On 7 February 2007, the then-Federal Education, Science and Training Minister, Julie Bishop, announced that ‘like other professions, teachers should be recognised and rewarded on merit.’ This policy announcement, made despite the Federal Government having no legal authority to set pay or conditions on public schools, was based on the pervasive private sector management practice of performance-related pay (PRP) and the incentive principles of inherent in neo-liberalism (economic rationalism). It purported to create an incentive in the employee (teacher) to improve his or her work performance, in order to improve the quality of output (education) that customers (students) receive. The key criteria which merit pay was to be decided upon, as outlined in the Minister’s speech, would be literacy and numeracy scores of students. PRP is a method by which proponents of market-based governance seek to introduce private-sector management techniques into the public sector to lead to better out-puts, greater cost-efficiency, and a ‘customer service’ ethos.

The day after May Day in 2011, Julia Gillard announced that Labor would introduce performance related pay for teachers in this year’s Federal Budget.

“We want to reward great teaching so the individuals who are doing it experience the benefits of those rewards so we can model what great teaching is to the rest of the teaching workforce,” Ms Gillard said.

“If you monitor and give feedback so that you identify great teaching, that does put you in a virtuous circle where great teaching does become more and more prevalent and that’s what we want to see.

“We know independent research conducted as recently as this year shows that a system of meaningful appraisal and feedback for teachers can increase their effectiveness by 20 to 30 per cent.”

Performance-related pay has a long history in Australia and around the world, with teachers in Australia, England and the United States paid according to ‘pupils’ ‘results’ as assessed in examinations, tests, and visits by “Inspectors”’ as far back as 1862 (Ingvarson, Kleinhenz, Wilkinson, Research into Performance Pay for Teachers, Australian Council for Educational Research, 2007, page 67). This system sought to improve the performance of teachers, increase the quality of education received by students, and use pay incentives as the chief means to do so. This system saw no appreciable improvements in students’ education, or morale or quality of teachers, and so was discontinued in the early 20^th Century, and was not revived until the 1980s.

Australia’s teachers are currently paid through an annual incremental salary system, with advancement to the next increment reliant on the teacher passing a review by the school principal (or ‘supervisor’), and based on ‘performance management appraisals’.  The salary cap is generally reached after a number of years, meaning that the bulk of Australia’s teachers are paid at the top salary increment. A number of incentives exist for teachers to gain additional income, most notably through the teacher agreeing to take on additional non-teaching responsibilities (generally of an administrative nature). All teachers’ pay and conditions are set out in industrial Awards or Collective Agreements, which lay out the pay increment progression and additional entitlements from professional knowledge, training or supplementary duties.

In the United States of America, the Bush Administration introduced a number of education reforms, including PRP programmes and ‘test-based accountability’ systems (Ingvarson, et al, p.68). The most recent programme was the establishment of the Teacher Incentive Fund that gives up to 100,000 teachers in the United States a reward of $5,000, in an attempt to increase the number of states using incentive-based PRP systems (ibid, p.7).

In Florida, the Florida Department of Education introduced a system called STAR (Special Teachers are Rewarded) that will gave a 5 per cent pay increase to ‘the 25 percent of teachers with the highest ratings in two areas: an evaluation from their superiors, and improvements in student test scores, notably the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.’ Massachusetts also introduced a programme to link teacher pay to evaluations of student performance’ with the goal of providing ‘incentives for high-performing teachers’ and placing teachers on a ‘comparable standing’ with private-sector employees ‘where rewards for performance have steadily increased’. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called in 2005 for merit-pay to ‘usher California’s schools into the modern era’ and that it was the duty of government to ‘financially reward good teachers and expel those who are not.’ (Tannock, “Yes, Let’s Talk About Merit”, in California Public Employee Relations Journal, Is.171, 2005, p.7 and p.5)

Numerous other states have introduced PRP programmes into the public education sector, almost all of which include bonus pay, and most bonuses linked to improvements in student test (or other measure) scores. Most PRP systems in education sector in the USA ‘base performance on limited criteria, including tests of student achievement’, and have a life of four to five years.

There is a great deal of literature on the effectiveness of PRP programmes in the teaching profession, including a 1998 Senate inquiry, A Class Act, and research commissioned for the Minister for Education Training and Science by the Australian Council for Educational Research. Numerous reports and studies from the British and American experiences also exist. The research suggests that since the 1980s – a period that marked a spurt of PRP proposals for teachers – performance based pay plans have been introduced as a result of market governance and NPM pressures on the public sector, specifically to improve the outputs of public education.

It is the view of the ACER report, and the majority of reports on PRP programmes in the USA, that ‘there was no evidence… to support the position that it was pay-for-performance which improved student achievement’ (Ingvarson, et al, p.17). There is further literature that suggests that there is little effectiveness at all in PRP systems either in the public sector or the private sector, in terms of increased productivity and outcomes (Pfeffer, “Six dangerous myths about pay”, Harvard Business Review, v.76, Harvard Business School Publishing, 1998, p.114). The concerns raised by opponents of the introduction of PRP programmes into public education are the same as those reported in the Harvard Business Review: PRP programmes have

been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance. Indeed, those are among the reasons why W. Edwards Deming and other quality experts have argued strongly against using such schemes (Ibid, p.114).

This view is repeated in the ACER report: ‘incentives in themselves did not necessarily improve what teachers knew and could do, or lead them to teach more effectively. Improved student learning outcomes were more likely to result from long-term, high quality professional learning promoted by knowledge- and skills-based approaches to performance-based pay’ (Ingvarson, et al, p.17).

A study by Stuart Tannock (professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California) for CEPR reported that despite the appeal of PRP systems when they are regularly introduced in states around America, a series of negative, unintended consequences arose (Tannock, p.7-9):

• competition between teachers for limited performance bonuses fostered ‘jealousy, resentment, and divisiveness, and undermine the spirit of workplace collaboration’;
• morale amongst teachers plummeted, and perceptions of ‘merit’ awards were viewed as ‘subjective, arbitrary, unfair, and prone to favoritism and discrimination’;
• performance criteria create incentives for teachers to ‘teach to the test’, narrow curriculums to focus on those that are part of the PRP measure, and often cause teachers to ‘shun low-achieving students and “hard-to-serve” schools, where gains in student test scores or other measures of learning often are more difficult to produce’; and
• administrative costs (mostly through lack of productivity) sky-rocket as principals or other school supervisors spend time reviewing teacher performance, and overall costs of teacher salaries rose, resulting in PRP being capped or suspended.

Even those stakeholders that oppose PRP acknowledge that two forms of PRP can be successful in improving standards of teaching: ‘when given a choice, most teachers much prefer task accomplishment to salary’ (Firestone, “Merit Pay and Job Enlargement as Reforms: Incentives, Implementation, and Teacher Response”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 13, 1991, p.280). Most criticism is leveled at ‘true merit pay’ and ‘job enlargement’ PRP programmes, due to the reasons noted above by Tannock. The OECD study into performance-related pay in England and Wales questioned whether PRP achieved its sought-after goals, with the overwhelming view of classroom teachers and school heads opposing PRP until it moved away from ‘true merit pay’ and focused instead on skills development, qualifications and professional development of teachers (OECD, p.185-57). In particular, there was evidence that many school heads acted ‘like a shop steward, keen to ensure that her or his staff got the pay increase from the government’ (Ibid, p.188).

The overwhelming evidence in both England and the USA suggests that a more effective way for teaching standards to improve is through improving professional development, accreditation and qualifications, measures that are not necessarily encapsulated in performance-pay.

Update

My article has been reprinted in the March issue of the Australian Education Union’s South Australian journal.

Download the pdf here.

Related posts:

1. Letters in The Age
2. Waiting for the confected outrage

The climate denialists in the Coalition has a simple message about the carbon price:

It’s a tax.

Taxes raise prices.

Prices on electricity, fuel and other things therefore will go up.

What about the alternative? The problem for progressives is that our arguments are nuanced. We don’t necessarily see the world in Manichean absolutes, black and white, good and evil.

It's not rocket science.

Electricity prices without a carbon price will continue to rise. Doesn’t really make intuitive sense, but that’s without knowing that degrading energy infrastructure pushes up prices. We haven’t had a carbon price in the last three years (or really, at all) yet elecricity prices have continued to go up – because of the old power lines, substations and other infrastructure.

Energy produced from non-renewable sources cost more than renewables because you need to continually mine coal (or gas or uranium).

Once you build the wind farm or soal plant, you don’t need to pay for the fuel.

The wind and sun are free, so there are almost no ongoing cost.

A carbon price will lead to lower energy prices… because it will mean we use more wind, solar and geothermal energy that don’t have expensive fuel costs.

Whatever our message, we on the progressive side of politics need to significantly simplify our key message about the carbon price and renewables.

Related posts:

1. Gas should be included in carbon price
2. Exchange rate movements had bigger impact than a carbon price
3. Assessment of the “Clean Energy Future” policy

It now appears that Tony Abbott’s tactics in Parliament of consistent obstruction and negativity is directly lifted from the extreme Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

Republican Dalek Mitch McConnell with John Boehner

While reading a profile on McConnell in The Atlantic Magazine, I came across a discussion of his tactics that seem remarkably familiar.

But McConnell didn’t waste the crisis, either. He has used it to chart a path back from oblivion for the Republican Party, mainly by blocking or delaying Democratic bills and then raising an outcry about the travesties being perpetrated on the country. Democrats may have won on health care, the stimulus, Wall Street reform, and a host of other measures that made the last Congress the most productive in a generation. But, at least for now, they have lost the political battle. Significant numbers of Americans disapprove of these policies, especially the expansion of health care. Many of them have been convinced by McConnell’s skillful exertions— especially his gift for scornful neologisms, which has helped to demonize not just Democratic policies but the very manner in which they came into being. (Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, was a campaign adviser early in McConnell’s career.) If you got upset when you heard about the “Cornhusker Kickback” or the “Louisiana Purchase”—or perhaps you were lectured by a Fox News–watching relative who did—that was McConnell. He coined the terms to cast sinister aspersions on what were actually typical instances of political horse-trading, in this case over health care.

Scornful neologisms may not be evident in the Australian context, but Abbott’s relentless use of the three-word slogan “no new tax” and describing everything as a “great big tax” is clearly aimed to demonise Labor’s policies.

Forgive me while I excerpt a large part of The Atlantic article, but I’m sure you’ll find it illuminating:

They went about this by escalating an arms race that had been building in the Senate for the better part of a decade: the increasingly aggressive use of rules and procedures by successive minorities to frustrate the will of the majority. The very first bill to be considered on the Senate floor in the 111th Congress, in early January of 2009, before Obama was even inaugurated, was the Public Land Management Act, a sweeping conservation measure with broad bipartisan support that would protect 2 million acres of parks and wilderness in nine states. The Republicans filibustered, forcing a series of votes and requiring a weekend session to finish. The bill eventually passed, 77–20.

The same tactics were deployed against most other initiatives, and expanded into new realms. Traditionally, only votes on the most controversial judicial nominees had been delayed or filibustered, although the number crept upward during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies. Under McConnell, Republicans have also filibustered noncontroversial nominees, many later confirmed unanimously. They have filibustered even nominees put forward by Republican senators, and required separate votes for district-court judges, who used to be confirmed in groups as a matter of routine. The resulting increase in vacancies has exacerbated a shortage of judges across the country, leading many districts to declare “judicial emergencies”—vacancy levels so high that they threaten the courts’ ability to function. McConnell bet (correctly) that he would pay no political price for this type of obstruction, because the White House and the media would be preoccupied with other things—things even harder to accomplish as the Senate calendar filled up.

“Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is,” says Jim Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. “Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to Friday, and doesn’t cover amendments. The following Monday you file cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that’s not even controversial.” All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Think about Abbott’s attitude to every debate since he became leader. Whereas Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson agreed to take a bipartisan attitude to many major policy issues, Tony Abbott resolved to obstruct every piece of legislation that has come through the Parliament. Even before the 2010 election, Abbott’s leadership was predicated on block block block – specifically over the climate change legislation.

Talk in the Senate has been about how the Liberals are increasingly using (abusing) the rules to slow things down, to throw a spanner in the works of democracy. Unlike the US Senate of course, debates can be guillotined, but getting legislation through the Senate has become much harder since the last substantial legislation passed in 2009 – the Fair Work Act. Since then, almost no “contentious” legislation has passed the Senate, due to Abbott.

Similarly, we can witness the Australian media casting this delay and non-action as the fault of the Government. The inability to get the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation through (due to the Liberal and Greens Parties voting to block it) was portrayed as a failure of the Government. Similarly, the other delays and blockages – National Broadband Network, the QLD Reconstruction Levy – have become political problems for Labor – Labor “has paid the political price”.

Winning on the CPRS allowed Abbott to show that Kevin Rudd (who had sky-high approval ratings) that the Labor leader was not bullet proof. Since then, the inability for Rudd to get anything through parliament exacted a heavy toll. The relentless criticism about his competency by Abbott was played out in Parliament with the Liberals using their numbers in the Senate to prevent the Government from governing. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s more, Abbott used his obstruction – something that the Canberra Press Gallery has never held him accountable – to argue that Rudd’s agenda was objectionable and outrageous, somehow unAustralian. A subterranean campaign was run against Rudd’s Mandarin language skills – suggesting that he was actually a sinister Manchurian candidate leading Australia to totalitarianism. Every out of character moment – swearing, yelling, etc – was used as evidence of un-Prime Ministerial behaviour.

Eventually, by the 2010 election, Labor had lost the public relations battle – and for many of the murmuring Labor back-bench, they had come to believe the conservative key messages that appeared daily in The Australian. Rudd was done for, and the only rational course for Labor was to dump the damaged Rudd in favour of Gillard.

Play for play, Tony Abbott has lifted the tactics of Republican dalek Mitch McConnell. And it has worked.

The media, the general public and even Labor MPs have accepted the narrative. That it’s Labor’s own ineffectiveness and objectionable legislative agenda that has caused the roadblocks. None of the political-backsplash has landed on Abbott or the Liberals. They’re not the Government afterall, and their mantra is that “they’re only stopping the outrageous legislation being forced on Australia by Labor”.

The Liberals have abandoned their civic responsibility as a political party to act in the best interests of Australia, to address Australia’s problems, whether social or economic. They have abandoned the century old practice of Oppositions acting in good faith on issues of national significance. Bipartisanship has been ruthlessly bashed to death by Boxer Abbott.

Related posts:

1. Labor won’t go to a double dissolution election
2. The Liberals’ “crisis pragmatism”
3. Great news for Tony Abbott: Liberals’ economic credibility trashed

I’m inclined to agree with Peter Brent and Phil Quin when looking at the 2010 Victorian election:

Brent:

It looks like the Brumby government is gone and the Reasons are arriving. The Reasons follow the facts. Everybody has one.

Transport, arrogance and so on. The usual ones and some others.

There’ll be nagging and scolding and triumphalism directed at the Gillard government. Something about the ‘Labor brand’. Rediscovering their soul.

Some federal Liberals will take heart. No one will remember the Howard years included Coalition losses in every state and territory, mostly big ones.

But overall this is actually a good result for Julia Gillard and a bad one for Tony Abbott. At the next federal election the two biggest states will have no unpopular ALP governments.

The real Reasons are mainly 11 years in power and an acceptable opposition. And those generic ones anticipated back in September here. Some things are meant to be and are beyond trying to explain. Electoral gravity.

The fact that the polls narrowed during the campaign doesn’t mean the campaign caused it. Most of it was going to happen when people’s minds were focussed.

Because the Coalition has done well, the Greens preference decision is seen as clever, which makes it more likely to be taken up in other jurisdictions. I’m not as confident as some of Adam Bandt’s ability to withstand unfriendly Liberal how to vote cards.

Quin:

For the Coalition to win, it needed to raid the band of seats that fell between 4 and 8 percent, a combination of regional and outer-suburban electorates. Of the eleven seats in this category, the Coalition has won two — Seymour and Carrum — and is leading in another, Bentleigh.  It is also very close in Eltham and Macedon, the latter sitting just outside the 8 percent range.   If the results remains as they are now, Seymour, Carrum and Bentleigh will be enough to deliver government to the Lib-Nat Coalition; if Bentleigh creeps back into the Labor column on the back of pre-polls, then we have a tie.

The results, therefore, won’t so much as raise the eyebrows of future political scientists.  Indeed, if a government of eleven years didn’t lose a swag of marginals, that would be more of a surprise.

But there is a bigger story underneath the numbers , and that relates to the scale and intensity of the swing in  Melbourne’s outer suburbs.  Here, Labor copped a unmitigated hiding. This is a demographic gripped with unease; the same economically stretched, culturally rattled (and predominantly white, non-Tertiary educated) voters that punished Obama in Pennsylvania and Ohio a few weeks ago, and have lashed out at Gillard, Gordon Brown and Helen Clark in recent times.  I plan to dig a bit deeper into this topic.  If the centre-left can’t grapple with this angry white problem, then we can look forward to plenty more replays of last night.

I spent election day in two seats: Brunswick (inner city, Labor vs. Greens Party) and Ferntree Gully (suburban, Labor vs Liberal Party).

A polling booth in Coburg. (Photo via @carlocarliMP)

While the Labor victory in the inner city was well-deserved, the feeling was completely different out east. The “death by a thousand cuts” was palpable: a range of policy failures were campaigned on hard by the Liberals, bunched under their slogan of “fix the failures, build the future”. After eleven years, Labor did carry a lot of baggage.

I’ll be keeping an open mind on election analysis, but I think Brent and Quin are fairly on the money here.

Some other thoughts:

1. Labor’s inner city strategy was a good one – focusing on Labor’s progressive achievements; Labor’s baggage of “no action on climate change” (as an example) was successfully neutralised. This in my view was necessary to win the seats and the motivate Labor’s volunteer base. I wouldn’t be surprised if Labor recorded a record number of new members and active volunteers in the inner city.

2. In the outer suburbs, Labor’s baggage was an appearance of wasting money on major projects (MyKi, North-South Pipeline, Desalination), combined with its legacy of 11 years in government. This wasn’t an election about the basics of service delivery – education, health – although Labor was hammered over public transport (above and beyond MyKi) and public safety (the result of 4 years worth of Herald Sun scare campaigns on crime and violence). The Liberal’s attack ads focused on this with strong effect, and without a leadership change to a new face (e.g. a Carr –> Iemma situation) voters in the last week of the election concentrated on the prospect of 15 years of Labor. The horror-stories from NSW probably haven’t helped.

3. Labor has never won 4 consecutive terms in government in Victoria – the tide of history was just too great. What is amazing is that the Liberals only won a 1 or 2 seat majority. While I agree with others that there are no real Federal or inter-state lessons to be learned from the Victorian result, I am hopeful that in NSW the actual size of the Liberals’ victory will be relatively small in absolute terms.

4. If there was an impact on this election by federal issues, I think it was a reaction against the hung-parliament situation where the minor parties and independents held the major parties to ransom. My feeling is that the minor parties and independents did poorly (none were elected at all in this election in the Lower House) because Victorians wanted a clear change and/or stable government, one way or the other.

Related posts:

1. Brian Walters blames volunteer for distributing misleading election-eve leaflet
2. MyKi, tram conductors, desalination, Kennett and Brumby
3. Labor won’t go to a double dissolution election

After getting the announcement from Paul Howes of the imminent publication of his “miserable little pamphlet“, I thought I’d get my hands on a copy and review it. Unlike the Canberra Press Gallery, who produced reviews of the book mere hours after it was released – presumably skimming through to the index to find the “dirt” – I spent a leisurely three days reading it while traveling to and from work on the train.

Howes has produced a classic "airport novel", but this book is no "confession".

Confessions of a Faceless Man weighs in at around 240 pages – large type – standard paper-back size. Melbourne University Press – the publisher – has done a fantastic job with the front cover, producing perhaps the only good photo in existence of Paul Howes.

From the outset, CoaFM is a day-by-day diary of the election campaign. It is out and out partisan, and the opening chapter sets the tone for the book – a self-serving justification of Howes’ very public and prominent role as a commentator on politics and the Labor Party. This is not necessarily a bad thing – one would hardly expect it to be overly self-critical – and most autobiographies and diaries are self-serving to some extent.

Throughout the diary, Howes constantly muses on the criticism he receives for being a “media tart” – so it is unsurprising that he tries to justify his large media profile.

The Good

Overall, CoaFM is an interesting insight into the world of professional, “high level” politics, focused almost entirely on the media side. The diary is really a list of Howes various media engagements throughout the five week campaign – partly organised by ALP head office in Sydney, and partly organised by the AWU. I found it a good peek into the 24/7 media spin cycle, where most of the commentators live in a self-created bubble. The feeling pervades Howes’ commentary that the Canberra Press Gallery is really just a massive echo chamber, where outsiders (like Howes and his conservative counterparts) are turned into media “insiders” – journalists rely on personal relationships and connections to feed their echo-chamber.

Howes also makes a spirited defence of Labor throughout the book – and while he is a member of the hated NSW Right faction, he demonstrates on a number of issues – like refugee rights – that he is more progressive than most of his comrades. Now safely after the election, Howes also feels comfortable making criticisms of the various weak-willed decisions of Labor during the campaign. Pandering on refugees, the climate change citizens assembly, the lack of confidence in Labor’s record on the economy, schools, etc. Most of his criticisms are spot on.

For politicos and Kremlinite faction-watchers, Howes also introduces the future factional heavyweights of the Right. The up and commers in the Right are named and given brief – flattering – character portraits. I’m sure many of the names in his book will become more prominent over the next decade.

Finally, Howes really has a go at Rudd. While the entire book seems to be a vehicle to justify his public attacks on Rudd during the spill, Howes systematically tears Rudd down on a political and personal level. He describes Rudd’s contempt for the labour movement, and his personal flaws that ultimately – as the media narrative goes – led to his ostracisation from caucus. Howes postulates that Rudd was the source of the leaks – although he has no evidence for this. Again, most of this stuff is on the record, and is unsurprising – but for Rudd haters out there, Howes is mostly on the money. Unsurprisingly, Howes also targets Mark Latham as well. There is a unstated comparison about the damage that Rudd and Latham inflict on the party that supported them for so long out of spite and score-settling.

The Bad

While Howes criticises some of the political decisions of the Labor campaign, he makes a spirited defence of Labor’s machine. With ALP Head Office located in the same building as the AWU National Office, this defence is to be expected. Many of the people who Howes cites as friends are the backroom dealers and apparatchicks who are targeted for abuse with the label “faceless man” (although there are some faceless women mentioned too). Howes reckons that the National Secretariat and the campaign directed by Karl Bitar was one of the best ever – it was smooth and professional. I’m not sure many of the local campaigns would share that view – especially in Victoria. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see who Howes is actually saying is responsible for the bad campaign decisions – ultimately Rudd can’t be to blame for everything.

A common refrain for the ending of each day’s diary is “went out for a drink with X”, followed by the opening of the next day’s chapter with “feeling hungover from last night”. Coupled with Howes’ occasional tweet about feeling worse for wear after a big night and it does not paint a pretty picture. With such a sanitised book, it is odd to include the incidents of heavy drinking – perhaps Howes thinks its good for him image, but in my view he would do better to not publicise his hangovers.

The book is also fairly light on. As a diary, it is an account of each day of the campaign. There’s not a lot of detail or depth. There are no real insights into Labor, the campaign machine, or what the Party or Government stands for. Howes of course has his own positions on various policies, but this book is not a great intellectual contribution to Labor’s corpus of books. It is entertaining, in its way, but it is not thought provoking. There is no questioning of why Labor is in such dire straights in NSW, or why we’re in such trouble in QLD – apart from blaming Rudd. There’s no consideration of Latham’s justified criticisms of the corrosive and toxic nature of machine politics – although as a machine man himself, Howes is hardly likely to be overly critical. In fact, it is the machine men who come out looking best in Howes account – Karl Bitar, Mark Arbib and the other hacks and careerists in the National Secretariat.

The Verdict

I described Confessions of a Faceless Man to a colleague as “a good airport read”. It is easy to read and mostly entertaining. Howes does a good job of hammering the Liberals and conservative media for their bias, their bad policies and their gross hypocrisy. This alone makes the book worth reading – it’s always a bit of fun to read a good polemic (especially if you agree with it).

Ultimately however, this book is no confession. It would have been better titled “Diary of a Faceless Man”. There is no insight into Howes himself – beyond his story-building narrative of having left school early, joining an ultra-left group only to “come to his senses” and embrace the NSW Right, and standing up for “working people”.

To use an election phrase – we never actually see the “Real Paul Howes” in this book. Like all of his media appearances, the book boils down to recitation of key messages. The key message from Bitar et al is that the election campaign went of smoothly except for the leaks, which derailed everything. This is the line that Howes trots out as well.

For political junkies and election tragics, I recommend reading it. It is cheap, short and easy on the eyes. There are no laugh out loud moments, but Howes targeted venom against Scott Morrison, Abbott and co is worth the admission price.

Related posts:

1. Quick Book Review: Hardball – How Politics Is Played Told By One Who Knows The Game by Chris Matthews
2. Book Review: “Yes We Did” by Rahaf Harfoush
3. Book Review: “All That’s Left: What Labor Should Stand For”

There’s an article in Politico about how the Democrats are spending up big in marginal congressional races this year on behalf of Democratic congressmen who have run ads against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reporting progress on health care reform with with Democratic House leaders.

As control of the House hangs in the balance, Democrats can’t afford to play favorites with their money down the stretch run to the midterm election.

So they’ve spent money on recalcitrants, rankling the ranks of Pelosi foot soldiers who endorsed controversial components of the Democratic agenda only to find that loyalty isn’t much of a factor when determining where to spend precious campaign resources.

“The thing that really irks me is the Bobby Bright s—t,” said a Democratic strategist who has worked on numerous campaigns over the last several cycles. “What’s the point of giving money to a guy like Bobby Bright who would probably take a good deal from Republicans and switch parties after this whole thing is done anyway?”

But the money game isn’t about who played nice and who didn’t. It’s about who can win — and who among that set needs the money.

“All this is a numbers game right now,” said an influential Democratic lobbyist who is on everyone’s fundraising list. “What can we do to keep the majority?”

There’s no better example than Bright, who keeps his distance from Democrats not only on roll calls — having cast hundreds of votes against his leaders — but who likes to sit in a comfortable leather chair on the Republican side of the Speakers lobby outside the House chamber.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dumped its million-plus ad buy against Martha Roby, Bright’s Republican rival in Alabama’s 2nd District, just as he was airing a commercial declaring that he won’t vote for Pelosi for speaker.

Now, I hear a lot amongst progressive circles in Australia that the party discipline system in Australia is corrosive to democracy – that Labor’s binding caucus, which forbids on pain of disendorsement, a party MP from crossing the floor, is somehow bad. The famous Howard-era Liberal Party discipline is often also cited, although there are no formal Liberal Party rules forbidding Liberal MPs from crossing the floor on any vote.

The argument is that if only we had the US-style system where parliamentarians could vote however they wanted, we would be much better off in Australia, and have better policies enacted. Furthermore, under this system, MPs would be able to vote how their electorates wanted them to on issues like same-sex marriage, climate change carbon prices and so on. (Most of the people who espouse this view, from my experience, are Greens Party members or supporters.)

Having a binding caucus and party discipline means that progressive MPs are forced to vote against their conscience in favour of bad policy. Witness, for example, the policies on same-sex marriage or the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (back in 2004).

What we see in America however is something rather different to this ideal.

Of course, Congressmen and women, and Senators of both Republican and Democrat parties, are able to vote how they want. In reality, this means they are held captive to they system of corporate patronage that runs the US political system. US politicians are bound by powerful and/or cashed-up lobby groups to vote in the interests of big business – invariably conservative in nature. On social issues, US politicians are pressured by wealthy and conservative minority groups who run smear campaigns (or threaten to) if the congressman or woman votes in a certain way.

What we see far more often in the US is that conservative congressmen and women, and Senators, vote in a bloc and the pressure is piled on the small “l” liberals.

Democrats regularly vote against Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on “core” Democrat policy such as health care and job-creating stimulus measures. The only Democrats doing this are the “blue dog” conservative Democrats. And there is no consequence.

While the likes of Bobby Bright, Bill Owens and Joe Donnelly run ads against progressive Democratic House Speaker Pelosi, the Democratic machine pumps millions of dollars to save them.

Even though there would be almost no difference if the Democrats lost those districts to a Republican – since those Democrats vote with the Republicans most of the time.

If we had the US system in Australia – specifically for Labor – we would see more often than not, the conservative groups within Labor voting against progressive social policy, more often than progressive Labor members voting against conservative policies.

We have already seen this in conscience votes in issues like decriminalising abortion in Victoria, or allowing same-sex couples to adopt or access assisted reproductive technology.

In fact, Labor’s party discipline system does more good than harm, as it forces those reactionary elements of the party to accept progressive policies that they otherwise would oppose if given the option.

I am told that the Greens Party has no system of discipline. This means that conceivably, a Greens Party senator could oppose the party’s policy on one issue or another. There would be no consequences for that Greens Party senator – and in all likelihood they would continue to receive preselection.

NSW Greens Party senator-elect Lee Rhianon has already foreshadowed disagreements with Party leader Bob Brown. Without party discipline, nothing stops any Greens Party senator from deviating from Greens Party policy on a “matter of conscience” – even to the detriment of the Party’s official policy. The Greens Party rank-and-file members who voted for the policy would have no recourse against that senator.

No party discipline creates a free-for-all, where votes can be effectively purchased through donations or threats of local smear campaigns – a far more dangerous proposition than one where MPs are bound by the party policy taken by that party to an election.

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2. Greens Party Leader Greg Barber can’t name disendorsed Party candidate
3. Dissecting the Greens Party election ads

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Crikey today reported on the Essential Report’s recent poll of voter attitudes towards the independents Oakeshott and Windsor’s decision to back Gillard. It found that the Liberal voters disapprove. A lot.

Tea bagger: This guy is really angry.

Indeed, Liberal voters are profoundly unhappy with the decision of the independents (and presumably Oakeshott and Windsor, specifically). Almost 90% of Liberal voters disapprove of their decision — perhaps not surprisingly — but the sheer strength of that view is interesting: 54% of Liberal voters strongly disapprove of the independents’ call, while 90% of Liberal voters also disapprove of the Greens deal with Labor, including 58% who strongly disapprove (the overall figure is 41-46% approval/disapproval).

The Essential Report’s results are here.

Why are Liberal voters so strongly disapproving?

Possum Pollytics has an excellent post that goes into the response from the conservative media.

Every policy and utterance the government or the Independents make will be creatively analysed, deliberately distorted and whose fabricated consequences will be shouted from the rooftops. This will not be an exercise in political analysis, but an infection of pathological political syphilis. It will not just be a campaign against the government, but one rolling, frenzied campaign after another, where each new contrived outrage will assume a greater level of mania than the last.

The Independents will be targeted in a way they are probably not prepared for – they will be demeaned, ridiculed and treated with contempt, where their honourable characters will be distorted into debased caricatures. The character assassination will be ferocious and their connection to their electorates will be serially brought into question, particularly from a group of ostensibly inner urban media elites whose acquaintance with New England and Lyne extends no further than peering down from 30,000 feet as they fly between capital cities.

But it won’t just be the usual suspects here. There will be an angry that we haven’t seen for a long time, from a group of disgruntled political zealots.

The Liberal and National parties have a profoundly successful ability at attracting a disproportional quantity of the most embittered, politically pungent elements of Australian society as supporters – a dark, angry, belligerent underbelly that believes the only acceptable outcome of any political contest is the one they believe in.

Possum is spot on.

The “unhinging” has already begun over at The Australian, with both Oakeshott and Windsor targeted as being “biased” toward Labor. The language of “legitimacy” is built into this. Although there has been an “official” acknowledgement that the government is “legitimate”, the media and the Coalition will continually discuss Gillard’s “mandate” and “legitimacy”.

But where does the unhinging come from? Why is there a growing army of disgruntled conservative zealots who energised the Liberal Party at the last election?

I’d be interested in seeing whether there is a correlation between areas and regions who have born the brunt of most social and economic change in Australia, and the rise of those who “strongly disapprove” of the independents backing Gillard.

This may not be the answer – I could be on completely the wrong track.

Australia has seen some significant changes in the last decade. Changes in job security, the increase in precarious, casualised work. The massive increase in immigration. The rise in the cost of living. The oil shock. Housing availability. The global financial crisis. The drought. Globalisation. Free trade agreements. Terrorism in Bali and the USA. Climate change.

A lot has happened. And for most of the last decade or two, there has been no compelling progressive narrative. The explanations for these changes to the fabric of Australian society and our economy have been predominantly conservative.

Blaming foreigners. Blaming dole bludgers, and greenies, and the politically correct bleeding hearts in the inner city.

Patriarchal, “traditional family” oriented values have been promoted. Flags and chaplains in schools. Private health insurance. Individual contracts. Turning back the boats or locking up asylum seekers.

Could right-wing radicalism be on the rise as a kind of psychological displacement activity for people who are struggling to cope with changes to their lives? And without a strong progressive alternative, could this explain the energy of the conservatives and the success of the Liberal party at the polling booth?

If this is correct, the strong dissatisfaction with the independents support of Gillard could be a manifestation at an individual everyday level as well as an ideological level of this displacement.

Robert Merkel over at Larvatus Prodeo also points to an interesting phenomenon:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.

This suggests to me (unscientifically) that the more the media reports on the outrages of Labor and the independents and other enemies of the Liberal Party – the more the conservative partisans and zealots are energised and reinforced in their views. As well as the more those same partisans encounter pro-Labor material, the more it reinforces their views. Its a self-perpetuating cycle.

My stream-of-consciousness post here has about come to an end.

I don’t really have a conclusion, just questions. Am I on the right track? I don’t know. I’d be interested to see some research into this phenomenon. I suspect that the conservative outrage movement in Australia will track along side the tea party movement in the USA – but not everything is comparable, so perhaps I’m wrong.

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Tony Abbott has gone off the deep end when it comes to climate change, expressing the view that the climate has cooled in recent years. This view alone – the equivalent to believing the sun rotates around the earth or that the world is only 6000 years old – is enough to disqualify Tony Abbott as a viable alternative PM.

I have pointed out in the past that there was that high year a few years ago and the warming, if you believe various measuring organisations, hasn’t increased … the point is not the science, the point is how should government respond, and we have a credible response.

Tony Abbott, 4 Corners

It seems that Tony Abbott has taken as his main scientific advisor on climate change the discredited denialist Ian Plimer – a geologist by training. Abbott has ignored the advice of the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology – two leading climate research institutes – as well as the Australian Academy of Science’s report on the science of climate change (released yesterday, link is a pdf).

Even if you only read the summary of the AAS’s report, the findings are pretty clear:

The global average surface temperature has increased over the last century and many other associated changes have been observed. The available evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause. It is expected that, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at business-as-usual rates, global temperatures will further increase significantly over the coming century and beyond.

We need to rapidly stop carbon pollution in Australia and show some leadership in transforming our economy into a 21st century, low carbon economy. If Tony Abbott became Prime Minister – a job he is woefully unqualified for – it would be a disaster for our environment and our economy.

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The Newspoll before the election has great news for Tony Abbott: the Liberals’ lead in polling on the economy has been trashed by Abbott’s economic innumeracy.

For the last three weeks, Tony Abbott has refused to accept a debate with Julia Gillard on the economy (or any other issue). Labor has responded by running ads highlighting Tony Abbott’s economic record – a personal history of former bosses and Liberal Ministers expressing complete lack of confidence in Abbott’s financial nous.

Newspoll shows that the Liberal Party’s 12 point lead on “handling the economy” has been reduced to just 1 point.

The Opposition Leader responded to criticism of his economic credentials by declaring “under the Coalition, debt will always be lower and deficits smaller”.

It is voodoo economic statements like this that has contributed to Tony Abbott turning Liberal gold into Liberal mud. When ever he is asked about the size of deficits or interest rates, Abbott comes out with ludicrous statements that most Australians can clearly see is farcical.

The polling also shows that Labor is breaking through with its message that its stimulus package helped safeguard Australian jobs during the Global Financial Crisis.

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A quick search of Facebook reveals that Tony Abbott has a massive presence on Facebook. Tens of thousands of people are fans.

Unfortunately, most of those people aren’t fans of Tony’s, but of sanitary napkins or of leaving the country if he’s elected. The biggest fan page for Tony Abbott is “Friends don’t let friends vote for Tony Abbott” with over 27,800 people a fan. The official Tony Abbott page (which hasn’t been updated since June 30 as of the writing of this post) has a mere 8,900 fans – far fewer than the negative ones combined.

Like John Howard before him, Tony Abbott doesn’t really understand the Internet or social networking. The Facebook page is used as a repository for photos, and the Liberal Party’s new whizzbang web page is used for little more than showcasing Youtube ads and media releases.

Tony Abbott really is old fashioned.

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Tony Abbott said that he won’t change the Workplace Relations Act in his first term of government, and Eric Abetz says the only “tweaks” will be to regulations.

Image: Tandberg, The Age, 2005.

Significant changes to the industrial relations regime in Australia is possible through regulation changes, and to amendments to other Acts.

For example, the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) were regulations imposed onto universities that affected their funding. The HEWRR regulations forced universities to offer AWAs to staff, exclude a wide range of things from collective agreements and more — all through regulations.

Similarly, Tony Abbott could significantly change the Corporations Act to remove workers rights, side stepping the Workplace Relations (Fair Work) Act. Other Acts could be changed as well to impose Tony Abbott’s extreme IR agenda.

An academic from NSW goes through some of the other possible ways for Tony Abbott to strip workers of their rights in an interview with Workplace Express:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has promised not to amend the Fair Work Act if elected, but McCallum told Workplace Express that the power of incumbency itself should not be underestimated.

Federal governments, he said, “have powers to appoint people to FWA; they have powers to intervene in proceedings”. They had, he said, a special power under s431 (which had not yet been used) to terminate industrial action.

They also had a contracting power with private enterprise, “where they can lay down who they’d prefer to deal with”.

“People forget the powers of Government, powers to appoint to all sorts of boards, powers not to consult with the trade unions about anything. These are far more important powers than changing the regulations, and in fact when [former Prime Minister] John Howard came to power he shut out trade unions from everything, and that was far more devastating than minor amendments to the regulations.”

Changes to regulations also significantly impact on unions’ ability to collectively bargain. The list of non-allowable matters is contained in regulations. Non-allowable matters are those that are unlawful to be included in a collective agreement, such as bargaining fees or environmental matters.

Tony Abbott could easily add a great number of things to non-allowable matters, restricting the ability of workers to improve their pay or conditions.

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