Posts Tagged ‘politics’
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 1
five Australian PMs, from 2010 to 2019
I don’t like the USA very much. I suppose that’s putting it mildly.
I’m not a nationalist. I was for some years involved in the humanist movement, attended meetings and gave, I recall, three talks to humanist groups, one on the free will issue, one on the decline of Christianity here in Australia, and one on the rise of internationalist organisations over the past century or so.
Lately, like many, I’ve become – I don’t know what to call it, concerned, transfixed by the USA, not wanting to know, not wanting to miss anything, a mixture of horror and schadenfreude. But generally, I find it more valuable to listen to those outside looking in, than to US commentators, with their ‘how have the mighty fallen’ fantasies.
This is generally a sound approach. As I’ve written before, if you want to know what an individual is like, don’t take it from the horse’s mouth, because she’s understandably (and healthily) biased. So you ask the people around her, who’ve had dealings with her, some friendly, some not so. This is ‘solid science,’ as they say. And the same goes for countries, generally.
So the most appropriate countries to compare the USA with are, surely, the other English-speaking democracies. That’s to say, Britain, the ‘mother’ of them all, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s important to note that Australia and New Zealand became separated from Britain more or less amicably, while the USA did so via a war of independence. Canada’s history lies between these two extremes. These facts help explain the differences in their polities.
So, to start with Australia, and I’ll try to be brief. It started in 1788 when a British flag was hoisted in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, claiming, rather outrageously, on a ‘finders keepers’ basis, that all of the surrounding land, the extent of which was largely unknown, now belonged to that small densely populated island on the far side of the globe. It all seemed perfectly cromulent to the colonists, and to be fair they had no idea quite how massive the land area was. Later, in spite of the rather obvious presence of non-British humans in the region, the land was declared ‘terra nullius’. Whether this was a convenient fiction, or simply a joke, is anyone’s guess.
The colonists used this harbour region as a prison camp for some decades, adding other camps in the north and south. Crime and punishment was rather fetishised in this period, to the detriment of the so-called lower classes. But further into the 19th century, after the Australian continent became more fully surveyed and explored, free settlements, or separate colonies, developed along the eastern and southern coasts, and in Tasmania, each governed by officials tied to the motherland. The Aboriginal population, more sparse and scattered than the Maori population in New Zealand, and considerably less given to warfare, tended to be brushed aside in the early decades.
The important Sydney region began its transformation from a struggling and near-failing farming and rum-guzzling community into a more civil society under Lachlan Macquarie, governor from 1810 to 1821, yet this seemed to encourage the motherland to send out more of their unwanted. The colonial population rapidly increased, and farming, often conducted illegally (squatting) became quite lucrative for some. Settlements grew beyond Sydney, as well as in modern-day Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide.
So, jumping to the late 19th century, the colony was more or less thriving in spite of a serious shortage of women, especially in the early years. This actually led to supportive treatment such as assisted migration and favoured settlement and employment terms. A mid-century gold rush boosted the population while further contributing to the gender imbalance, as well as racism.
Voices for independence were being raised from the 1830s in Australia, and even in Britain by the 1850s. The self-government process developed in different regions, and was less a national than a colony-based development, since each region had already created governmental systems. Constitutions were created in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and South Australia and approved in Britain by the end of the 1850s. Western Australia was officially self-governing by 1890.
So with constitutions came legislative councils for each of the far-flung colonies. With variations they created lower and upper houses, with the upper houses being based on a very limited property-owning male franchise. My home state, South Australia, was the first to introduce universal male suffrage in the lower house in 1956. It was also the first electorate in the world to introduce female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, in 1895. Only for ‘white’ women, of course.
So Australia’s move towards complete independence from Britain was piecemeal and peaceful. 1901 was the year that it became a national federation of states, with a governor-general and state governors linking it to the motherland and its constitutional monarch, but with all legislative power in the hands of the federal and state governments. On the federal level it operates largely under a two-party system, with smaller parties on the left and right fringes, sometimes forming coalitions with their corresponding larger parties, and independent members of various types. The head of government, the Prime Minister, is not elected directly by the people, as is the case in the USA, but by the elected members of her or his party, and she can be removed from her position by a vote of no-confidence from those elected members. The opposition leader attains her position by the same process. New legislation is introduced by the incumbent government, debated and voted for in the lower house (the House of Representatives), after which it passes to the upper house (the Senate) for confirmation.
In all of this there’s, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Australian system and the British one. There’s a two-chamber parliament that meets regularly, all made up of locally elected members. Those members choose their leader – the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, and they in turn choose their ministerial and shadow ministerial ‘teams’, e.g the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Education Minister, the Attorney-General, the Deputy Prime Minister and so on. This collection of ministers is called the Cabinet. Australia also has a Constitution, like the USA, but unlike the USA, it virtually never gets mentioned. It basically explains how the government or parliament is constituted, and there seems to be general agreement about it.
The important difference between Australia’s Westminster-based system (and those of Canada, New Zealand, and of course Britain) and that of the USA is the absence of anything like a President, or immunity from prosecution for any member of government. Pardoning powers are in the hands of the Attorney-General, in consultation with the Cabinet, and are very seldom used. The seven-person High Court of Australia is the equivalent of the USA’s Supreme Court, but nowhere near as controversial (very few Australians would be able to name anyone who’s on it). Mandatory retirement age for its Justices is 70, and new members are selected by the Attorney-General in consultation with the Cabinet.
New Zealand’s democratic or political history (I suppose I’m trying to say ‘white’ history without sounding racist – of course its Maori history was full of politics in the broad sense, as was Australian aboriginal and native American history) can be dated to 1840, the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the declaration of British sovereignty over the islands by its first governor, William Hobson. The Maori people, Pacific Islanders who first settled on the North Island some 12,000 yers ago, were generally much more difficult to deal with in these early years of white colonisation than Australia’s Aboriginals. Given to tribal warfare before the whites arrived (much like the whites had been in Europe for millennia), they were well prepared to make life tough for the newcomers. This led to serious warfare from the 1850s to the 1870s when, for some odd reason, many Maori groups refused to accept that their 12,000-year island home now belonged to Britain – or possibly Australia. The British government, which by the mid-19th century had become somewhat overwhelmed by the burden of its own colonial enterprises, generally left developments in New Zealand, which mostly centred around the Bay of Islands at the very northern region of the North Island, to those ‘over there’ who thought they knew what they were doing.
This was generally a good thing. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 led to the first elections in 1853. There was a property qualification, of course, but it was more liberal than that of Britain at the time, and a large number of Maori chiefs could vote. All Maori men over 21 could vote by 1867. This was way ahead of anything in Europe or North America. However, by the early 20th century, Maori had been stripped of almost all of their land. Unsurprisingly this led to uprisings and plenty of violence.
New Zealand adopted a Westminster-based system of course, with a ceremonial Governor-General representing the British monarch, a Prime Minister, and two major parties, Labour on the left and the Nationals on the right. There have been a number of minor parties and independents over the years and recently coalition governments have been more common than not. Here’s how Wikipedia recounts it:
In 1996, New Zealand inaugurated the new electoral system (mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP) to elect its Parliament. The MMP system was expected (among numerous other goals) to increase representation of smaller parties in Parliament and appears to have done so in the MMP elections to date.
New Zealand’s judicial system has been independent and largely uncontroversial, though there have been some important recent changes. A body called the Supreme Court of New Zealand came into being in January 2004, replacing the right of appeal to the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. There was a certain amount of opposition from monarchists about this change, of course.
Although religion played some part in the politics of Australia and New Zealand into the 60s, both countries have been ‘losing their religion’, i.e Christianity, quite rapidly since that time, in contrast to the US. This is one of many factors separating the US from the Westminster-based English-speaking nations, as we shall see.
In the next post I’ll take a look at the USA’s unfortunate neighbour, Canada, which also has a Westminster-based parliamentary democracy, as well as the USA itself, as briefly as possible.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia
Keith Sinclair, A history of New Zealand, 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Zealand
patriarchal power, money, and endings
I’ve written before about how people make the category error of confusing patriarchy/matriarchy, which is a system, with men/women, which is about individuals. Of course we can think of woeful women and marvellous men, but that’s not at all the point.
And then there are others who say that the aim should be égalité, not oppression of one gender by another. Of course this is reasonable, but if we look at other primates we find a complexity that is hard to parse into neat categories. In a study of 121 primate species, published in PNAS, entitled ‘the evolution of male-female dominance in primate societies’, they start with this:
We show that societies where males win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare. Evolutionarily, females became more dominant when they gained more control over reproduction, as in monogamous, monomorphic, or arboreal species, as well as when they faced more competition, as in solitary or pair-living species. Contrarily, male-biased dominance prevails in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and polygynous species.
Human primates (and don’t we just hate being described that way) are, these days, mostly monogamous, very varied in terms of size, and generally terrestrial, so it’s hard to say how that works for gender dominance.
However, though it galls me to harp on human uniqueness, we have created or evolved these things we call civilisation, language, nations, technology, etc, which have complicated questions of gender dominance. For example, it’s clear that size would hardly be expected to matter so much in a technically-savvy society such as ours. Then again, male violence against women, as we all know, is far more prevalent than its opposite.
Male dominance is still very much the norm in human societies, and is often taken for granted in surprising ways. I remember as a mature-age student in the 90s befriending a young woman who was convinced that men had better, more complex brains than women, and that neural physiology would bear that out. What could make her think this? Did she also think that male cats and dogs had more complex brains than their female counterparts? It seems that our patriarchy, slightly declining though it is in recent times, is still doing its damage in terms of human ambitions and expectations.
One way that gender empowerment can be measured in human societies, and nowhere else in the living world, is wealth. Moulah. Wealth, they say, is power. And when we look at the USA, supposedly the richest country on Earth, with the greatest wealth disparity in the WEIRD world, it’s very clear that wealth is wielding its power there in rather disturbing ways. This has made me wonder – how much wealth, globally, is in the hands of men, compared to women? Would it be 90%? Surely more than that. Surely closer to 99%. In any case it makes a mockery of looking at gender dimorphism when determining the power imbalance between the sexes in humans. And it’s no good looking at the disparities of pay between Mr and Ms Average, I’m talking about the world’s controlling billionaires, all of whom are men. Here’s the opening paragraph of an essay from the Brennan Center for Justice, on money spent on the recent US election:
The 2024 federal election cycle was the most secretive since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, plowed more than $1.9 billion into last year’s election cycle, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020.
Though it occasionally happens, the super-rich, pretty well all male, don’t contribute money to the left side of politics. There is an Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution, but it’s a sick joke, and I’m very doubtful about that $1.9 billion figure – surely it’s far more than that. And although it hasn’t been so prominent lately, the ‘project 2025’ agenda includes an assault on women’s rights and freedoms in that beleaguered country, including a nationwide ban on abortion care, with the further threat of banning all forms of birth control and fertility treatment such as IVF. It also plans to prosecute health professionals who engage in abortion care, and to largely curtail the Affordable Care Act, which would disproportionately disadvantage women in a number of ways.
Of course Trump, who is now clearly the dictator of that country, is less concerned with project 2025 than with prosecuting anyone who has slighted him, and with cashing in on his dictatorship, but his fellow-travellers are mostly of the macho-fascist type, so the assault on women’s rights, freedoms and empowerment will continue, perhaps into Trump’s third term. All we seem to be able to cling to is the long arc bending towards justice that Martin Luther King evoked.
I suppose it will all end by our discovering how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are….
And then maybe bonobos will survive us, and evolve…
References
on fascism, buffoonery, criminality and a pretty crappy political system
On asking myself what fascism is, considering that it’s quite topical at present, my first answer is ‘nothing much’, by which I mean, on an intellectual level. The standard fascists of the past, Mussolini and Hitler, could never be described as intellectuals, and nor could Trump, though all might be described as clever in their extremely self-regarding ways. Good old AI describes fascism as ‘a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology characterised by a dictatorial leader, a centralised, autocratic government, militarism, and suppression of opposition’. This certainly describes much of the current Trump playbook, though it says little about the psychology of the typical ‘fascist’ leader, who, it seems to me, is always noisy, extremely thin-skinned, and has huge problems with listening to voices other than his own (though of course it needn’t be an exclusively male thing, but few women have ever been given the political power that the aforementioned men have been given).
The term didn’t exist before the 20th century, but of course the character type certainly did. It was apparently born out of the first world war – think of Hitler’s war experience; but it was Mussolini in particular who was central to the term, founding the Partito Nazionale Fascista, (PNF) in the early 1920s. It involved wholesale militarisation of the state, ultra-nationalism, and was of course molto macho. With Trump the draft dodger, however, fascism has taken on a different character. Definitely not so macho (many of his fellow-travellers are women), and focussed more on bullying his own critics, as well as a collection of ‘outsiders’ and competitors, and generally seeing the world in terms of win-lose scenarios, with a brutal edge. Whether or not this can be called fascism is no doubt an open question, and it isn’t of huge interest to me. It sure isn’t what I would call humanism (I was formerly involved with the SA Humanists), or a fair, inclusive, healthy or effective approach to politics.
So, much as I’m depressed with current US politics, and have long found their politico-social system far less impressive than most United Staters seem to think it is, I can’t help but hope it can be reformed and improved, considering the power that nation wields globally.
Firstly the US presidential system is quite obviously a bad system – obvious to most people outside the US. It gives a ridiculous degree of power to one individual, with limited checks and balances. Not only the ridiculous level of immunity, and the over-reaching pardoning powers, but the power to choose any unelected person as ‘running mate’, a person who can become President if something unforeseen happens, as has occurred in the past. This is clearly not democratic. Another problem is the influence of the almighty dollar. Campaign financing is very inadequately regulated and has been rising steadily over the past 30 to 40 years. Obviously this favours the rich in a nation with a larger rich-poor gap than any other democratic nation.
This one-man rule (it has always been a man and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable) seems unable to be stopped even by clear evidence of criminal activity (Trump was convicted on 34 counts of felony business fraud re hush money payments in 2024; was found to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in two lawsuits, in which Caroll was awarded $88.3 million dollars in damages, the case being currently under appeal; was indicted on 40 felony counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents related to his 2016-2020 presidency; and of course Trump’s involvement in the violent January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington DC and subsequent fraudulent attempts to claim that the election had been won by Trump, have never received proper legal treatment from the court system, due to his re-election in 2024). It’s surely obvious that no other nation in the English-speaking world, or throughout western Europe, would have allowed such an obvious reprobate to continue to play a role in their political affairs. (I must also say that the Wikipedia articles on the above-mentioned Trump ‘activities’ are impressively detailed and damning).
So what is to be done? Is there any hope for a nation that allows such a felon to be their president twice, with no doubt the hope of evading justice by buying a third term? And the way things are going over there, he might just succeed.
I have many good, and screamingly obvious, ideas about how the US polity could be overhauled, but I’m absolutely certain none of them will be implemented. In order for that to happen, the nation needs to be far more modest about itself, and to subscribe to a philosophy of constant renewal, to match the renewal of social values recognised by most other WEIRD nations, and by some progressives within the US.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of these ideas before in this blog, but… first, scrap the presidential system, which is beyond repair. Giving such vast powers to one person, who doesn’t even have to subscribe to the discipline of a political party and its collectively devised platform, more or less understood by the voting public, or at least there for every voter to consider, is highly problematic. Such a system is tailor-made for wannabe dictators. Nobody in Australia, where I live, or Britain, where I was born, goes into politics hoping to be a dictator – they would have to win over their local electorate, as a member of a political party (if campaigning as an independent they would’ve had to gain a local reputation through commercial or community activity), and then, if elected, would have to impress their party colleagues vis-à-vis their ideas, their communication skills, all the factors that make for a good team captain. This isn’t to say all ‘team captains’ have been effective or anything much more than disastrous -in Australia I can think of Mark Latham for Labor, or Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott for the Liberals (aka Conservatives – yes, it’s confusing: it’s about individual liberty and small government – think Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’).
So if the US scrapped its much-worshipped Presidential system, what then? It already has a functioning Congressional-Parliamentary system, elected every four years (called mid-term elections). It seems to have become increasingly partisan, whereas in Australia, cross-bench numbers (independents or ‘mini-parties’), with stops and starts, have grown. In Australia, our national elections vaguely resemble the US mid-terms, in which we elect local electorate hopefuls to the parliament (or re-elect incumbents), most of whom are members of the right or left party. The leaders of those parties are chosen, and can be dumped, by their elected peers in the party. Thus we have a Prime Minister and an Opposition Leader, working in a parliament, defending their policies and attacking the policies of the opposition, as of course occurs in the US Congress. We don’t have this extra, surely unnecessary, layer of power, an individual who sits in the White House like a king in his palace, surrounded by courtiers and flunkies, appointing various unelected ‘Secretaries’ to positions of massive power and authority (Treasury, State, Defence, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Education, etc, etc, – and also members of the judiciary – all subject at least to Congressional approval). The same king also has massive immunity and pardoning powers.
What could go wrong?
Anybody who thinks this is a good, let alone great, political system has surely to be certifiably insane, or born in the USA. Propaganda, anyone?
I’ve touched on just some of the problems of the US system. There’s also a disastrous ideology of ‘individualism’, in which you’re on your own, you’ll get very little government help in terms of education, health and general welfare, leading to a massive ‘left behind’ population susceptible to obvious charlatans like Trump. Hilary Clinton once called them ‘deplorables’, an indication of the problems they face vis-à-vis the wealthy elites on both sides of the political divide. The nation seems to have no shame about having the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (this is always arguable, as naturally the world’s vilest nations don’t come clean about their rates), and some of the most disgusting prisons.
All in all, it’s pretty depressing, and I don’t see any change on the horizon. Yes I’m happy I wasn’t born there – if so, I would surely have been marked as another deplorable, given my background. I just hope the country doesn’t infect others with its disease. We all have enough problems…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(election_obstruction_case)
on neoliberalism, libertarianism and free will
some of the Grates of neoliberalism
Rousseau was wrong, humans are not born free. In fact this statement is pretty well meaningless, since our birth is dependent on the activity of those who conceived us, as well as those who helped our passage into the light of day, or the light of a home or hospital room. As to our parents, their genes and those of their relatives will determine our height and our general physiognomy, which our culture will deem to be attractive, hideous or somewhere in between. That culture and its subcultures will also determine the language we first speak, the food we are given, and the home, be it a mansion or a tent, we find ourselves living in. Our gender too will be determined, in a somewhat mysterious way.
The first few years of our life will be hugely determinative. We might be coddled, we might be thoughtfully raised according to the Montessori method, or we might be neglected or abused. We ourselves will have no say regarding those options. We know that those first few years will be hugely impactful for the rest of our lives. The Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types (among many other things), which I’ve written about previously, identifies five – Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted – which are generally recognised from the age of three, and are ‘observed to be relatively stable throughout life’. The study has been ongoing since the 1970s. As Aristotle is reputed to have said, ‘Give me the child at seven and I will show you the man’. This presumably also includes female men. Whether Aristotle meant that he could mould the child into whatever he wanted, or that the child already had the features of the man, is slightly unclear, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the latter is true.
So where then does individual freedom, so highly valued by so many, come in? What do we make of the libertarianism touted by certain politicians, philosophers and economists? And what, exactly, is ‘neoliberalism’?
I’ll look at the last question first. Neoliberalism is associated with some late 20th century economic theorists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, though it harks back to Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. It isn’t particularly new, or innovative, and it largely ignores the vast constraints (and advantages), mental, physical, cultural, familial, financial and so on, that we are subject to from the very beginnings of our lives. Here’s how Wikipedia jargonises it:
Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
People with a university education – that’s to say, a minority of people – might be able to understand some of these terms. Those who understand none of them have my sympathy, as they will most certainly be neoliberalism’s victims.
A little anecdote from my primary school days. I was one of the smarter students, naturally, and I remember the teacher asking another pupil to spell a not particularly difficult word. I remember the pupil’s name, Andrew Binney, and I’ve often wondered what became of him. Andrew tried, and his efforts caused titters around the room. But you could see he was really trying. The teacher persisted, not in a bullying way, but patiently, offering clues, and the scene went on for an excruciating amount of time, it seemed to me, because it was clear that Andrew just didn’t know. Eventually he too started to titter, and the teacher gave up on him. It wasn’t dyslexia – Andrew was just as clueless in arithmetic, etc. He wasn’t free to be as smart as the other pupils. I would go further and say that nobody is free to be smarter than they are, though many smart people might strive to be smarter than they are, by reading, studying, hobnobbing with other smart people and so on. But that’s what it is to be smart.
Neoliberalism is a lot like libertarianism, and there’s a question about how ‘neo’ it is. The idea seems to be to reduce government influence in all spheres where it might be expected to have an influence – education, healthcare, housing – just about anything to do with human welfare. All of these things should be ‘marketed’, taken care of by the market. And what does this mean exactly? What are markets, and perhaps more importantly, who owns them? Think of the various items and systems we need to sustain a viable modern human life. Homes, schools, food, electricity, communication systems, infrastructure, clean air and water, hospitals and healthcare systems. Most if not all of us have been born into these systems, barely aware of their life-sustaining existence. They are the necessities of a successful, even viable, life in our modern world. They constitute our modern society.
But neoliberals contest this. Take this 1987 quote from a doyenne of neoliberalism:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There’s no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Margaret Thatcher, 1987 interview, quoted in The Invisible Doctrine, George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, 2024, p 62
This is classic neoliberalism. It’s also classically inane. The late British PM would have us believe that she obtained her language, her upper-crust accent, the clothes she wore, the homes she lived in, the food she consumed, the education she obtained, the transport she availed herself of, and any or all of the jobs she worked at, from either herself or her family. This is obviously nonsense. To take just language – if this is solely provided by our families, there would be no possibility of different families speaking the same language. Language is entirely a socio-cultural phenomenon, that we all plug into, first at home, then in our immediate environment, then at school. As to any homes she lived in, her family didn’t build them, they didn’t act as architects, stone-cutters and bricklayers, as well as carpenters, plumbers. electricians and so forth – they plugged in to the wider society to provide these things. Cities, with their roads, bridges, vehicles, public transport systems, parks, entertainment centres, are clearly not the products of individuals and their families, they’re the result of planning on a large social scale. And I could go on, and on and on. I know I’m belabouring the point, but it’s astonishing how many people just don’t get it. How can they be captured by this imbecilic ideology? Qui bono?
The answer is fairly obvious. Success in the developed world is largely measured by wealth, and that means accumulating as much of it as possible. A business person is described as ‘successful’ entirely in terms of that accumulation.
I asked earlier who owns the markets. With the current fashion for limited, non-interventionist government, even on the left – and this has been the case, in the WEIRD world, since at least the late 70s – they have been owned by private enterprises, with profit as their motive. To maximise those profits, people and resources need to be manipulated and massaged to the maximum.
This is the world that Andrew Binney, and others like him, have grown up in. I can’t imagine him standing much of a chance in such a world. We need to do better than this – we owe it to our society, in all its variety.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz
George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, The invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, 2024
South Korea moves leftward, with problems
I’ve avoided the debacle of the US Presidency since their election, and I’m happy to continue doing so, though I note that United Staters are still not blaming their federal system for the mess, without noting that other democratic systems, such as here in Australia, in other Westminster-based systems, and in most Western European nations, aren’t going to be subjected to “I alone can fugg it” types, due to having more effective checks and balances, leading to more collective and open administrations.
The only other democratic country that is currently having US-style problems is South Korea, and we should all know why. The answer is screamingly obvious to me. I suppose it’s because I’m so smart. Having a system in which the people vote every few years for one potential Dear Leader against another is simply idiotic – especially when you have as big a rich-poor gap and as large a population of disillusioned, left-behind and superhero-loving types as the US. But in general it’s a political system that attracts ambitious libertarian wannabe heroes more than team players.
So I’d like to look at the South Korean situation, because – it’s not the USA, and I know very little about South Korean politics other than it was surely a political system guided by the US after the Korean war – and that straight away spells trouble, but at least it’s, for me, ‘exotic’ Korean trouble rather than stale old MAGA trouble.
So here’s what the Qatar embassy in Seoul (well, why not?) says about the Republic of Korea’s political system:
The System of government in Korea is a pluralistic, democratic and presidential system, the president is elected by popular vote every five years, for one term only. The President appoints the Prime Minister and has the right to release him [sic] from his duties.
The parliament consists of 299 members, about 80% of its members are elected directly, others are elected based on a proportional representation system. Despite the fact that the presidential system is prevailing now, yet there is a call to change it to a parliamentary system in order to reduce the absolute power of the president, and to grant the rights of appointing and removing of prime minister to the parliament.
So, before going into South Korea’s political system, I should briefly address all the doom and gloom stuff about South Korea and Japan’s negative population growth. These dire predictions are based on the future being the same as the past, which is never ever ever ever ever ever the case. Ever. These two countries will need to start worrying if and when their GDP starts heading south. That’s when boosting internal reproduction rates and opening these countries to more immigration will have to be a feature of their economic policies. End of story.
Anyway, note that South Korea, which became democratic only in 1987, has both a directly elected President, like the US system, but with 5-year terms and no possibility of re-election, and a Prime Minister, appointed by the President, which sounds something like the French system (described as ‘semi-presidential’). France also has a presidential term of 5 years, but she can be re-elected for a second term.
The presidential election system also differs from that of the US in that more than two people can stand, just as many people can stand for a local electorate in Australia, with the difference that it isn’t a preferential system. Had this been the case, it’s quite possible that the leftist candidate and new President, Lee Jae-myung, who won the race decisively on first preferences, would have lost or barely scraped in, as the next biggest vote-winners were from the political Right. Lee is also, to put it mildly, a controversial figure with a murky history. The Guardian puts it this way:
Lee, who headed the opposition-led campaign to oust Yoon, is a highly divisive figure in South Korean politics. He faces criminal trials including charges of bribery and alleged involvement in a property development scandal. Courts agreed to postpone further hearings of continuing trials until after the election, allowing him to contest the presidency while the cases remained unresolved. Lee denies all charges, describing them as politically motivated persecution.
Others have gone further in their accusations or insinuations, but it seems their video has been deleted! In any case, I suspect the drama around South Korean Presidents – Lee survived an assassination attempt quite recently – will continue for some time yet. This of course is a shame as South Korea faces many problems, with declining growth and having to accommodate two economic giants, China and the USA, both bullying in different ways. And then there’s those bribery charges, etc. The next few months will be interesting…
References
https://seoul.embassy.qa/en/republic-of-korea/political-system
Parisian salon society
Thanks, Lucinda!
I don’t know if I’m a Francophile, but my first experience of any foreign language was when my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me, started teaching me French from his high school textbook before lights out, when I was about ten. I went on to do French at high school for three years, topping the class each year, which wasn’t hard. I left school at fifteen, but eventually went to university in my thirtieth year, and completed a 3-year arts degree majoring in French, I’ve no idea why. I did about half of an honours year, then dropped out due to poverty, and a realisation that my French writing was pretty shite. And that, the way things were going, I’d never get to France.
Since then I’ve managed to spend some eight days wandering cluelessly around Paris, which was great fun. And of course I’ve read a lot of French literature, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and such serious stuff as Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir and Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, although my favourite French writer has long been Stendhal, who basically turned his back on France and all things French, preferring the more demonstrative Italians – interestingly, as he seems to have been the most sexually repressed of characters, though the most obviously feminist.
A shame, for Stendhal might have been brought out of his shell by the salon society that was coming to an end by his time – the post-Napoleonic era. I’m reading a lovely little book, True Pleasures: a memoir of women in Paris, by an Australian, Lucinda Holdforth, who brings to life the salonistes and salon-creators of that city, and their admirers, from Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th century, to Nancy Mitford and Gertrude Stein in the 20th. It rather painfully reminds me of my solitary wanderings on the Rive Gauche and through the Marais during that week in 2016, hoping to find something associated with my very dissociated French readings. Will I ever get back there? Not likely.
So now, towards the end of Holdforth’s book, I’m reading about Germaine de Staël and her contretemps with Napoleon. I knew of her, of course, mainly through my reading of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and my researches around that work, but I wasn’t quite aware of just how viciously Bonaparte had treated her. She wrote at least two novels, Delphine and Corrine, and various political and literary tracts, none of which I’ve paid the slightest attention to. In fact many of these female salon-holders were quite voluminous writers, and I’ve read none of them. I’ll try to make up for it, maybe after I’ve found out what’s going on with that possibly non-existent dark energy.
All of this makes me wonder about my take, as a man (of some kind), on female intellectualism and aesthetics through the ages, especially the last few centuries. When I was a teenager, still living in Elizabeth, I read some modern (at the time) feminist literature, including Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch, Eva Figues’ Patriarchal Attitudes and Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique (all of these were just books around the house, thanks to my mother and elder sister), but I can’t remember much about those readings, or whether I even finished any of them, except that I’m sure I patted myself heavily on the back for being so enlightened. Since those days I’ve come to realise just how difficult it is to get out from under the worldwide control of patriarchy, in spite of having encountered many powerful women in my life, for better and worse. And I’ve tried to imagine what a ‘world turned upside down’ would look like, hence my interest in bonobos, so vastly different from us, and yet so strangely inspiring. And my interest in women of intellect, trapped in a world which has deprived them of political power. At least in a direct sense, but they have exerted insidious influences. So here’s a potted account of some of those influential women – and I’m limiting myself to the French influencers, though not all were French by birth.
Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665): Born in Rome, daughter of a couple of nobles (the male being a marquis, whatever that is) and married at 12 to the future marquis de Rambouillet, with whom she had seven children. They lived in Paris but she was unimpressed with court life and by 1620 she had gathered a circle of intellectual/influential friends at Hôtel Pisani, later renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, the first recognised salon, in which ‘the fine art of conversation’ was overtly cultivated. The list of visitors and habitués is long, but some of those recognised by me are the tragedian Pierre Corneille, Madame de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Cleves, the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, letter-writer extraordinaire. So Madame de Rambouillet might be called, very simplistically, the inventor of the salon.
Ninon de L’Enclos (1620-1705): Paris born, and perhaps the most interesting of them all, as there’s no obvious sign of the aristocracy in her background, though her father was an established musician and composer who taught her to sing and play. The family was exiled from the city due her father’s duelling habits, and Ninon was forced into a convent when her mother died in 1642, but it didn’t last long, and ‘for the remainder of her life she was determined to remain unmarried and independent’. She returned to Paris, becoming a frequenter of salons, and a courtesan (lovely word), soon establishing her own ‘court’. She was a friend and patron of the young Molière. As you can see, she lived a long and fruitful life, and among her lovers was Louis II de Bourbon, aka Le Grand Condé (one of France’s greatest generals), and La Rochefoucauld of Maxims fame. Her associates included the young Saint-Simon, one of France’s most influential writers, and fascinatingly, ‘when she died she left money for the son of her notary, a nine-year-old named François-Marie Arouet, later to become known as Voltaire, so he could buy books’. But of course, being a known courtesan had its down sides, what with patriarchy and all. In 1656 she was imprisoned (in a convent) at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen consort (and mother of Louis XIV), but was soon rescued by another, rather more interesting queen, Christina of Sweden, who interceded on her behalf through the formidable Cardinal Mazarin. She was also a noted author, writing in particular about morality without religion, and was a friend to intellectuals such as Jean Racine, and powerful women such as Mme de Maintenon, second wife to Louis XIV. Immanuel Kant and Saint-Simon wrote approvingly of her (and Saint-Simon rarely wrote approvingly of anyone else), and – well, that’s enough.
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1696-1780): Convent-educated in Paris, and unhappily married for a time to another of those marquis blokes, generally known as Mme du Deffand, an intellectual and skeptic, close friend of Voltaire, she established an aristocratic salon in the 1730s which attracted Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Fontenelle and Mme de Staal-Delaunay as well as Voltaire. She had become completely blind by 1754, at which time she received help from Mlle de Lespinasse (see later entry) in organising the entertainment, but they fell out due to the latter’s wit and other attractions, apparently, so Mlle de Lespinasse established another salon which drew away many of the intellectuals. In her later years she established a close relationship with the British politician and indefatigable letter-writer Horace Walpole.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721 -64): Although not born into the aristocracy, and possibly ‘illegitimate’ (though she had many scandal-mongering enemies due to later becoming the mistress of Louis XV), Mme de Pompadour was renowned for her beauty, as well as her personal charm. From Wikipedia:
When she was married aged 20, she was already somewhat famous throughout the salons of Paris for her beauty, intelligence, and abundance of charm. Her husband, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, though initially displeased with their marriage arrangement, was said to have fallen in love with Mme Pompadour swiftly.
Let’s face it, it helps to be good-looking, even for a bloke. Her marriage produced two children, both of whom died young, sigh, but it also enabled her to attend salons, where she encountered Montesquieu, Duclos, Helvetius, Fontenelle and Voltaire, among others. Her reputation soon became known to the King, and so ended her marriage, and, presumably, her participation in salons. In latter years, her reputation as a generally civilising and humanising influence on the court has definitely increased. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-76): An ‘illegitimate’ child of wealthy types, it was, much later, discovered that Mme de Lespinasse was the daughter of Mme du Deffand’s brother. Unhappy and neglected in childhood, she received an indifferent convent education and was largely self-taught, comme moi. Her success in that endeavour has been attested to by the many intellectuals with whom she conversed. Mme du Deffand, acting as a patron of sorts, brought her to Paris, where she quickly gained such a reputation in her aunt’s salon that a dispute arose between the two, with Mme de Lespinasse emerging as the intellectuals’ favourite. She started her own salon, which became a meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie, particularly Diderot and D’Alembert. D’Alembert moved in with her, though the relationship was platonic, apparently (check that with Plato). As to her intellectual bonafides, they were later proven to the world by the publication of her letters in 1809, long after her early death, possibly from tuberculosis, but exacerbated by depression and opium dependence. These letters, largely about her relations with men, have been favourably compared, by Sainte-Beuve among others, with Heloise (the 12th century French philosopher and nun – and suggested reading for me), and later romantics such as Rousseau and L’Abbé Prevost. A sad ending, but at least she didn’t live to face the Reign of Terror…
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817): aka Germaine de Staël, who should be better known than her nemesis, wee nappy bonaparte. Mme de Staël was another saloniste who was an important writer in the romantic tradition, though today her critical and historical writings are more valued. Her mother, Suzanne Churchod, was also a saloniste and writer, and her father, Jacques Necker, was France’s controversial finance minister under Louis XVI. As aforementioned, I knew of her through Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but I wasn’t sufficiently aware of her prominence. Always a political moderate, she went into exile during the Reign of Terror (1792-4) and was later forced into exile by wee nappy. Her marriage, at 19, to a Baron Staël von Holstein, was apparently a matter of convenience, though they tolerated each other. No doubt due to the position of her father amid the political turbulence of 18th century France, Mme de Staël wrote reflections on political theory, while wisely avoiding direct political involvement. Nevertheless, as political division and violence mounted, she was forced to flee the city. She eventually reached England, where she was unimpressed by the general voicelessness of women. She returned to Switzerland in 1793, and published a defence of Marie Antoinette, who was on trial at the time. Like Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (and guillotined for her moderation), Mme de Staël was an advocate of constitutional monarchy. It was at this time that Benjamin Constant became her lover. She returned with him to Paris in 1795, where her salon gained fame and notoriety. The rise of wee nappy, however, with his more or less fake, self-boosting misogyny, spelt big trouble for both Constant and de Staël, and – well the rest is history, and I’ve gone on too long.
I’ve described only a few interesting women of the place and period – other salonistes worth exploring are Juliette Récamier, Mme de Choiseul, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet, to name a few. Vive les salons! Je veux en être un!
References
Lucinda Holdforth, True Pleasures: A memoir of women in Paris, 2004
Just about all the info on the above-mentioned women comes from their Wikipedia biographies.
slowly slowly catchy monkey
As we approach the rather significant US election on November 5 (and the fact that they hold their national elections on Tuesdays is very stupid, but one of the least stupid things about their elections in general), I’ve been indulging in absurd fantasies – though I prefer to call them thought experiments – about a future electoral system. ‘Absurd’ isn’t a term I like to use about myself, but I must admit that when I mention this thought experiment, I get a ‘please go away and stop bothering me’ response. So what do I do when nobody wants to listen? I post it on my blog and pat myself on the back.
So my idea is that, perhaps under the influence of some soma-type happy drug, or perhaps just because there’s a near world-wide irritation with male political leadership, at least in the democratic world (let’s not get too optimistic), laws are passed in quick succession banning males from standing for political office and banning males from voting (ok, let’s leave aside for now all the gender-bending categories… if you identify as female you can vote?…but what if you’re pretending to identify…?)
Anyway, in justification of such an absurdity, in the US Presidential elections, which began in 1788-9, 45 separate individuals have been elected, none of them female. Women weren’t given the right to vote until 1920, under the 19th amendment, after decades of heroic struggle. Hilary Clinton became the first woman to stand for election, in 2016, after nearly 230 years of elections! She won, of course, on the popular vote, but that don’t matter in the US of A.
So how would such an impossible scenario go? And, yes, of course I’m going to invoke bonobos.
Well of course there are fascist-style, ‘I alone can fix it’ type women, but they’re far out-numbered by the men of that type, and there are collaborative-style, non-adversarial men, but women are generally better at working together. Just look at the stats, from any country you prefer, on male versus female violence. Just look at the Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace organisations, which have been struggling together for decades, with no male alternative. Just look at the hooliganism associated with men’s soccer games, in some countries, and its absence in the women’s game. Just think of (projected) 30% rules in the various military organisations worldwide, because it’s known that female boots on the ground are more effective at winning hearts and minds, and finding collaborative solutions. Actual peace-keeping.
Of course, banning men from this or that organisation or activity is coercive and won’t happen (to men), but it’s certainly a pleasant thought experiment. An all-female military? Imagine it if you can. You certainly won’t have trouble imagining an all male one. It fact it doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. Any more than an all-male Presidential system, an all-male Politburo, or an all-male dictatorship.
So while I’m not trying to create a new SCUM manifesto, I do think that cutting down severely on male domination, in politics, finance and every other power-making activity, something that the WEIRD world is oh so gradually doing, is pretty well essential for our long-term survival. And bonobos provide something of a template.
It’s easy to scoff and point out that we’re so vastly superior to our language-deprived, tree-climbing closest rellies. After all, look where patriarchy got us – eight billion plus people, world domination, and geniuses like Donny Trump and Vlady Putin. But today’s human aims – sustainability rather than endless increase, sharing the resources of the biosphere rather than exploiting them, peace, persuasion and preservation rather than domination and destruction, and so on, are obviously more suited to the nurturing sector of humanity than the murderers and blowhards.
So how to give power to the bonobo possibilities within our human natures? By noticing, that’s the first thing. Actually taking note. Not only of how bonobos bring up children, deal with families, and treat (bonobo) strangers with guarded friendliness and peace offerings, but of how similar behaviour in humans, led predominantly by the females, bring about a similar bonding, mutuality and trust. Think of the waste, the desolation created by Putin’s territorial nonsense, by Xi’s pretended ‘need’ to take back Taiwan, by the hapless hope of many ‘Arabs’ and ‘Israelis’ of winning and ridding their world of the other. Think how very male it all is.
Of course, I’m being very idealistic, or at least too impatient. Humanity evolves, and, I’m hoping, in a good way. Yes we’re facing, or I should say creating, huge problems – climate change, over-population, species depletion, the nuclear threat, the lure of fascism, and still, decisions are being made here and there, that are worsening the situation. I don’t quite believe in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity depiction of humanity’s future, but I do think that, overall, we’re evolving in the right direction. Patriarchy is coming under pressure, and the pressure is very gradually growing. And bonobos, those dumb primates, are putting us to shame in that department.
So – slowly slowly catchy monkey.
References
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
They’re our servants, remember
Onya, Ben!
Having just read the US Special Counsel’s indictment against that thing wot once was Prez, or 165 pages of it at least (I keep hearing that it’s 180-odd pages, so where’s the rest?), I must say I’m not at all surprised. I mean I keep hearing the media using phrases like ‘bombshell after bombshell’, as if old Drivelmouth has changed a jot since he was Young Drivelmouth (and before that Baby Dribblemouth). So all the lies and threats and pathetic bluster catalogued in the indictment just reinforced my disgust and astonishment that this lump of faeces was allowed to become the leader of the world’s most powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, nation on Earth.
I was, however, very much heartened by a quote that Jack Smith took from one of the USA’s most enlightened 18th century figures. But before presenting it here, some background.
I’ve written before about how politicians are public servants, not our bosses, and that they shouldn’t be put up on pedestals, and be given special powers – massive immunity, massive pardoning powers, power to shut down the government, power to keep themselves separate from the elected body (the Parliament or the Congress), power to surround themselves with their own unelected courtiers, shut up in a White Palace, power to select Judges and Justices, and Secretary of This or That, at their own whim. And this strong feeling I had about an ‘I alone can fix it’ four-year-dictatorship, and the danger it entailed, not least because of the effect such massive power has upon weak minds such as that of Old Drivelmouth, this strong feeling came rushing back to me a few years ago when I heard about France’s President Macron’s retort to a teenager who was presumably criticising some policy or other to Macron’s face – ‘call me Mr President’. Of course, this was an improvement on having the lad hung drawn and quartered in public, which would once have been the case (and that’s no joke), but still, I was white with rage at Macron’s effrontery – and immediately had him skinned alive in my mind, such is my own anti-authoritarianism.
And so, I come to the finest line in Jack Smith’s indictment, which had nothing to do with Old Drivelmouth’s specific crimes.
“In free Governments,” Benjamin Franklin explained, “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors [and] sovereigns.”
GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS, p92
Thank you thank you thank you Ben. My sentiments exactly!
It’s not just about female leadership – Sheikh Hasina’s downward spiral
Muhammad Yunus
Bangladesh is in a mesh at the moment, and it’s no joke. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, resigned today (August 5 2024) after 15.5 years in office. She’d previously been in office from 1996 to 2001, so, more than 20 years as Prime Minister. Now, the term Prime Minister has a very Westminster-type resonance, and sounds very ‘first among equals’-like, but having heard some quite disturbing things about this leader in the past, and having heard about the recent events leading up to her resignation, I’m minded to take a closer look.
Bangladesh has been an independent nation since 1971, before which it was known as East Pakistan. This wasn’t a peaceful transition, and of course the region has a history going back thousands of years, long before the present, hopefully passing, obsession with nationhood and sovereignty became a thing. That region, above the Bay of Bengal, was itself known as Bengal, or Bangla, and is covered essentially by Bangladesh and the Indian Province of West Bengal.
So, as I write Sheikh Hasina has, it seems, fled to India, and large numbers of young Bangladeshis (commentators are saying they are students) are in the streets of Dhaka, apparently carrying away loot from the Prime Ministerial residence. It seems that we’re witnessing the end of a very long dictatorship. Hasina is the daughter of the first Bangladeshi Prime Minister, which gives it all a bit of a North Korean feel (oh but I’ve just learned he was assassinated in a military coup, along with other members of Hasina’s family). So, like her father, Hasina doesn’t seem to have managed to keep control at the end, as apparently the police have chosen not to take action against the present student protesters (though many have been killed in recent times). So, given the family history, she’s chosen to decamp to India.
So of course there are now some big questions due to the power vacuum. What will be the role of the military, and can all this be succeeded by something more seriously democratic?
So, okay things are happening quickly… the nations’s military has promised to form an interim government and has promised to fulfil student demands and ‘bring peace back to the country’. Reporters are saying that over 90 people were killed the day before Hasina’s departure. The word autocracy is being used – Hasina ‘won’ an election earlier this year, after a boycott by opposition parties.
Protestors, on being interviewed, are inveighing against military rule and demanding civilian-style government. An articulate student protestor has expressed concern about the ongoing treatment of minorities in the country, and has severe reservations about an interim military government, though I suppose there has to be some peace-keeping force to fill the vacuum, at least for a short while. An important point, raised by the DW reporter, and further commented on by the student, is that Hasina fled on a military aircraft, which raises questions about the military’s neutrality. However, there are obvious questions about what would have happened if the students and protesters (hundreds of whom have been killed in recent weeks, according to reports) had gotten their hands on this former Prime Minister.
And the fact is that, despite the perhaps well-meaning promises currently being made by the military, these student-type revolutions rarely turn out well in the end. Democracy is, of course, a Euro-American import to this region, as is the concept of nationhood itself. There is so much religious and ethnic conflict – an online Indian report on the upheaval comes with a baggage of commentary, Indians (especially Hindus) worrying about an influx of refugees (especially non-Hindus), as well as weird commentary about a perfectly functioning democratic state being over-run by the military… You get the impression that the situation is being deliberately misunderstood.
So the latest news is that Muhammed Yunus, apparently a very important figure in Bangladeshi politics and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (I’m on a steep learning curve here!), has returned to the country from Paris and has been sworn in as the interim leader, much to the relief and jubilation of student protestors. Considering that hundreds of students have been killed recently, Yunus, who’s 84 years old, and has no political experience, has his work cut out for him, and the obvious key to his success will be his connections with the right people, those who are invested in democracy, human rights and poverty alleviation. He was awarded the Peace Prize for his highly successful micro-financing systems designed to help the country’s poorest. Hasina’s regime rewarded him by charging him with a vast list of crimes, presumably because he was highly critical of the government’s behaviour.
So, just listening to a student activist being interviewed about Younis and the general political situation – and she points out that the two main political parties, that of Hasina and the main opposition, have great credibility problems, being based on dynastic families who have served themselves rather than the nation, so it may be that, with popular support, Younis will be encouraged to remain until the political corruption is dealt with. At his age, that would be a big ask. The country is very polarised, with no doubt religious as well as political divisions.
So, just gathering more info – students, and the public generally, have been incensed by the former government’s quota system for jobs and benefits. They were particularly outraged by Hasina’s apparently sarcastic comments some time ago about extending the quota to the pro-Pakistan families – that’s to say those who fought against and killed Bangladeshi freedom fighters in large numbers. Protesters had also been activated by the military’s shoot-to-kill behaviour recently, which killed more than 100 students in one day.
So, peace has been restored for the time being, and the arrival of Younis will presumably mean that the Hindus of India will be less concerned about a huge refugee influx (the Indian government has sent a large military force to the border). As to Sheikh Hasina, she has sought asylum in the UK (her niece is a British Labour politician). Her US visa has been revoked, a turnaround from previous friendly relations due to her crackdown on religious extremism and her welcoming of Rohingya refugees into the country in 2007. Hasina’s family background is Moslem – and no matter what her personal beliefs, she would probably have to be seen to be practising in order to retain any credibility in the region. Anyway, it seems that Hasina is currently holed up in India, and Bangladeshi authorities (whoever they may be?) are demanding that she be handed over to them. Interestingly, she has younger relatives in relatively high places in the US, India and Finland as well as in the UK. To quote other commentators, asylum in India (a country that has refused asylum for Afghani and Sri Lankan leaders in recent times) would compromise India’s relationship with a new Bangladeshi government (there have already been requests from the Supreme Court Bar Association in Bangladesh to have Hasina sent back).
So – many issues facing a new administration. How to deal with the massive destruction of buildings and other infrastructure. How to deal with agitprop coming out of Pakistan and India. How to deal with what appears to be the collapse of the banking system, with the mass resignation of high-level staff of the Bangladesh bank, the country’s biggest bank, after protestors stormed their offices. Unsurprisingly there has been a run on bank withdrawals throughout the country.
And Sheikh Hasina has very recently stated that she wishes to return to Bangladesh ‘once democracy has returned’! Her son, who lives in the US, is blaming the Pakistani government and its spy agencies for the unrest, and he too identifies his mother as the person to restore democracy in the country. That’s family for you.
Needless to say, there wouldn’t have been many other women in Hasina’s government, if any. When I talk about ‘a world turned upside-down’ in terms of gender relations I must admit I’m talking about the world I know, the so-called ‘WEIRD world’. There are so many other factors, ethnic, religious, dynastic and so on, that make female dominance unlikely in so many parts of the world at this juncture. Even in Thatcher’s government, in the heart of the WEIRD world, there were no other women in her cabinet. Too much power in the hands of too few, that’s always a bad sign, regardless of gender. As primatologists have pointed out, the most successful alpha males/females are generally those that build alliances and trust – to keep everyone in the same tent, so to speak. Females are better at it, I think, but plenty of males are good at it too. So it isn’t just a matter of gender, it’s about how best to benefit the whole community, to recognise their rights and needs, and to always consider government in terms of help. I’ll be watching this space.
on private schools in Australia, the egalitarian nation
Geelong Grammar, Australia’s most expensive private school, apparently
When I was in my mid-twenties I shared a rented house in a small inner suburb of Adelaide called College Park. It was named after what was by far the largest piece of real estate in the area, St Peter’s College. Our street was called Harrow Road, after Eton and Harrow, get it? Other nearby street names were Oxford, Rugby, Trinity, Marlborough and Pembroke. Not a single Skank Lane or Black Boy Alley to be found.
I was reminded of this period on reading Jane Caro’s article, “Class Warfare” in The Monthly magazine for July 2024. So before tackling the article, here’s a story. Walking the streets of College Park I often crossed ‘in-roads’ leading to the high steel-mesh fence that defended St Peter’s College. On the other side of the fence was lots of green ‘sward’ as Alan Bennett would call it, with a very large mansion or palace in the distance, and a few smaller building dotted about – the servants’ quarters perhaps. It all seemed a little unAustralian to me. Anyway, some of these fences also incorporated gates that seemed not to be locked. That was a bit more Australian, and anyway the front of the College was accessible enough – it was a school, after all. So, noticing that there was a rather forlorn-looking asphalted tennis court, partly fenced and sans net, not far inside the palace grounds, I suggested to my house-mates that we might take our racquets and balls and have a few hits. This, I suppose, was an indication of how bored we were.
So we’d been knocking balls to each other for surely no more than twenty minutes (it was a long time ago) when I noticed a figure in the far distance, marching over the sward towards us, from the vicinity of the palace. Looked like trouble, but we carried on regardless. He appeared to be hailing us, but we waited to get a full view of this clearly colourfully dressed individual. By the time we could make sense of his exclamations, I was able to get a fuller picture of this slim forty-ish gentleman in check golfing trousers, grey-green cardigan, and a bright red cravatte which beautifully set off his flame of auburn hair (okay, I only clearly remember the cravatte).
“Boys, boys, you do realise this is private property?!” He may have said much more, but the words ‘private property’ and the sense of real astonishment in his voice is all I clearly remember, and the more my memory repeats to me those two words, the more Pythonesque his voice sounds. Of course we slunk off with a bad grace, but the memory, and my fantasy of hoisting the fellow with his own petard, is, for better or worse, the most persistent feature for me of that period – though I’ve since learned that a petard is a bomb, not a cravatte.
So the god of private property still looms large in ‘classless’ Australia – and the larger the property the more powerful the god.
Jane Caro’s article begins with a quote.
“We ask public schools to compete against private ones, but we do not give them the funding or resources to do so,” says the principal of a comprehensive public secondary school. “We then fill them with the most disadvantaged – and so most expensive to teach – students, including those rejected or expelled from publicly subsidised private schools. Then we blame public schools for struggling. No wonder so many of our principals and staff despair.”
Caro goes on to describe a scandalous funding situation regarding public v private schools, with remarks such as ‘no other nation funds education the way we do, yet most Australians remain blissfully ignorant of just what an outlier we are’, and ‘no other [private] schooling system anywhere enjoys such largesse for so little reciprocal cost’. Count me in as one of the blissfully ignorant, and I’ve been tsk-tsking about the USA’s underfunded public education system, and its role in letting down those who might otherwise have seen through Trump’s bullshit (but then there’s their awful public health system, their ultra-low minimum wages, their massive incarceration rates…).
Having said that, and being prepared to accept Caro’s analysis, I’m disappointed that there’s a lack of actual hard data or references in her article (or in any other of The Monthly’s articles). The magazine might employ the excuse that these are only opinion pieces – but they’re clearly not, they’re making factual claims. The Economist, another mag I read from time to time, cites references within its articles (‘according to x..’, ‘statistics from the bureau of y show…’), which might be inelegant, but useful for valiant truth-seekers like me.
So here’s a tantalising and shocking quote from The Australia Institute, a public policy think tank:
In 2024, the Commonwealth Government will spend an estimated $29.1 billion on schools in Australia. More than half of this – $17.8 billion – will go to private schools.
More than half that private money – $9.9 billion – is earmarked for Catholic schools, in a nation regarded internationally as one of the least religious in the world. How can this be happening?
According to the 2021 census census, just under 20% of our population identifies as Catholic. That number strikes me as unbelievably high (I’ve also met many who identify as Catholic but don’t ‘practise’ the religion), but it has been falling quite rapidly since the 70s.
Unsurprisingly, Independent Schools Australia – presumably an advocacy website for independent schools – claims that all this malarky about funding is just mischiefy myth-making. Here’s a quote from theirs:
FACT: On average, Independent schools receive around half the level of government funding of public schools.
Hmmm. So, one of these claims is not like the other. Clearly, one would expect independent schools to receive far less funding because they’re fee-paying schools which tend to advertise themselves as superior. And those fees can be pretty hefty – the still all-male St Peters College, with the swards and the cravattes, charges (in 2024) $17,770 per annum for Prep students (that’s pre-Reception!) up to $31,770 for year 12. And if you’re a boarder, that’s an extra $28,600 on top. I’m not sure if that includes uniforms and cravattes. So, while I’m skeptical of the above-mentioned ‘fact’, I have to wonder why independent schools receive any funding at all.
Thinking on this has dredged up another memory. The school I attended in my last three years of primary education – Elizabeth Field Primary – hit the headlines of South Australia’s principal daily paper, some years after I left the building, as the most violent school in the state, which came as a great surprise to me, as I’d noticed nothing more than the odd mumble or sneer in my time there. However I do recall, from those days, outlining to my sister a story I planned to write about a student uprising which left most of the teachers dead or dying on a field of gore. But isn’t that every schoolboy’s fantasy?
The evidence, in any case, appears to support Caro’s essay. ABC News reported late last year on an analysis by the Australian Education Union. It argues that ‘Australian private schools are overfunded by $800 million this year while there is a funding shortfall of $4.5 billion for public schools’, and finds that Tasmanian schools are particularly hard hit. Further, it finds that ‘chronic underfunding of public schools in every state and the Northern Territory is expected to worsen over the next five years’. It should be noted that centre-left Labor governments are in power in every state and territory in Australia, except for Tasmania.
So, what is to be done? Australia’s politicians, especially those in the top jobs, are mostly private school educated and reluctant to despoil their own nests – so it’s the usual situation of a politics run by elites for elites, which has long been a problem of ‘representative’ democracy as opposed to participatory democracy. So the problem won’t be solved, obviously, by voting ‘this lot’ out, as the conservatives are even more beholden to private school education. Being informed and making a fuss, a noise that can’t be ignored, is the best I can come up with, though I’m not much of a noise-maker myself. Education is so important, it’s the key to having as good, as informed an electorate as possible. And currently Australia’s education system, and its funding, makes a mockery of our claim to be an egalitarian nation.
I suppose I should send this to a politician, for what it’s worth.
References
Federal funding for private schools
DISPELLING MYTHS