Daggett
Apologies, I misread your “adequacies” as “inadequacies”. It was a genuine mistake – it’s pretty rare to see the word as a plural noun, and I misread it for the much commoner form. In the context of the discussion, does it really make such a difference?

As for denigration, again your complaints seem hypocritical, given the abuse you direct at other forum users.

You say I have “failed to notice that I am not enamoured with Paul Keating”. Not at all, I’d expect you to dislike Keating, for the same reasons I rather liked him – because he initiated a series of economic reforms that Australia badly needed and which helped set up our current sustained growth and rising prosperity.

At the time, this took considerable political courage. Happily, as both mainstream parties have come to see and understand the benefits that economic reform has delivered, your anti-reform views have become a minority view in the major parties (though they have not entirely disappeared). With the exception of the IR rules, a Rudd government will not wind back the reforms instituted under Howard, which is one reason Rudd’s looking highly electable.

Your anti-market views are, however, more common on the political fringes, both left and right.

Even there, though, views are mixed. As the material I quoted from Hamilton indicates, many on the left dispute the “deprivation model” that insists that things are bad and getting worse.

There are also many right-wingers whose analysis and rhetoric are strikingly similar to yours, notably in the National party and its offshoots (e.g. Katter) and One Nation. One Nation’s policies include opposition to privatisation (especially water, Telstra and postal services), a national bank, abolition of the Coalition’s IR laws, antipathy to the IMF and multilateral trade agreements, the reintroduction of tariffs and agricultural and manufacturing protection, “buy local” policies, winding back competition policy, abolition of the GST, free healthcare, opposition to outsourcing, subsidies and below-market interest rates for small business, immigration cuts and antipathy to “deregulation, free trade, globalisation and economic rationalism.”
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~triumph/intro.pdf

This ideology cuts across conventional party and left-right lines.

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... They were ignored, so that a previous generation of property speculators, with no concern for the future, could make windfall profits. Now the prices of vegetables, that have to be transported hundreds of kilometres, with increasingly expensive petroleum, have gone through the roof.

If you have acknowledged that the environment is in a precarious state, then you need to consider how much worse rampant urban sprawl may be for Australia's environment. It is already dry and fragile. Many scientists believe that we risk turning Australia wholesale into a barren desert. If this does happen we won't be the first civilisation to have collapsed as a result of urban sprawl. This happened to the ancient Mayans and the Chaco Anasazi of North America (http://candobetter.org/about#chaco).

If we want affordable housing, we simply have to stop population growth now, which effectively means cutting back immigration completely. If we must allow it should be for humanitarian reasons only, or to obtain essential skills that cannot be obtained from within this country. To cram an additional 1.1 million by 2026 into South East Queensland to suit land speculators and property developers when we don't have enough water now as 'smart state' Premier Anna Bligh wants to do now is unbelievably irresponsible.

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To those who may suspect that there is a link between 'daggett' and 'cacofonix', there is indeed. He is a friend who visits me from time to time. He posted earlier today from my PC and I accidentally posted using his log on. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to me and probably won't be the last.

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Rhian,

Your apology is appreciated.

Yes, I have been aware that some of my views are shared by those who can be labelled 'far right'. I don't this is really central to the issue, however.

In any case, I don't believe "anti-market" views are confined to the political fringes. As an example, 70% of Australians opposed the full privatisation of Telstra in 2005 when the legislation was passed by the Senate.

James Sinnamon (author)

"Now the prices of vegetables, that have to be transported hundreds of kilometres, with increasingly expensive petroleum, have gone through the roof."

So let me see, 8 tonnes of veggies carted 200 km would use around
100$ worth of diesel, so 1.25c a kg. Hardly the reason for prices
going throught the roof.

Urban sprawl, compared to high density living, could well be the
solution, rather then the problem. Switch the power off in
any major city for a day and you have disaster! Compare that
to 100 years ago, when people had their half acre, a veggie patch,
some fruit trees, some chooks, the kids cycled to school, dad worked
locally. They actually coped with very little energy. Life was
all about the local community.

Forget the farmland stuff. A huge chunk of Australia is used to
grow merino wool for zilch profit, day by day its becoming more
of a niche industry, as the world changes.

Given that city blocks cost 300-400K$, compared to 10-50k for
country blocks or three times the size, give me country living
any day! 150k$ can still buy you 100 acres to do your own thing
on, grow all the food and biodiesel that you want.

I'll leave the ratrace to the rats :)

Daggett
I raised the point about anti-market ideology existing across the political spectrum, but being concentrated on the fringes, primarily to refute your claim that I failed to notice that you are not enamoured with Paul Keating. I don’t assume that hating Howard means loving Labor.

However, it raises a broader point.

If you agree with me that neither major party is likely to turn back the reforms of the past 25 years, and if you are right that these reforms have led to falling living standards for most ordinary Australians, then the obvious question presents: why do people continue to vote for them?

There’s a strong likelihood that Labor will win the next election, a small chance the Coalition will, but none whatsoever that the One Nation Party or Greens will be forming government. Nor do the combined primary votes of all of the minor parties, independents, informal voters etc in the House of Representatives amount to the number of votes achieved by either one of the majors.
http://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/Federal_Elections/

Granted, there are lots of reasons to vote for or against a particular party besides their economic policies. But if the reforms of both Labor and Liberal have really been as damaging as you say, shouldn’t more people be voting, say, Green or One Nation? Especially as a vote for a minor party is never wasted in our electoral system - eventually our preferences wind up allocated to the winning candidate or runner up, so protests votes are relatively risk-free.

Rhian,

Your argument seems compelling on the face of it: There are clear alternatives to Labor and Liberal who both support free market policies. The fact that the alternatives to Labor and Liberal don't achieve higher votes confirms that the public supports the free market.

But life isn't as simple as that. Part of the problem is that the Greens don't even seem to take themselves seriously as an alternative to Labor and Liberal and they don't, in my view, coherently and strongly argue against the free market.

We also need to take account of the insidious role of the corporate newsmedia which misinforms the public and did so blatently prior to to 2004 elections.

As just one of almost countless possible examples, how could the media have allowed Howard and him ministers to have gotten off so lightly over the AWB scandal in which AU$290million was paid in bribes to the Hussein regime - the same regime that Howard assured us only months later in 2003 was such a threat to the world, that we were left with no choice but to immediately overthrow?

Imagine how the anti-war movement would have been treated if any in their ranks had been suspected of even giving a small fraction as much help to Hussein.

Either John Howard and his ministers were incompetent beyond belief, or they were criminals. It has to be one or the other.

And if they were so incompetent how could the same newsmedia then turn around and protray them as such brilliant economic managers?

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In my experience, most people agree with my views when I am given the opportunity to explain them. They are not considered extreme or fringe.

If we had a balanced and honest newsmedia, I believe that people would understand the issues and the choices before them more clearly and use the preferential voting system, as you suggest, to vote for parties such as the Greens which stand for something better than either Labor or Liberal.

I’d agree the Greens don’t argue coherently against the free market. Some, such as Hamilton, accept that free markets create affluence, others are closer to what I understand to be your position - that under free markets, the rich get richer and the poor poorer. More fundamentally, they are divided about whether raising living standards is a desirable objective.

We get a much more consistent anti-free-market message from parties such as One Nation.

As a fan of free markets (in most circumstances), I’m certainly no defender of AWB – in fact, I’d argue that the corrupt behaviour of this agency is one of the moral hazards we risk when we give the government’s imprimatur to a business to try to gain monopoly profits by using market power. This could only happen because we have the single desk.

Blaming the media seems too simplistic, even if they really are out to mislead the public, which I find very implausible. In my experience, people take what they hear/read in the media with several pinches of salt, and are capable of recognising bias and partiality. Furthermore, the Internet and independent papers etc give many opportunities for alternative voices to be heard.

Anyway, as you’ve argued in this forum, people are not going to be deceived about their own experiences. If most people really are worse off, and believe the policies of the mainstream parties to be responsible, then these parties would lose votes.