Lanz Priestley commemoration

 It had rained for a week and it would rain for a week more and I’d spent the morning shopping and having yum cha in Campsie with friends. I’d bought box cutters and gardening gloves – I planned to plant things so they could grow and feed me – but caught the bus and tram into town for the event. I left home for Lanz's event at 1pm and got back after five o’clock, so it was a full day for me, one in which I met an old friend. 

I’d once travelled to South American to be with Austin but Martin Place was the only place that the commemoration ceremony could possibly have been held in, the crowd relatively thin – there were probably a few hundred people all told – due to Huey, the weather god. A camera crew roved around among the mourners, others wielded their cameras, and the boys in blue stood off to one side, under the eaves of a commercial building and of the Reserve bank of Australia, which, four years before, had stood sentinel over the Tent City, of which Lanz was unofficial Mayor.

“Barak bukbuk baraken warangumuraj rajita nunga,” the almost-naked man chanted as people came up to the stack of burning gum leaves, giving off their cleansing smoke. The man had a stick through his nose and he talked about meeting Lanz on the Northern Beaches, and of surfing. 

“You’ve gotta help other people in need,” sang Peter Blanch with his guitar. Big city life. 

Later, there was a video shown on a large truck that someone had parked on the pedestrian mall. It wasn’t all about the city. Ethan Pinnar, a truck driver who used the word “tremendously” at least three times, talked about a convoy to Bourke for NSW Bushfire Cleanup. Mary spoke about who she thought Australians were: “We are people that look after each other.” 

Lanz was a Kiwi, but never mind. 

Others spoke about what Lanz had meant to them. There was Glenda and Roy Butler, an MP who illustrated the freewheeling network Lanz could marshal like a crazy general. Then Freya spoke movingly about what she’d lost.

Nicky said, “English is my fourth language.” Carol, Sandra, Melanie, Nicole, Lee Rhiannon. Everyone had been touched in some way by Lanz and it was a real shame that the mainstream media didn’t turn up to report on his death. It would be left to the people who knew him as a man, as a giver, as a motivator, as a mentor, as a friend, as family, as an organiser, a man so contrary and ambitious for the wellbeing of others that he’d go without if it meant someone else could have what they needed. 

Lanz was a man of ideas who inspired by his example and by his words. He was unique, one-off, “iconic” (as someone said). He was the best of who we are.

Austin had to meet a friend at Stanmore but we decided to head to Central to have a coffee. When we got there the café on the Grand Concourse was closed however so I caught the bus home.

Equality or equity: which is a better gauge of community health?

In a story published by the Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday 18 August, journalist Eryk Bagshaw wrote, “Young Australians are being locked out of a ‘generational bargain’ as the wealth gap between children and their parents soars, new figures show, as the government prepares the terms of reference for its landmark retirement income review.” The story goes on:

In a report to be released on Monday, the Grattan Institute found Australian household wealth has tripled over the past 30 years from $2.8 trillion in 1990 to $10.3 trillion in 2018. 

"But the wealth bonanza has been far from equally spread. Most of the increase in wealth has been accumulated by older households, who benefited most from the housing boom and growth in superannuation assets," researchers Danielle Wood and Kate Griffiths found.

This story feeds a common source of discontent in the community broadly, and it’s a gripe that is almost as old as Modernity itself. From the downfall of China’s Qing dynasty to the October Revolution in 1917, around the world people with not much wealth have been mobilising their forces in order to try to capture the wealth of the better-off parts of societies. But this impulse – the idea that all people in the community should share in the community’s wealth equally, regardless of their profession or their talents or their industry or their dumb luck – has been a source of untold suffering. The 20th century is strewn with the bodies of the dead, people killed in the service of promoting equality. The corpses of martyrs to this idea, if they were all placed above ground, would probably stretch from the top of Mount Everest to the moon.

The image above is a piece of propaganda produced in the wake of the French Revolution, the originary cash grab launched by the proletariat. It’s a curious image. In the left of the image you have two symbolic figures, a man and a woman. The man holds a pole on which a pennant, the Tricolor – the flag of the revolution – is flying. The woman has bare breasts to show that she is liberated. But in the right of the image there’s a heteronormative couple with three children: a girl, a boy, and a toddler. The boy and the girl obediently hold their arms out toward the titulary figures, encouraged by their mother. The father, obligingly bent a few degrees at his waist, brings up the rear as the supporter of his family. There’s a plough in the frame, a symbol of industry. The woman with bare breasts holds against her knees a cornucopia to embody plenty – the benefits available to be enjoyed by the people if they follow the dictates of the state. The image is full of interest and shows how, at that time, in the final years of the 18th century, French people were expected to obey in order to prosper. Obey not the king but the state.

The state today fulfils some of the same roles, particularly through taxation and redistribution of wealth. It can also function to regulate wages so that even the lowest-paid among the community’s breadwinners are adequately compensated for their labour: if people have no money to spend, then not only do tax receipts go down, depriving the government of funds from which the poor can be supported, but business also flags and the economy tanks. Equality turns out to be a matter of degree rather than an absolute good in itself.

Australia today, according to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, is the fifth-best place in the world for workers, as measured by social mobility. But despite the prosperity stemming from a high degree of equity in the system, a current bugbear is the Baby Boomer generation, as the story mentioned at the start of this piece shows. Boomers are the bad guys du-jour, the group that the majority of the population loves to hate. They are, if they are white, the patriarchy who have benefited from favourable policies and so have quarantined for themselves the majority of the nation’s wealth. If you say this often enough it becomes true, regardless how much wealth each person aged over the age of 55 actually possesses. An entire class of people is demonised. They must, consequently, pay. 

The parallels with Germany in the 1930s come to mind here. It’s probably only a matter of time before the family home will be included among assets to be assessed for the purpose of calculating the pension. Already, the government has been clawing back money from older Australians, including in 2014 when, in a bipartisan move, the government changed the way that nursing home fees are calculated. Before this time, fees were calculated based on income alone. But assets are now included in Centrelink calculations of the fees people are asked to pay to stay in a nursing home (the government provides a subsidy depending on the individual’s ability to pay). So both sides of government are in on the game: older people will be asked to pay more and more older people will therefore be living in poverty as a result.

If you have worked, as I have, in the education sector, you will know that there is another measure of social health: equity. In the tertiary education sector equity of access to academia is a gauge of institutional health by which senior managers judge their own performance. The idea is not that all people are equal (because, clearly, this is a nonsense). The idea is that all people have equal access to the good things that are available in the society in question. In this case that thing is higher education. A passport to higher wages and to personal fulfillment. Making sure all people have the same level of access to higher education is a goal of university managers and they take this task seriously through the use of a range of measures that can help people coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and from linguistically diverse backgrounds to enrol in a course of study.

So the measure that we should use to gauge the health of our society is not whether people are equally remunerated, but whether they have the same opportunities to develop their skills and talents so that they can thrive. Seen this way, the task for Millennials envious of their Boomer parents is to try to build something as robust as that class of people has managed to construct over the years. They should also be cognisant of the fact that most Boomers, when they die, will, in any case, bequeath their wealth to their children, so we will see a massive transfer of wealth between generations as a result of mere mortality. 

In any case, Boomers are entitled to their wealth. Once you arrive at the age of 55 it is hard enough to keep your job. Just try getting a new job if you lose your job and you are aged 55 or above. The number of Australians over 55 who are on Newstart is increasing at an alarming rate. Millennials on the other hand might switch easily from position to position. They might change jobs every two years, as far as I know. But once you hit the big 5-0 you are considered by most employers to be a liability even though the things that you can contribute to a workplace are many and varied.

Boomers, for their part, are very aware of the community’s views about them. In the past year, for instance, I have read two novels by older Australian men that had a man as the protagonist who philanthropically provides a home for a woman fleeing a dysfunctional family. Neither novel was influenced by the other but both had this common plot element. This indicates to me that there is a type of survivor’s guilt among Boomer men who find themselves, in their later years, comfortably well-off and able to avoid relying on the government to supplement their income. Headlines like Bagshaw’s are neither needed nor warranted.

The Labor Party: lapdogs of the big end of town

You see these graphs all the time these days showing how increases in productivity have been captured by the managerial class since the beginning of the 1980s. Here’s one that I saw just the other day.

This graph shows the change in relative growth to incomes in the US since the 1980s, when neoliberalism kicked in under Ronald Reagan. There are others and they’re not even hard to find. Here's another one which I also saw just recently. 

In this graph the black line shows that average incomes in the US between 1946 and 1980 doubled. In the years between 1980 and 2014 they flatlined for the majority of the population, with the notable exception of the incomes of the very rich.

All of these diagrams (and they appear all over the place all the time, you don't even have to go looking for them) show the same thing: that beginning in Reagan’s day the salaries of the middle class have stagnated in the US. And it’s not just in the US either. Even the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia thinks that unions have to be given more power in order to make sure that wages start to rise, since they have been flat for years here.

On the last day of February, the Sydney Morning Herald tweeted: "The NSW Business Chamber has filed a groundbreaking application to create a new type of employee in between a casual and a permanent worker: 'permaflexi'." Here you have the managerial class still trying to squeeze more profits out of employees without giving them a just wage in return. 

In the run-up to the federal election we have the Labor Party looking set to win. And what do they do? They go after retirees. Instead of picking on the big end of town and its tame attack dogs, the Murdoch press, the ALP has decided to go after grandma and grandpa, those twin evils of contemporary society, people so heinous that they remember your birthday and send Christmas cards even though no-one else does. They deserve everything they get from Bill Shorten and his loyal troops.

But the rot set in a long time ago. Back in the day, Whitlam actually had policies worth believing in. Things went downhill beginning with Hawke, who began to liberalise the economy to suit employers. Then Dawkins with his university fees for students. (Can’t have people getting educated for free! Oh no!) The less said about Rudd the better. Labor is now the party of faceless apparatchiks and technocrats, people with the sort of vision that you would expect from a manager at a bank. They are spineless and full of wind, like some special tribe of puffer fish. They are beneath contempt.

The day Sydney saw its soul: horserace ads on the Opera House sails

On Friday 5 October, radio shock jock Alan Jones publicly berated Opera House executive Louise Herron for rejecting an approach by Racing NSW to use the building’s structure – specifically the famous “sails” that make up the roof of the structure – to advertise a new horse race, The Everest. I had seen the race being advertised in Martin Place not long before. There had been portable kiosks branded with the name of a betting agency, and five-foot-high letters placed on the pavement outside the MLC Centre (another architectural feature of the city, built in the 1970s and designed by Harry Seidler). Herron said:

What we won't do is put text or videos of horses running or horses’ numbers or names or the Everest logo on the Opera House sails.

The prime minister, a member of the conservative Liberal Party, made his views public: the Opera House was Australia’s largest billboard and should run the ads. And the Liberal NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian (also a Liberal), stepped in to announce a compromise. On Sunday she said, "There'll be no logos or names -- the only words on there [will be] the words of the trophy itself." But still Sydney simmered with resentment. Or large parts of it. Over 300,000 virtual signatures protesting against the move were collected on a website. Parts of the community were ropeable, voicing their complaints on Twitter to anyone who would listen. Some people in Melbourne were enjoying the spectacle: the hated rival to the north was being humbled by Capital. Well, good, they thought.

By the following Monday, Jones had magnanimously apologised to Herron. And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s comedy team, The Chaser, got out during the night and projected a sign onto the Opera house’s sails that read “Advertise here”, along with Alan Jones’ mobile phone number. The rant had turned into a debacle which had turned into a meme.

On Tuesday night the drama continued when light displays were scheduled to be projected onto the building’s sails. As each barrier draw was announced the number of the barrier was projected on the middle sail and the colours of the relevant horse were projected on two smaller sails beside it. But protesters – over 1000 according to the ABC but probably closer to 5000 going by a video taken on the night – who had gathered in front of the building flashed torches onto the illuminated sails, distracting viewers who had tuned into the telecast and disrupting the smooth performance of the show.

Despite the sound and fury the episode threw up, it seemed clear to me that there was something both profoundly fitting about the premier’s decision and something disappointing about the views of the political left. Not exactly that Berejiklian was toning down the visuals, but that she had insisted that the ad go ahead. The building had been funded, originally, using a lottery, for a start. But there’s more to support her case than that fact alone.

The Opera House began in the 1960s as an idea and an international competition was run by the state Labor government to find an architect. The winner, a Dane, turned out to be an inspired choice, although he almost wasn’t chosen. But the idea itself was the interesting thing about his pitch to the judges: to build a special monument to an authentically Australian culture at the edge of the gorgeous harbour on the site of a tram marshalling yard. What characterised that moment in history was optimism, and people forget just how new that might have felt to Sydneysiders at the time. But think about it: with the New York stockmarket crash of 1929 and then the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s, followed by a global war that only ended in 1945 that led to massive changes in governance around the planet, the world had had enough drama and now wanted to settle down and get on with the business of living.

Over 15 years of hardship and conflict were ended by halcyon days when the wages of ordinary people were rising in the post-war economic boom. People’s lives were being changed not only by better-paying jobs, many of which required university degrees to gain entry to, but by bigger houses with open plans instead of poky rooms, higher buildings in the city built to accommodate the businesses that were emerging to fill the void left by the Depression and WWII, a growing economy fuelled by higher immigration rates and inflows of foreign capital looking for a safe haven and high returns. Things were, finally, looking up.

The design that was finally chosen was itself not implemented exactly the way the architect had initially envisioned, in his early drawings, due to engineering constraints. Even so, the problem of how to assemble the vaulting structure using concrete and steel proved difficult to solve. In the end, modular pieces were strung together like beads on a cord using steel cables that were anchored to the earth. The building also has other innovative elements, including a cooling system that uses harbour water to regulate temperatures inside the buildings.

But what about those big, white sails? In a way they are emblematic of the era as well, and the idea that you can project any meaning onto them seems to me to fit the ambition of the designers, the builders, and the governments who led the project from start to finish.

They were nothing if not modern. Like the big, almost empty walls in contemporary art galleries, which featured isolated paintings hung one next to the other in a uniform series (so unlike the traditional “salon hang” where paintings are all squeezed into the available space higgledy-piggledy). Like the wide streets and front gardens of salubrious Sydney suburbs, settled in the years after the turn of the century. Like the spreading government-funded train system that reached out into areas that were still covered in grass and trees, with scattered settlements in wide expanses yet to be filled with houses. Like the Reserve Bank of Australia building in Martin Place, designed in the International style to suit the times and imbued by its founder, Nugget Coombs, when it was finished in 1965, with the same ideals that had led to the foundation of the big, global organisations that emerged to prevent another military conflict: the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1944), the United Nations (1945) and the International Court of Justice (1946). Things, the country seemed to be saying, echoing the global community, were going to be different now.

And different the Opera House is. Almost as well-known globally as Mickey Mouse, the building contains within it an abstract, formal purity that makes it able to withstand any application of light or shadow by whatever government of whatever colour happens to be in power at any particular time in history. It has at its core this simplicity, like money itself, so that it can accommodate any message and still retain its essential character. Apart from time and youth, money can be traded for practically anything, and the world after WWII was finally over was about nothing if not the accumulation of wealth. For all. For the broader community and not just for the economic elites. Our big challenge now is not the preservation of some notional purity for the Opera House that is rooted in narrow political interests, but rather the challenge today is to recapture the egalitarian spirit of the post-war years, and to make sure that the wealth that we are creating is shared as widely as it was then and not squirrelled away in offshore bank accounts operated by members of a rent-seeking managerial class.

While in theory I disagree with using the Opera House to promote gambling, because it is bad for people and causes harm to parts of the community, for the reasons listed I feel that the campaign of protest against the ads by the political left was misplaced. The bigger threat to their interests is a growing inequality that characterises the economies of the west, with Australia being no exception. Given the right conditions, totalitarianism can easily appear again; indeed, it exists already in many countries including China and Russia. The forms it takes now are different from the ones that applied in the past, but the end result is the same: the control of the majority by a murderous and self-interested elite. This should be the focus of the left in Australia. Change-dot-org petitions are merely the opium of the chattering classes.

You shouldn’t need to tell people to distrust Nazis: a report from the front line

A piece appeared recently on the New York Times’ website about a neo-Nazi living in Ohio.  The newspaper had commissioned the report and sent a journalist out to the Midwest to interview Tony and Maria Hovater. The report garnered adverse reactions on social media and the paper wrote a follow-up piece to engage with its audience but the negative tweets continued to appear.

I noted on Twitter that I found the report “anodyne” and this sparked comments from one respondent, who said, “I think there’s an awful long list to exhaust of people who need to be written about from a position of empathy before you feel the need to write a sympathetic piece on a nazi. The fact that someone felt the need to start there says something in itself.” I had suggested that the Times’ piece was reasonable. Then I said:

The problem that the elites, including the media, have ignored is that the working classes in the developed world are suffering from gross inequality. This chart shows how wages globally have changed since the 1980s.

I attached a chart to the tweet showing how wages have changed across the world over the past 30 years. The chart was presented by Professor John Romalis of the Department of Economics at the University of Sydney on 25 October this year during a talk on globalisation (which I covered on this blog). You can see big increases in wages for low-wage earners in the developing world – for example China and India – but big drops for lower-wage earners in the developed world. Wealth is gradually being moved from wealthy nations and deposited in poorer nations, so that all will eventually look the same in terms of wealth distribution (everything else being equal).

The chart is mirrored by one on Wikipedia’s page on the subject of inequality in the US, which shows how increases in productivity since the late 1970s have not been matched there by wage increases.

Further evidence on how the wages in the developed world have been affected by globalisation appeared yesterday on Twitter in an animated GIF, which I employed to make these images. The animation is based on information derived from the Pew Research Center. The images show how the wealth of the middle classes in the US has been eroded since the 1980s. As in the Romalis chart, these charts show a big increase in the wealth of the very-wealthy in the developed world.

What my interlocutor had ignored was that Nazism arose in Germany in the period between the wars following the great stockmarket crash of 1929, which started in New York and spread globally to cause the Depression. Added to that were crushing war reparations that had been imposed by the victors of WWI at the Treaty of Versailles, which saw Germany forced to pay vast amounts of money to its former enemies. In Germany the result was spiraling inflation, where whole stacks of banknotes were needed just for grocery shopping. In this environment of extreme discontent due to material hardship stemming from the Depression added to the humiliation that was linked to the reparations, the still-living memory of the defeat in WWI, Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s found fertile soil for their radical ideas about the nature of humanity and the relationship between the government and the governed.

Similarly, in the post-GFC world, Donald Trump and his neo-Nazi, white-supremacist followers have found fertile soil for their ideas among the discontented in America. And Trump even wants to make inequality worse by cutting taxes for the very-wealthy!

But I think there’s another problem at work, and that’s to do with the inability of some people to “read” irony. They want everything richly flavoured and highly coloured and so the Grey Lady – the New York Times – seems too difficult for them. The paper is objective, fair and independent. It lets the reader make up his or her own mind. What many people seem to want is to be told exactly what to think, to have all the buttons pressed for them, to have the whole package presented, complete. Otherwise they don’t “get” what you’re saying. Personally, I prefer to get just the facts and make up my own mind. Not for me the Guardian or Breitbart; I prefer the Sydney Morning Herald. I think there’s a market for this kind of writing, but it’s in a rarefied arena it seems. 

I was looking back at my blog for mid-2008 yesterday when I was writing this blogpost and I found a review from August about Chloe Hooper’s creative nonfiction book The Tall Man, which was published in that year. I had written:

Just prior to reading this book I finished a biography of the literary journalist Martha Gellhorn. The contrast between the 'old school' of Gellhorn - who did a lot of coverage of WWII - and Hooper's equitable method is tonic. 

Gellhorn never didn't take sides. Hooper refuses to, and her book - which in her cover blurb Helen Garner says is "enthralling" and "studded with superbly observed detail" - is all the richer for it.

Manufacturing the Future: Cultures of Production for the Anthropocene

The evening’s lecture was the 10th annual Ted Wheelwright Lecture and it was by Professor Katherine Gibson from Western Sydney University. Gibson is the first Australian to give the Wheelwright Lecture.

Dr Elizabeth Hill, head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, was compere for the evening, and Annamarie Jagose, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the university, opened proceedings. Simon Tormay, head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the university, introduced a new portrait of Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell by artist Judith O’Conal-Prinz (who introduced herself: “As an artist and a socialist as I’ve always been ...”). At the front of the room there was also a portrait of Wheelwright that O’Conal-Prinz had painted at the beginning of her career. In both portraits, the men wore red ties.

 

Wheelwright taught at the university from 1952 to 1986 and was a critic of orthodox economics who warned of the dangers of global capitalism. He died in 2007. Wheelwright’s research looked at the contours of foreign ownership. He was awarded an Australian Research Council grant to study manufacturing.

Gibson helped write the book ‘The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)’ with Julie Graham (who died in 2010); the two women used the name J.K. Gibson-Graham to cowrite books. Manufacturing was a key interest of Ted’s, Gibson said. His father was a steelworker. Gibson’s father helped set up Pecks Paste after WWII. He was the production manager and would often manage refugees at the company’s factory at Rosebery in Sydney.

She said there are primary challenges facing manufacturing, and pointed to recent science that shows the appearance of “manufactured materials in sediments including plastics, aluminium and concrete” (‘Science’, 8 January 2016) proving that the Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. The Anthropocene also “coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel consumption”. It is, Gibson said, “What we drink from, what we live in, what we move with.”

We have seen massive wealth generation as a result of modern manufacturing processes, she went on. There have been decades of wealth redistribution, but more recently there have been decades of wealth polarisation. How to address this disparity in wealth distribution?

She asked if manufacturing can be part of a solution to global warming, and used a quote from a 2003 book by Julian Agyeman and others: “The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.”

She also quoted from a book by Chantel Carr and Chris Gibson (2016), ‘Geographies in the making: Rethinking materials and skills for volatile futures’: “how humans manipulate materials, compose objects and construct economies and societies around material things – as well as how this might be done differently.”

There is now a shift from machinofacture to robofacture. In her research, Gibson selected companies that are doing different things. Gibson pointed back to the mid- to late-1980s when Laurie Carmichael was the assistant secretary of the ACTU. (He had also been the head of the Communist Party of Australia.) In those days, workers enjoyed well-paid employment in the car industry. But innovation around cars of the future was stymied.

Gibson said that the future of Australian manufacturing lies in upstream small manufacturing companies. She has an interest in class and a process and pointed to regional capitalist Mondragon of the Basque country in Spain. She pointed as well to Race Mathews’ work on the history of cooperatives. At the time her first book was published, Gibson recalled, her brand of thinking was labelled “Hills-hoist socialism”. But she said that post-structuralist feminism liberated her generation. It had a performative aspect because it contributes to making some things more real than others.

She pointed to the Earthworker Cooperative, a manufacturing cooperative in Victoria. (I wrote a story about Earthworker in 2011 for ‘Ethical Investor’ magazine.) It demonstrates a community-led form of economic development.

Then Gibson gave us four examples of innovative types of businesses in Australia, starting with Interface Carpets. The company was started by Ray Anderson in 1973 in Atlanta. The company is an example of a circular economy, recycling carpets into new materials. In 1995, the company had looked at ways to reaching a target of “mission zero” and they found that way through the reuse of carpet tiles.

Gibson put up a slide quoting a former CEO of the Australian company saying:

The stories you hear in the business were that when he first started to communicate that to, say, Wall Street, they really thought he had lost his mind. He used to raise that subject on occasions and the share price would go down afterwards. But we’re talking in the nineties, yeah. Then it became an advantage … So you go from being a heretic and a complete lunatic to … actually you’re [in] a leadership position.

They had a fire in 2012 at their plant at Picton but gave workers 12 months’ pay to stay on while they rebuilt. A new plant was opened in Minto in 2014. The former CEO said that at the time “we knew that to start up the new plant rapidly we needed to retain the skills of our people because carpet manufacturing or textile skills are very thin on the ground in Australia these days”.

The second company Gibson looked at last night was Varley Group. The family-owned company was founded by George Henry Varley in Newcastle in 1886. In the late 1990s it faced closure. But free from the influences of the stockmarket it adapted and now has 600 employees. “It’s not just the business, it’s our Varley culture, our way of how we want to run the business,” said the managing director of Varley Engineering. The general manager of Specialist Vehicles said:

That’s one thing that Varley do have, is people are human beings and do we really need – can we get through this as a team? You’ve got to give them credit to it. That may be one of the things that has kept the place together, it has a reputation that … the senior staff are loyal too, and those people are committed.

Then Gibson looked at Norco, a 125-year-old cooperative in northern NSW that is owned by 220 dairy farmers and has three manufacturing plants. The company employs 800 people and has $1 billion in sales. It pays above-award wages in its plants, including an ice-cream factory in Lismore. It uses succession planning with younger farmers taking on production while older farmers stay on the farm. The chairman of the board of Norco said:

Globalisation has served its purpose and made us all aware that we need to change and move forward, but it doesn’t mean that we need to abandon our own.

The fourth company that Gibson looked at was Soft Landing. The company was originally established by Mission Australia as a way to process the hundreds of mattresses that were being dropped off at its collection points. There are 1.6 million mattresses thrown away each year in Australia. Gibson also pointed to Resource Recovery Australia. She said there is national mattress stewardship scheme in which Soft Landing has taken the lead. The national manager of the company said about its cooperation with an automated partner (which had wanted to take over the company):

Still a partnership; we’ll be the front face, we’ll do the collection, we’ll be the social enterprise, we deliver to you the volume of mats that can go through your machine and you push the button on, and the widgets and whatever go. Great, we’ll keep some mats aside for our guys that are existing. We want a net gain in jobs, so we don’t want to lose any jobs, we want more jobs.

These are businesses that operate at some distance from private shareholder primacy. There are glimmers of new cultures of production in Australia, Gibson said.

She also pointed to a study of automation by Hugh Dwyer and the work by James Ferguson studying ownership of land in southern Africa. For Gibson, it has been an epistemological epiphany, being imaginative. She said it is important to keep your critical sensibilities.

Gibson is currently working on a project titled ‘Reconfiguring the Enterprise: Manufacturing Culture in Australia’ with Dr Stephen Healy of Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, and Associate Professor Jenny Cameron of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. The project received ARC discovery project funding for 2016 to 2018. Gibson is also involved in Community Economies Collective.

Is globalisation the opposite of nationalism?

The talk last night was part of the Sydney Ideas series, and was on the topic of globalisation. The compere for the evening was Professor Glenda Sluga from the Department of History at the University of Sydney. She is an international historian. First up with a bunch of slides – which form the bulk of this blogpost – was Professor John Romalis of the Department of Economics at the university. He is an international economist. Also speaking was Dr Thomas Adams, a lecturer in American studies and history at the university’s United States Studies Centre. He is an historian of American society and cultural life.

The discussion swung around the question: Is globalisation the opposite of nationalism? The first slide that was shown showed what is called the DHL Globalisation Index, which measures trade, capital, information and people flows across borders. The index dipped, for example, in 2015 but did not go negative. This chart starts in 2005.

Professor Romalis brought up some slides looking at the case of Austria to question the assertion that there is too much globalisation. According to his sources, most inputs in industry in Austria comes from elsewhere in Austria or from elsewhere in Europe. The first chart looks at what Austrian businesses purchase.

The second slide considers consumer purchases in Austria. Again, most goods purchased by Austrians come either from Austria or from elsewhere in the EU.

He also put up a slide full of text titled ‘How do economists think about the gains from globalisation?’ It said:

1. Production linkages raise the productivity of firms and lower their costs. This increases the quality of goods and services that can be produced per person.
2. Consumption linkages lower costs to consumers. They shift purchases towards products that offer better value.
3. Investment linkages facilitate the transfer of better ideas and more productive technologies across borders, as many of these are either “tacit knowledge” that is not easily transferred, or proprietary in nature and will not be shared freely. Technology transfer raises the productivity of business.
4. 1 + 2 + 3 lead to higher AVERAGE income per person.
5. Economists still think that there is potential for further gains from globalisation, especially for developing countries, if the costs (whether policy based of otherwise) of conducting international business declines.

Romalis then put up a rather striking chart that shows the way that global wages – along a scale from the poorest on the left to the wealthiest on the right – have changed over the period 1988 to 2008. The red dotted horizontal line shows the growth rate in the mean of 24.34%. You can see the big dip in the chart up near the top of the scale. This dip represents the fall in wages of the poorer parts of the workforce in the developed world. Romalis noted that unlike in the US, Australia’s manufacturing industries were gutted by deregulation a long time ago, so we had already felt the pain that the US is feeling now.

Next, he looked at the way that real wages in rich countries have been depressed by globalisation, “because imports from poorer countries effectively embody the services of unskilled foreign workers, reducing the demand for the services of local unskilled workers.”

Adams mentioned in his talk Theodore Levitt at Harvard who invented the term “globalisation” in the ‘80s. He noted that when most people hear globalisation they hear loss of good jobs, but he called Trump’s promises of “good jobs” a cargo cult mantra. He also mentioned Mike Davis, a California historian.

A few observations on inequality

This blogpost started with a graph showing the way that incomes in the United States have become gradually less equitable since the 1980s, up until which time increases in productivity were matched by increases in real median family income. This graph is quite well-known and has been discussed in detail in some Wikipedia articles on inequality in the US.

The reason this graph and its message are so topical is because, of course, it’s outcomes like this that have fuelled the kind of middle-class discontent that led to the election of Donald Trump, who, we are assured, will take steps to further increase income inequality by cutting taxes for the rich.

Inequality is often measured internationally by what’s known as the Gini coefficient, which is an index that functions on a scale where 0 means that everybody has the same income and 1 means that all income is controlled by one individual. The US does quite badly in the OECD ranking using the Gini coefficient, as you can see in the following graph. The US is the country with the fourth-highest Gini coefficient, after Costa Rica, Mexico and Turkey. Australia is further down toward the middle of the pack.

The Gini coefficient for the US is demonstrably worse now than it was in the 1990s. I found figures comparing the US in the mid-1990s, when the Gini coefficient before taxes and transfers was 0.477, with the late-2000s, when it was 0.486. An even bigger difference can be seen if you look at the Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers (0.361 in the mid-1990s compared to 0.378 in the late-2000s). This second index represents income once redistribution has taken effect; “transfers” is used here to indicate things like welfare payments. So, in the US lower-income families are worse off now because they are getting less benefit from wealth redistribution. In other words, fewer taxes for the rich, such as Trump is recommending, is exactly what the US does not need.

Other things have been working to erode average incomes in the US as well, such as competition from workers in lower-wage countries, who cost less to employ.

In Australia, the Gini coefficient before taxes and transfers in the mid-1990s was 0.467, and by the late-2000s it was 0.468. So, it didn’t change much over that 25-year period. However, the Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers in the mid-1990s for Australia was 0.309, and by the late-2000s it was 0.336. This means that income inequality over that 25-year period has favoured the rich while the less-well-off have lost access to redistributed wealth.

Here’s another graph, this time from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and it shows real median income over time. It shows that lower-income Australians have done worse than higher-income Australians over time. In this graph, the numbers go up to 2016.

The ABS numbers for wealth tell a similar story, as you can see from the following graph. In this graph, which includes numbers from the early-2000s and compares them to more recent numbers, the wealth of the middle of Australia has grown much less rapidly than the wealth of the wealthy. The wealth of those at the bottom of the chart has remained virtually unchanged over that 13-year period, while the numbers for the middle have increased only slightly.

In France, the Gini coefficient before taxes and transfers in the mid-1990s was 0.473 and by the late-2000s it was 0.483. But the Gini coefficients after taxes and transfers for the same time segments were 0.277 and 0.293, meaning that while lower-paid French people have also done worse over time, they still get a larger slice of the redistributed pie.

The following table shows the Gini coefficient figures used in this blogpost, all in one place. The table shows how redistribution works in a European country to even out inequality. Whereas in France inequality before taxes and transfers is the same, approximately, as it is and has been in the US, once redistribution takes effect there is far less inequality in the economy. It also shows that Australia is coming in at about half-way between the two extremes: between the US on the one hand and France on the other.

Plenty of upside in 2014

This year looks set to offer better financial opportunities to people living in practically every country in the world. In the developed world you can look at financial indices such as stock markets to see how things are trending; you had a 14 percent rise in the London-based FTSE index in 2013, for example. But growth is spread broadly. In the US, the S&P 500 index finished the year 30 percent higher and in Australia the ASX 200 was up 15 percent. Of course part of the upside is determined by the downside: low interest rates pretty much everywhere in the developed world mean people are looking to equities to grow their capital, instead of term deposits.

The surprise that gave markets wind in the final days of the year - the US Federal Reserve tapered its quantitative easing policy marginally - only added to the feeling of confidence around the traps, with traders acting in a way that showed they were happy with the announcement despite fears voiced over earlier months about the taper. What it means is that at this point in the economic cycle - halfway through the process of deleveraging that started in 2007 - the steps that have been taken by authorities and governments are worthy of reward in the eyes of the majority of those who are trusted with investing our retirement savings.

These are indices only, of course, and may not always in all cases reflect realities on the ground but I personally see no need to worry unduly about global economic performance in 2014. In fact I see a lot of upside, and this is not just in the developed world - where some countries are still struggling to resuscitate growth and employment, and will face more pain in this new year - but also in developing countries.

In absolute numbers global trade has helped to lift out of poverty hundreds of millions of people in places like China, India and Indonesia. As the middle class in these countries expands, however, it will start to covet many jobs currently - even, until recently - performed in developed countries, so there's no room for complacency in Australia, for example. It's not just call centres, either. Jobs like IT support, accounting, even copywriting are now being done overseas by well-qualified Asian people. On the upside, those same people are going to want to spend the money they earn and will look to the developed world for many of the things they buy. It's up to our managers to find opportunities to supply goods and services that those people want. The bottom line is that there have never before been so many people in the world with money to spend, and that's something that will continue in 2014, and increase.

As people move to cities to build their futures - economic and otherwise - the downside of growth will continue to be pressure on regional and rural areas, with concomitant stress on places where wildlife lives. This "externality" should become more of an issue for the Asian middle class, but for the moment environmental conservation is something that people in the developed world need to further in a leading role. The implication for wildlife of urbanisation is mostly bad, and we need to make sure that growth is managed sustainably so that future generations can enjoy the same quality of life that we do now.

Here, again, is where the developed world should take the lead. The media uses indices like retail spending to demonstrate good or poor economic performance in developed countries, but having and spending money should not be the only index of a society's health. If you only look to your wallet to find agency there's something wrong with your values. There are other, better ways to actualise your essential self in the world than paying for something that probably won't satisfy your needs in the long term. Further education, for example, can offer many surprises for those who are looking for something new in 2014, above and beyond the sugar-hit that comes with buying a new car, for example. Education, especially in the arts, gives you better access to cultural resources and these can provide you with support at those times when other things fail you. So instead of planning a trip to South America, maybe commit to doing a six-month course in creative writing or English literature. You might find things there that you never suspected could exist.

What use are the very-wealthy?

The impulse to write about the very-wealthy seems to be biggest in Britain right now as the country continues to struggle economically and the Tory-led coalition government presses on with fiscal austerity measures that seem to mainly affect those on low incomes. Here's one Guardian story on the issue, one of two that appeared there just today. The author places emphasis on the fact that the wealth being accumulated by those in the top income brackets does not help the broader community. Progressives often attack the "trickle-down" theory that says that wealth gets broadly distributed. The story quotes Chrystia Freeland, an author who has written a book about the very-wealthy titled Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. (I started reading the book but put it aside.) I recommend it to readers, as well as a story written by Nicholas Shaxson for the April issue of Vanity Fair magazine on One Hyde Park, an exclusive apartment complex in London where properties cost tens- and hundreds-of-millions of dollars. The image accompanying this post shows the development.

Let's give credence to the progressive line that trickle-down economic theory is nonsense, so what use, then, are the very-wealthy? As Freeland notes in her book, globalisation has led to a larger number of very-wealthy individuals, so we can expect their number to increase while in many parts of the world income disparities also increase. For some, this reality can animate the emotions in such a way that leads to civil disorder, but for others it can work to stimulate the imagination and function as entertainment; we see stories all the time in the Australian media about high-end property sales. What we don't often see is any examination of an important nexus, for example stories about people who live in what are considered relatively prestigious apartment developments in our cities. That might be a hard sell because those people are too much in the middle to warrant attention by culture producers. Instead, we get The Great Gatsby movie, or Titanic, or one more history book about an English king or prominent Elizabethan aristocrat by bestselling author Alison Weir. These subjects are immensely popular and the movies entertain with striking visuals showing clothes, cars or carriages, and houses that regular folk probably hardly ever saw in the course of their lives. These stories are an easy sell because they focus on things that possess value in the market of things that surround us today. They are sexy and easy to consume.

The very-wealthy also appear in popular culture as fantasies. There's Bruce Wayne in the Batman franchise, Tony Stark in the Iron Man franchise, and strange personifications of altruism such as Windsor "Win" Horne Lockwood, III in Harlen Coben's Myron Bolitar series of crime thrillers, and Tony Blake in the short-lived TV series The Magician of the 70s. In all these cases the very-wealthy hero - or, in the Coben case, influential side-kick - dedicates his life to good (yes, they all seem to be men). In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The very-wealthy might consume a more expensive form of culture, fine art for example, but they do not contribute to the improvement of society. They work to increase their wealth, live in isolated comfort in the most convenient parts of our cities, and raise children who generally shift themselves into high-paying jobs in finance, the law or accounting. They are unimaginative, under-educated and self-interested.

There are exceptions, of course, like Nobel prize-winning Australian author Patrick White, who came from a rich rural family, or Australian painter Martin Sharp, who still lives in his parents' house in Bellevue Hill, in Sydney, where he works. These are the rare exceptions, though, the rule being someone like James Packer, who abandoned the struggling media business he inherited from his father and started building casinos instead.

The popularity of stories about the dead rich tells us something about our priorities. We can look at the Florentine grendees, the Medicis, and applaud their patronising the fine arts: plenty of good visuals there. But we ignore someone like William Wentworth, a Sydney colonial figure who not only helped mark the passage across the Blue Mountains but also helped found the University of Sydney and agitated for the introduction of democracy in New South Wales in the 1850s. With his wealth in the land, like many of the early colonial very-wealthy, Wentworth held firm Humanist beliefs; the first prize that was instituted at the University of Sydney is the Wentworth Medal - which is still awarded today - for an essay. And what about all those aristocratic lady poets of ages long gone, like Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661 - 1720). Can Peggy Guggenheim be compared to her? Mr Darcy remains a fantasy, albeit a popular and attractive one for millions of modern-day women who continue to read Jane Austen's novels. But the remarkable George Gordon, Lord Byron, is largely ignored in favour of the merely, gorgeously, massively rich.

Greens' deep red heart leaves me politically homeless

This is a picture of Adam Bandt, the Greens' sole parliamentary lower house representative. Bandt represents the seat of Melbourne, which the Greens memorably won in the 2010 federal election. Because of the tenuous hold the Labor Party has on the parliamentary balance of power, Bandt has been playing a key role in Australian politics over the last few years.

Like many progressives, I cheered when Bandt won his seat, and I looked on with interest as the election result necessitated a bit of horse-trading between the successful candidates, resulting in a new model of Parliament. I watched approvingly as a key Greens policy - a carbon tax - was ushered in amid claims of duplicity aimed at the prime minister. Clearly, a new type of consensus was required, and Australians were taking their time getting used to it. With a single lower-house representative, the Greens were punching above their weight on the national stage. I also watched as the Labor Party changed its official policy on gay marriage - an issue very close to my heart - although the prime minister has ensured that a change to the marriage laws has been impossible.

But everything changed for me when some other elements of Greens policy became plain to me, as I read a statement published by Bandt on a website. While I certainly agree that corporations must be made to contribute more to building equity into Australian society, there are two things in this statement that I violently disagree with. One of these is their desire for "higher taxes for millionaires" as if private savings and private income were of the same nature as corporate profits.

This kind of redistributive animus against the concentration of wealth in private hands is very Old Labor. It's deeply red and appeals to the worst instincts of the majority of Australians, being of the same nature as the kind of rank xenophobia that makes it easy for governments here to work so hard to prevent asylum seekers from arriving on our foreshores. I have no patience with this kind of policy. A guy who has saved, say, five million dollars and who owns three or four investment properties is not "rich". He's not a plutocrat who possesses more money than he'll even be able to spend, like Rupert Murdoch or Gina Rinehart. He's just a prudent and successful man, probably with a wife and family, who has been able to squirrel away a bit of the ready to prepare for his retirement. But this guy would be targeted by a Greens government.

The thing I want to say to Bandt and his colleagues is that you do not make the majority rich by punishing the prudent and successful. What you do is help more people to be like this. I think that all governments would like to see everyone retiring with the capital assets that my man has, so that social security payments can be lower. It is prudent for governments to make changes that can help my man to acquire the relatively small amount of wealth that he has put away. A government that does not help this guy is not going to get my support.

But there's another deeply-red element to Bandt's policy statement. Bandt wants to end "the public funding of ... very wealthy non-government schools" so that more funds can be channelled to public schools, especially those which service areas that contain material disadvantage. Again, I think this is regressive and harkens back to the old days of class warfare, the type of class warfare that Mark Latham brought into play in the runup to the 2004 federal election, which he unsuccessfully contested as leader of the Labor Party. Latham notoriously imploded after that election, and it's precisely this kind of redistributive bent that led to his downfall. But the Greens want to give new life to this old corpse?

I think all schools should receive more funding, but the way to do that is not by punishing the elite institutions that have served our country so well for so many generations. You don't pull up the majority by pulling down the elite. It's the same old school thinking that turns me off Bandt's "millionaire's tax": an outdated mindset that harkens back to the bad old days when social mobility was minimal. Today's suburbs are populated by aspirational voters who all want those investment properties and who all want their kids in private schools. Bandt, and the Greens, are way out of line with the true wishes of the majority of right-thinking Australians on this one.

I will never abandon the progressive ideas that make me who I am. I will always push for human rights, the rights of the individual, and for greater tolerance in society. I will do so because to do otherwise would be to betray myself. But I cannot ignore the regressive, old-school economic policies the Greens are promoting, and I cannot stomach the popular animus they are designed to appeal to. We all need to be better educated, financially better prepared for retirement, and more open to new ideas and new arrivals. My type of Australia does not rely on the negative process of class warfare to achieve its goals, but generously includes all of the people in its broad embrace.

London riots: Revenge was due to lack of respect?

A 20-minute video produced by the Guardian provides new insights into the mindset of people involved in the August riots in London. Reporters interviewed 270 people in making the video, with the interviews being part of research conducted alongside the London School of Economics. (I wrote about this research, and the government's reaction to it, recently.) Revenge appears to be a dominant theme for people who participated.

The justifications for the riotous behaviour that engulfed the country during those weeks, that arise repeatedly in the voices contained in the video, are:

• Routine stop-and-searches conducted by police, 
• A lack of respect by police for people living in disadvantaged areas of London, and 
• Cuts to government-supplied benefits and the increased cost of university tuition. 

Government attacks on 'criminals' and gangs appear to have been competely misplaced, in light of the video. The video, which in the link above sits on the New York Times website, will be embarrassing for David Cameron's conservative-led Coalition. Cameron tried to deflect blame for the riots by casting aspersions, at the time they were taking place, on 'criminal' elements in society. This tactic now appears to be utterly misguided.

People interviewed were not criminals, just ordinary citizens. They resented the way the Coalition has been making it harder for them and people in their neighbourhoods to improve their lives. Cuts to government handouts and rising university tuition costs are cited as examples of the lack of attention they, and people like them, receive from the government. This lack of a just system compounds with feelings of powerlessness deriving from a lack of respect from the police. So the attacks were an opportunity for people living such lives to get revenge on a system that had ceased being interested in their welfare, and that had started to make life increasingly difficult for them on a day-to-day basis.

Of course, these interviews were conducted sometime after the fact, and although measures were taken by reporters to preserve the anonymity of those interviewed, we can intuit a degree of special pleading in their words. Given this caveat - that perhaps those interviewed are not being completely honest, and are merely trying to justify their actions to make themselves look better - it appears that the ingredients for a repeat of the riots remain alive in the community. Many of those interviewed said that such events could happen again.

Greed of elites caused London riots, not Beckham

They've done some research into the August riots in London, which I wrote about at the time, and have come up with a plan. But first, let's look at the reason they think the riots took place. The Guardian reports:

A "get rich quick" celebrity culture exemplified by The X Factor and the dysfunctional lives of footballers has created a society "out of balance", the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, says today in an interview surveying Britain after the summer riots.

My take on the riots was that the rioters were aping the 1% that had been created by decades of frantic globalisation. The type of globalisation that allows a four-bedroom penthouse apartment in the building pictured - London's most expensive address - to be rented for US$90,000 a week by a Middle Eastern businessman. But the Tory administration in the UK has decided it was, instead, David Beckham and the X Factor (a reality TV show where contestants try to sing their way into lucrative recording deals). Oh well, at least it's better than their take at the time, which was that the riots were the fault of just plain criminals and thugs.

But rather than point the finger at the thing that has actually caused the social breakdown that created the conditions within which the rioting took place, the Tories have decided to pay a bit more attention to the "out-of-balance" communities that spawned them.

Duncan Smith, who as chair of the social justice cabinet committee is one of the key figures shaping a coalition response to the riots, warned there was "every chance" riots would recur unless structural reforms were made to repair "communities in which so many families are broken".

He is due to call next week for major investment from the private sector to help prevent social breakdown. He will argue that public-private spending can reduce social failure.

So they want to bring in corporations - which created the problem in the first place - to try to solve the dysfunction that lies at the heart of stressed communities throughout the developed world. Bring in companies to fix "structural" problems (it's not just criminals and thugs, after all, the research, which was conducted along with the London School of Economics, says) that bedevil the lower classes. There's something Elizabethan about this proposal. Next thing you know there will be Poor Houses where the indigent have to sew lace or weave cloth in order to earn their meagre sustenance.

The real structural problem in the developed world is not just the result of those decades of globalisation. It's deeper than that. For a start, as Jeff Sparrow pointed out in a recent piece for The Drum:

[N]eoliberalism reshapes the notion of citizenship, so that voters' relationship with their government becomes analogous to consumers' relationship with a corporation. Rather than active participants, they become individual customers, who engage with politics by selecting a candidate at election time just as they choose a product from a supermarket shelf.

Not surprisingly, across the western world, we've seen a long-term decline in political participation. Fewer people join parties or pressure groups – or even pay them much attention. Politics is no longer something you do but something that's done for you: every so often, the political parties court your vote via the media, much as Apple roles out some cool commercials whenever there's a new iPhone to sell.

In Australia and in the UK, furthermore, the relationship between the traditional party of the left (Labor here, Labour over there) and its core constituents - presumably people like those who rioted in August - has changed. The Left no longer protects the interests of its core base. Under Labor in Australia during the Hawke-Keating years Labor became the friend of big business. Under New Labour and Tony Blair in the UK, the party courted the big end of town, pretending that it was revitalising the Left. These dalliances turned out to have had the opposite effect. Noone trusts the Left any more. Of course there is no political protest - they burn shops instead.

The problems that the UK Tories perceive are just more of the same targets that are usually picked out when hands begin to wring among the privileged. Sure, the Guardian/LSE research was right in pointing out that the problem is "an acquisitive consumer culture", but this has nothing to do with reality TV and football players. Rather, it's got to do with the system of money that sits behind those facades. Behind the street frontage of entertainment is a financial mechanism every bit as determined to achieve profitable outcomes as the one that drives the Wall Street trader. These days, everything has become commoditised as, along with globalisation, the power of corporations grows and the power of governments decreases. It's time to start reading Jared Diamond again, the man who says that, in many civilisations through history, greed on the part of the elite results in the collapse of the entire social structure. Famine awaits.