Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Abbott & masoch

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/09/tony-abbott-election-victory-labor
 
 
Tony Abbott's election victory and Labor's braindead politics
 
Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Monday 9 September 2013 20.00 BST
 
Australia's economy is an enviable state, yet Abbott pummelled the Labor 
party to its heaviest defeat in a century. How?
 
 
Has anyone come up with a word for "completely dismaying yet utterly 
unsurprising"? Because we need one to sum up what happened in Australia 
this weekend.
 
On Saturday, Tony Abbott was elected Australia's new prime minister. 
What's he like? In a private memo from 2007 published by WikiLeaks, the 
then-US ambassador to Australia described him as "a polarising 
rightwinger" with a "propensity for insensitivity and controversy". 
Climate change, in his book, is "complete crap". This is the man David 
Cameron welcomed to the fold with the tweet: "It'll be great working 
with another centre-right leader."
 
Then there's Abbott's woman problem. He has wondered aloud: "What if men 
are, by physiology or temperament, more adapted to exercise authority or 
to issue command?" That was back in 1998; during this campaign, he 
praised a female candidate for her "sex appeal". After the inevitable 
barrage of complaints, he backtracked, or tried, by describing his 
colleague as "not just a pretty face".
 
Abbott is a Catholic; going by these comments, you might surmise that 
his patron saint is David of Brent. Unsurprisingly, he has never been 
especially popular – even among his own Liberal party, which awarded him 
the leadership by a wafer-thin majority. His approval ratings are 
regularly dismal and one pollster dismissed him as "unelectable". So how 
did Abbott pummel the Australian Labor party to its heaviest defeat in a 
century? It's a sad story, and one that holds lessons for leftwingers 
around the world.
 
 From Gordon Brown to José Zapatero, the global financial crisis has 
claimed many social-democratic leaders. But the striking thing about the 
economic record presented by Labor's Kevin Rudd at the polls is how 
strong it is. Australia is now enjoying its 22nd consecutive year of 
growth: during the Great Recession, the country managed to avoid any 
recession at all. How? By warding off a global downturn with what Nobel 
prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz described as "probably the 
best-designed stimulus package of any … advanced industrial country, 
both in size and in design, and how it was spent".
 
Using the war cry of "go early, go hard and go households", Rudd chucked 
a total of A$52bn (£30bn) into the housing market, into refurbishing 
schools and rolling out broadband and other public works. He even doled 
out money, in the spring of 2009 giving the typical single worker A$900. 
 From the IMF to the OECD, the major international institutions all 
lined up to clap.
 
The result is an economy in enviable nick, especially compared with 
other rich economies. Last week's GDP report showed Australia's national 
income rising at 2.6% a year – the kind of growth rate George Osborne 
would love to fight an election on. Unemployment has been remarkably 
quiescent and take-home pay for the average worker is rising. Sure, 
there are niggles – the country's mining boom seems to be drawing to a 
close, and the housing bubble remains a worry. But think about the 
wreckage the banking crash left elsewhere in the world and you can see 
why they call Australia the lucky country.
 
So, having pulled off such a feat, what did Labor do? Rather than crow 
about such smart state intervention, it practically disowned its 
triumph. Rudd – who once described himself as "basically a conservative 
when it comes to … public financial management" – and his Treasury team 
were soon promising to get the government budget back in surplus. This 
was "braindead economics", according to Steve Keen, economist at the 
University of Western Sydney. Even after its stimulus spending, 
Australia last year had among the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the 
entire developed world.
 
But it was also braindead politics, playing right into the hands of 
Abbott's scaremongering over the public finances. What Labor were 
effectively telling voters was: judge us not on our successes, but on 
the benchmarks set by our opponents. If that sounds perverse, that's 
because it is. But, really, it's in line with what social democratic 
parties around the world have done in the wake of the crisis.
 
Consider: Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling help pull Britain out of an 
economic nosedive; then draw up a law to force themselves to halve the 
budget deficit. Barack Obama saves Wall Street but barely lays a glove 
on the bankers. François Hollande takes charge and does pretty much the 
same budgetary botch as Sarkozy was planning. When Lehman Brothers fell 
over five years ago this month, there was much fanciful talk about how 
this was a "progressive moment". Brown indulged in such rhetoric, and so 
did Rudd, penning 7,000-word essays on the evils of neo-liberalism. But 
there was no recasting of economic models, or even a serious debate 
about how things ought to change. The best social-democrats managed was 
to save capitalism for the capitalists. And now that the five-year panic 
is giving way to another phase, the social democrats are being shown the 
door.
 
That story holds for Rudd and his managerial Keynesianism. What filled 
the vacuum left where a political philosophy ought to be was bitter 
rivalry with Julia Gillard (and you know how that worked out), 
flip-flopping over carbon pricing and a race to the bottom on 
immigration policies. The result was last weekend's wipeout.
 
So what is the synonym for acute disappointment and predictable defeat? 
My knowledge of compound German nouns being a bit rusty, let me suggest 
this: contemporary social democracy.
-- 
Namib
.....
αἱ ψυχαὶ ὀσμῶνται καθ᾽ Ἅιδην (Eraclito)


 
 
 argomento interessante, ma non richiede risposte serie