the "left" are full of self-righteousness, and are incapable of seeing the bigger picture, including what is happening on the world-stage altogether.

The Australian "news"-paper is full of ignorant self-righteous opinionists who consistently write fluff pieces. Albrechtson, Glover, Christopher Pearson,Henry Ur-gas, Shanahan, Milne, and the team that write the editorials (some of which are laughable and would get an F triple minus at any half-way decent journalism school).

Check out their editorial re the Greens in todays edition (Saturday). And the various Oz blogs that have commented on it.

What is the bigger picture altogether

These two references give a unique perspective on it.

http://www.beezone.com/news.html The Signs of the Times

http://www.dabase.org/p2anthro.htm

Those on the right side of the culture wars uniformly promote more of the same, and even more so.

Those on the left generally try to ameliorate the inherent brutalisms of the current system.

Ho Hum,

Yes, balance is always necessary.

I still believe that good centrist commentary can highlight various strengths and weaknesses on most issues, albeit that such journalism is a bit harder.

Adding politics to Climate Change.

So much we need to hear politically still can come from a Nordic in the latest Guardian.

Bjorn Lomberg notable contrarian today argues even more that we are running out of time to do something good about climate Change.

Two letters in the Opposite Guardian page, are from two Australian women both espousing how to lose an election.

Both are seemingly worried about the recent entrance of the Greens into politcs, or rather why they should have to?

First from Katherine Hall who writes that while Rudd seemed to close a worried mind about Climate Change, Julia Gillard though espousing political action, once elected has completely changed her mind on Global Warming similar to Rudd. Wendy Taubman, the other women, mainly seems to simply declare that the entrance of Greens seems to give the best answer to clear things up.

However, Katherine Hall probably does give the most significane message, when she writes that she heard Tony Abbot say that a belief in Climate Change is just Pure Crap.

Hi Ho Hum,

(always wanted to write that)

You wrote: <Those on the left generally try to ameliorate the inherent brutalisms of the current system.>

Does this include Indigenous affairs ? What evidence is there that the Left (of whose very broad church I still count myself a believer), or at least sections of it, actually want to 'Close the Gap' ? Perhaps out of fear of the dreaded bogeyman, Assimilation, I suspect more and more that many on the Left would be happy to 'Maintain the Gap'.

Or, given the belief of many on the Left that the rightful place of ALL Indigenous people, all 75 % urban and 25 % rural of them, is somewhere out in the sticks, in loin-cloth, on one leg, eating lizards and berries, etc., would you agree with me that there are sections of the Left who think that it is imperative to 'Increase the Gap' ?

Joe Lane

How do you close a DNA gap without genetic engineering ?

You are just being provocative, Individual :) If your post had anything to do with mine, then what you infer is outrageous. The 'Gap' is the product of social, economic, spatial and political factors, and all of their educational, health, behavioural, etc. spin-offs, and all of them surmountable. The 'Gap' IS closeable. Even the Left has to believe this, or am I mixing in the wrong cirlces ?

DNA has nothing to do with it. To suggest otherwise has an extreme right-wing tinge to it: surely the Left hasn't come to this ?

Loudmouth,
Very much to the contrary. Not trying to be provocative although I do want to provoke out of the square thinking. What makes up anything & the way it exists on this planet ? It's DNA ! If one group of people happens to have evolved which enables them to have a longer life span than that evolution is down to the genetic makeup. The social & economic disparities are due to how one group manages to cope with what's being thrown at it. This is due to intellectual & physical ability/adaptation. Where or how does this ability come into play ? Due to DNA ! Good behaviour, bad behaviour, good health, bad health, race, they're all down to DNA.
Loudmouth we must provoke different thinking & a more responsible attitude because whatever we have done to-date hasn't worked, has it ?

Of course, social & economic factors have a hefty degree of input in these kind of gaps. How do these gaps evolve in the first place ? There're people who simply have no concern for others & there are people who have no concern for themselves. The lack of concern for oneself comes from an individual or group simply getting sick & tired of having the other constantly breathing down their neck. This is a problem of attitude & attitude & this in turn is due to a person's genetic makeup. How many studies & other effort has gone into trying to find out what makes people tick ? What has been found ? We still have wars, greed & apathy all of which are factors in this gap. That's why my question, how do you change peoples' attitudes without changing their psycho/physiological makeup, the old DNA.

Thanks, Individual, but I disagree with you, that <whatever we have done to-date hasn't worked, has it ?>

Tertiary education, university education, certainly has worked: twenty six thousand Indigenous graduates by the end of this year, around ten thousand students currently enrolled, out of a nation-wide adult Indigenous population of 240,000 - that's 15 % of the entire adult population who is either a graduate or studying (or both) - surely that's something to crow about, given that (according to Michael Dodson), 30 % of the Indigenous population is illiterate ? That sort of success points two ways, to what CAN be done, and to what NEEDS to be done.

Here are another couple of stats about Indigenous involvement in tertiary education: (if you are on that part of the Left which finds this sort of thing distressing, please stop reading now):

* Indigenous women (aged 20-49) are COMMENCING tertiary study, university study, at a higher rate than NON-Indigenous Australian men;

* the average age at which Australians students commence tertiary study is around 24. In 2008-2009, the number of Indigenous people aged 24 was annually about 7,500, while annually 4200-4600 Indigenous people commenced tertiary study. Some of those were post-graduates, some transfers, some re-enrolments, but still around 3,000 Indigenous people commenced tertiary study for the first time, 90 % at degree level, in each of those years - the equivalent of 40 % of the 24-year-old age-group. And commencements have been rising slowly towards this 40 % figure for many years. In other words, of those aged 25 to 40, perhaps 40 % are either already graduates or current students.

So tertiary education, university education, is something that's working for Indigenous people - not just for some piddling elite, but for a huge proportion of the population. Some higher education experts define 'mass tertiary education' as 15 % of an age-group, some use a figure of 30 %. Either way, Indigenous people themselves have pushed their involvement up to 40 %.

[TBC]

Individual, I can appreciate that you are despondent about progress, and I get the idea that you have worked for many years in remote communities, where progress may seem elusive (to put it mildly). One can get burnt-out very quickly in that sort of environment [ a suggestion which might horrify the caffe latte set in their ergonomic chairs with A/C and harbour views].

But I can assure you that, at least in the cities (and therefore, with all sorts of provisos and qualifications, why not elsewhere ?) university education has been a success story for Indigenous people. A mass success story, and all their own work. And it won't slow down or stop, either: the next decade will see massive increases in enrolments and annual graduations.

Who knows - maybe in the next ten or twenty years, Indigenous affairs will experience a positive transformation led by Indigenous graduates based in the cities ?

Those on the Left who find this sort of information objectionable can open their eyes now :) Nah, it's easier to keep them closed, to imagine all Blackfellas stuck out there living their idyllic lives chasing lizards, in 'their natural habitat', leaving cities to Whitefellas, in 'THEIR natural habitat'.

Joe Lane

Loudmouth,
cheers for that. There may well be many people who call themselves indigenous who achieve academic status. Sadly, their indigenous alliance comes to an abrupt halt when it comes to offer the expertise & usefulness of their achievement to the struggling communities. Struggling purely due to the constant interference by bureaucratic public servants. Left to their own I'd say most communities would function a lot better than under the "guidance" of those Departments. The increase of indigenous participation in Universities nowadays is mainly due to many people of different/partial background other than indigenous. They're the ones who have no desire to help build stronger communities. They merely take the opportunity to claim indigenous status for ease of funding access. I know this is a harsh statement but it is what I experience.

Well, Individual, firstly the graduates that I know who have tried to go back to either their 'home' communities, or to other communities, have usually got a lousy deal from those communities, of the 'who the f** do you think you are, coming in here, telling us what to do ?' or 'coconut !' variety.

Secondly, why should they have to go to communities, either their own, or to others ? Did they create the mess of problems that communities have built up for themselves ? I don't think so, so why should they have any more responsibility for contributing to the solutions than anybody else, graduate or otherwise, Indigenous or non-Indigenous ?

Thirdly, settlements usually are so small that many graduates simply would not find full-time work there: apart from teachers, nurses and administrators, anybody with expertise would need to travel around a number of distant settlements and out-stations to have enough work to do to warrant employment. Vets or archaeologists or chemists would find little work to do in many settlements. Those heroic people who are able to find work, and do so, deserve medals, but don't expect all that many to take it on, Indigenous or non-Indigenous.

In any case, the vast majority of Indigenous graduates (a) are from long-settled areas of Australia with few remote settlements, from cities and towns, (b) are the second-, third- or fourth-generation of their families living away from missions and fringe-camps, and (c) have as much right as any other Australian to pursue any damn career they choose without being dictated to.

And I do take exception to your denigration of Indigenous graduates, in that time-honoured right-wing way, as 'part-Aboriginal'. They have had a gutful of that sort of rubbish. With respect, Individual.

Joe

Loudmouth,
I acknowledge your comments your comments. I'm afraid I don't know of any other way of stating my experience. I knew I'd get that kind of reply, it's fairly standard.
Find it offensive or otherwise the point is that we're a long way from achieving a situation where the blame game ceases & responsibility kicks off. Would you be less offended if I'd said part european ? What is someone of mixed race ? What is the PC version ?

Individual,

Thank you for moving this discussion along. What is someone of mixed race ? Biologically, they are of mixed race, yes, but socially or politically, they carry their history with them and it can either inspire them or weigh them down. But think of it this way as well:

In many 'settled' parts of Australia, Aboriginal people were kept out of towns, and thereby any secondary education opportunities until well into the 1950s, the NINETEEN fifties. i.e. many Aboriginal people who are still only in their sixties were not able to access those educational opportunities that we now take for granted. They have been confined to unskilled and semi-skilled labouring jobs, or none at all. Agreed ?

The children of those generations, now in their forties and older, could access secondary schooling but had no guidance or assistance from their parents - as well as a common social expectation that they were not good enough to complete secondary schooling. Very few of these children completed secondary schooling and, given the increasing skill-requirements of the Australian economy, they also were confined to lower-level jobs. Agreed ?

THEIR children, usually now under forty, and born after the Referendum and Whitlam, do have parents who gained some secondary schooling, but very few have parents who completed it. Their parents could help them with some secondary schooling but only up to a point, and couldn't provide much guidance about tertiary education.

In other words, since the first large wave of people at university, say from 1980, Aboriginal people have generally had to battle through without much parental guidance, even with the best will in the world - they succeeded mainly with the support of university staff and each other.

But it's THEIR children who are now coming through the secondary system, in far greater numbers than a generation ago: here in SA, Year 12 completion numbers were stagnant until about 2000, but have quadrupled since then. History is not destiny.

It's happening, Individual, be confident of that, it's not all doom and gloom. All your efforts are not for nothing :)

TBC

Loudmouth,
that does sound promising. I only hope this chaniging attitude towards academic/tertiary education transcends to pragmatism & trade qualifications in all communities. What I mean by that is that it is one thing to be able to read the instructions to build a house & another thing to to actually build it. This one of the great problems we face in wider Australia now that people have education but don't know how to do things. I still shiver when I think back of the hundreds of those kids from the communities I frequented were sent to private colleges at full taxpayers expense & only a handful are now pulling their own weight in working life. If this can change I'll for once feel better.

Individual,

You're on to something here: In Saturday's Australian, Tim Soutphommasane wrote about the desirability of bringing back a form of national service, young people finishing their schooling and then doing a couple of years of service, not necessarily military training but community service. It used to be the practice in many European countries (perhaps it still is ?) that all students finishing school who wanted to go on to university, had to do two years' work either in a factory, on a farm, learn a trade or serve in the army. For example, the philosopher Karl Popper worked and studied to be a cabinet-maker in the early 1920s. It's said he could knock up a coffee table or a book-case in an hour. (No, I made that up). But the point is that uni students shouldn't get too far up themselves.

Conversely, a former colleague went straight from school to teachers' college, then to post-graduate study overseas, then straight into a lecturer's job and stayed there for 35 years - not a day of work out in the real world. So you've got a point :)

So ideally, all students intending to go on to uni should get their hands dirty for a couple of years - fruit-picking is not a bad start. I did twelve years of factory and farm work, then five years on and off picking apricots, citrus and grapes and I don't regret it - well, one day of 46 degrees during a ten-day period of 40+ degrees, I'm not so fussed about, but I learnt a great deal about the world of work in those years. Perhaps every uni graduate should also get a trade, just to keep their feet on the ground. And, of course, to be more versatile in small communities.

I don't know much about kids in boarding schools - it's not something urban kids have to do. But from my limited experience of kids from the West Coast and Broken Hill coming to Adelaide, they seem to do surprisingly well, given the isolation and home-sickness

How does one define progressive? Well despite your obvious disaste for the Left it is a good question. Some might argue that progressive governments cease to be too concerned about Left and Right politics and get on with the job of democracy and governing. Not only representing but increasing participation of citizens. It has been done before albeit on a smaller scale in Athens and while Thomas Paine (representative democracy) understood some of the impracticalities of direct democracy in larger groups, there is no reason to believe it could not work even on a smaller scale in councils or via a yearly referendum.

Some semblance of direct democracy or at least greater participation could be a sign of progressive government. The term progressive is a bit like the term Conservative. One means to move on (but to what) and the other to stay the same (regardless of Right/Left characteristics).

"As for the leftwing rhetoric, they will continue to tell us how hopeless we are as their own self-righteousness often swamps their ability to fully understand the problems ahead."

I don't see any less self-righteousness from the Right. Just look at Truss and Palmer's behaviour on Q&A last night - opposing for the sake of it and refusal to look outside the circle and take advantage of the independents call for more consensus in governing.

It is the Right that continually push the rhetoric of economic management and sometimes confuse liberty with freedom to oppress and who will dismiss any idea of checks and balances as akin to force.

Maybe we have become too pragmatic and less ideology focussed, this was an inevitable consequence of a growing middle class. I am not sure if we are better off or worse for it but while human beings continue to muddle through perhaps eventually we will end up with communities that benefit the greater rather than a system that serves to empower a minority of advantaged groups.

Pelican,

That's a very useful question: how does one define 'progressive' ? I used to make a crude differentiation between 'radicals' and 'progressives': a radical was one who went to bat for the rights of her/his own group, through thick and thin; a progressive was one who went into bat for the rights of other disadvantaged or oppressed groups besides her/his own.

So an Indigenous radical was a person who devoted their time more or less exclusively to Indigenous rights, while a Indigenous progressive was prepared to defend the rights of others, such as gay marriage, or refugee rights, or women's rights.

A radical environmentalist confined their interests more or less to Green issues, anti-pollution and land degradation, anti-whaling, protection of forests, etc., while a progressive environmentalist extended her/his concerns to Indigenous people's rights, refugee issues, rights of gays to adopt, etc.

Being progressive is thus much more difficult than being radical: it may involve conflict between one's core interests and other issues which may be seen as equally, or even more, legitimate.

The Left is a very fractured grouping, even within families, but it too has its radicals and progressives, most of whom by definition do not agree with each other 100 %. So there is no contradiction when somebody on the Left criticises some other Left position: just mention the words Russia, Labor, China, Khmer Rouge, Venezuela, Greens, Trotsky, J.D. Lang, Mbeki, Saddam, even al Qaida, etc., to a group of people who consider themselves Left, and watch the variety of responses.

And you're right, self-righteousness is not confined to the Left: after all, it's hard to be both passionate about something and detached enough to understand its defects or shortcomings, whether someone is Right or Left, deeply religious or fervently atheist, gay or straight. But S-R can easily morph into smugness, intolerance and paranoia, as many of us have discovered the hard way.

Joe

You make a good overall assessment Joe. Compromise is part of politics and many with the ALP and the Coalition would find themselves having to compromise their own personal ideals for the objectives of the greater majority within the party machine. Malcolm Turnbull,Nick Minchin and Cory Bernardi are all of the same ilk but in some areas hold very different ideas about a number of issues particularly climate change and asylum seekers. The same is true within the ALP.

Consensus government will mean some compromise and hopefully wider consultation and planning before going gung-ho into a program without being prepared.

"...after all, it's hard to be both passionate about something and detached enough to understand its defects or shortcomings..."

Very true and relevant to all the various perspectives. That is the problem with a two-party dominated system. Reform or progressive thinking cannot be achieved if one is not first willing to critically analyse one's own failings or acknowledge a win by one group might also (in some cases) mean a loss to another group that might cause great disadvantage.

It is about weighing up the greater good, but even then we can get into trouble as to whom defines the greater good. With that dilemma we get back to the old ideological impasses of Left/Right politics.

We should retain some cautious optimism that voter discontent might open the doors to fairer and more open government.

The next three years (or less) will be very telling.

I do not want to give the impression I merely support the right; I don't.

Article was more about my belief that some on the the left make simplistic assertions: in this case the belief that Hawke-Keating were somehow great social democrats.

I would also agree that some on the right are a joke.

I actually am hoping that the independents can make a difference, like some of the respondents

Chris Lewis,
I second that !