This site is a fairly random collection of essays and opinions on a range of subjects, including, but not limited to, places I have visited, authors I have read, politics and economics. It will only be added to when I have something to say, which won’t necessarily be all that often. Just have a look at the menu to see what’s here. I’ll update this page when I add something
August 2025
A brief rant about freedom and responsibility (and fencing). On the menu.
January 2025
After a long period of inactivity, I’ve posted some stuff to ‘celebrate’ 2025. You’ll find it on the menu under Happy New Year. The first part covers the rise of the radical Right and discusses the issue of immigration. The second part discusses refugees and asylum seekers. In both cases they are focused largely on the impact of the radical Right on Australian civil discourse.
April 6: A revised opinion on debt and deficits
Reading some heterodox views on the nature of deficits has led me to revise my thinking on the nature of debt and deficits. Published under the Thoughts on Political Economy menu.
November 17: A house divided cannot stand
After a considerable hiatus, I ‘ve posted something under the Thoughts on Political Economy menu.
August 12: Identity and Freedom
I’ve posted a longish piece on identity politics under the Thoughts on Political Economy menu.
August 9: The Aged Care Tragedy
I am always quick to blame privatisation for fiascos in the provision of public goods (and I am sure I am not alone in my abhorrence of the obscene lifestyle and self-publicity of the owners of Epping Gardens). I do not believe that the care of the elderly and infirm is something from which profits should be made – aged care provision should not be subject to the ‘laws’ of the market and the narrow search for efficiency. However, the not for profit sector is not without blame in this affair- the St Basil’s case indicating that the problem is not simply one of private sector ownership. Perhaps it goes to the structural issues of low pay, poor training and casualisation. Even before COVID-19, the sector was beset with issues of negligence, poor quality care and egregious acts of neglect.
There is another issue at play here. While there is no doubt that many elderly people require the degree of supervised care that should be, but often isn’t, provided by aged care homes, and have been placed there by deeply caring sons and daughters, I suspect that a significant number of older people incarcerated in aged care neither need, nor deserve, to be there, as they have been abandoned by their offspring as an inconvenience and a burden. Other cultures hold the elderly in high regard and treat them with the respect that they are due. Our culture of selfishness and self-regard, our individualism and obsession with rights over obligations seems to do the opposite. Only now, when the tragedy of old people dying alone, and often without dignity, do we wring our hands, and search for convenient targets to blame. Another example of the modern phenomenon of gesture politics.
July 11: Some thoughts about the recent rise in COVID-19 cases in Victoria
Up to now, I’ve resisted the temptation to post about the pandemic, but what has recently happened in my home state of Victoria moves me to say something. When I saw Virginia Trioli’s rant about the role that security guards played in the rise in cases I was moved to get something off my chest. Quite what she was trying to say in her foul-mouthed Twitter rant by showing a glass of wine alongside her post only she can know. If you haven’t seen it, just Google ‘Virginia Trioli and quarantine’.
Given the culture in which we live we rather sanctimoniously rush to blame and judgment. In this case the recent spike has been blamed, inter alia, on Daniel Andrews’ decision to grant a no-tender contract, on the grounds of a lack of time(!), to a private security firm to manage quarantine at Melbourne hotels and on the guards charged with the supervision of the process. It comes as no surprise that this decision led to widespread, often egregious, infractions. After all, untrained underpaid staff were woefully unprepared, and lacked the authority, to enforce what appear to be already rather lax standards. It is rather ironic that a Labour government decided to privatise this important job, while the Liberal government in NSW assigned the job to trained police and ADF personnel. Only now, when the horse has well and truly bolted have police and corrections officers been given the job. And once again, in true Australian political fashion, we have shunted the whole affair off into an inquiry, whch will doubtless exonerate the accountable and blame the footsoldiers.
But my main point is this. While the proximate cause for the quarantine induced spike can be laid at the door of the security guards involved, this ignores what I think is the root cause. And that goes to the passion for privatising public services in the name of a narrow concept of ‘efficiency’ that governments of all complexion and at all levels have indulged in for the past thirty years and more. This orgy of privatisation has led in many cases to reduced services and increased costs, but perhaps the most serious effects have been on the labour market. I don’t believe that is a coincidence that enforced casualisation, zero hours contracts, low wages and income inequality have become more prevalent since the government got out of providing public services and the trade union movement haemorrhaged members as a result of industrial relations legislation and increased labour market ‘flexibility’.
This current crisis gives us an opportunity to redress the balance. We cannot turn the clock back, but what we can and should do is challenge a status quo that rewards a few at the expense of the many. But, and it is a very big but, we can only begin to do that if we stop failing for the old trick played on us by powerful elites and demagogues of demonising migrants, asylum seekers and minorities (and in this case low paid untrained security guards). I would have expected better of a journalist of Trioli’s reputation not to have piled on in the way she did.
May 25: The Austrians are coming, hurrah, hurrah(?)
No account of economic thought leading up to the neoliberal revolution of 1980 can be said to any where near complete without saying something about the Austrian School and its most famous member, Friedrich Hayek. After all, it is Hayek and his followers who inspired Reagan and Thatcher. If you’re interested have a look at the latest post on Thoughts on Political Economy.
May 20: The issue of debt
I don’t think that I addressed the issue of debt comprehensively enough. Given low tax regimes and the entirely mistaken belief that lower taxes lead to growth – an idea that I will address in my next post, which is in progress as I write, government revenues have collapsed as has the share of public wealth. This leads to public debt, which is financed by government borrowing. Some borrowing is of course good, if is intended to build infrastructure and/or mitigate the effects of economic downturns, but borrowing to cover structural deficits caused by tax cuts isn’t. The fashionable response is to address this issue is not by making the tax base more equitable, but by cutting services, privatising to raise short-term revenues and other ‘austerity’ measures. In this way the bulk of the population is subsidising the wealthy by indirectly paying for their tax cuts.
May 5: Some ramblings about Keynes and associated matters
To continue this wander around economic history, I’ve written a longish piece on Keynes, one of the most influential exconomists of the 20th century. A man whose star has waxed, waned and is now waxing again. I’m afraid I have digressed somewhat into a bit of a rant about governemnt debt.
May Day seems an appropriate day to post some brief musings on Marxism. You’ll find them on the Thoughts on Political Economy page. I’ll try Keynesianism next. Bet you can’t wait.
24 April
Quantum Physics and Australia Post Parcel Delivery
I couldn’t have imagined that these two things could have anything in common, until a recent experience caused me to reconsider.
I had ordered some books from an online bookstore for delivery by StarTrack for delivery to my house near Benalla in the Victorian countryside. This service includes parcel tracking. Imagine my excitement when the parcel containing my books had left Botany in Sydney and made its way to Benalla. Even greater excitement occurred when I received a message to tell me the parcel had been delivered. However, my mailbox was devoid of books. Had they been delivered to a mailbox in another quantum reality? Was there another me in this other universe reading the same books I had ordered?
Sceptical of this explanation, I decided to try Australia Post’s tracking service, which appeared to inhabit another reality altogether. In the Australia Post world, my parcel had left Greenacre in Sydney and had travelled to Melbourne, passing tantalisingly close to Benalla en route. It then left Melbourne for a place called Lemnos (thankfully the Victorian one – but perhaps another in another reality the parcel was sent to the Greek island called Lemnos) before ending up in an equally obscure location called Steventon– not the ones in Hampshire or Oxfordshire, except perhaps in yet more quantum realities. Discussions with StarTrack indicated that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was operating. They could tell me where my parcel was but not where it was going, or indeed why it was in Steventon at all.
Another example of quantum strangeness occurred this morning. My parcel arrived. But of course, Heisenberg was operating. It was there but I was unable to discover how it had got here. I couldn’t know both. And of course, it wasn’t until I opened the parcel to discover some books that all the other possibilities of this saga resolved themselves into this single outcome. But were they the books I ordered?
PS I apologise in advance before any physicists out there express horror at my gross misrepresentation of Everett’s Many World’s Theory, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Copenhagen interpretation.
12 April
Another post on economics – this time my, admittedly biased, view of neoclassical economics. Not academically rigorous, but hopefully readable. It’s called I am the Walras. You’ll have to read it to find out why.
6 April
Just posted a longish piece on economic history – origins of the idea of the free market and associated stuff from Smith, Ricardo and JS Mill. Intended to provide a background to later posts. Its under Thoughts on Economics and Politics on the menu.
5 April
Sitting around in lockdown gives you plenty of time to read and to think, particularly when it has been raining pretty solidly for the last couple of days, making it next to impossible to enjoy a solitary walk in the empty countryside. To give myself a little relief from matters economic, I have been dipping into some philosophy texts. While doing so, I came across something that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote about what he called ‘Grenzsituanen’ or ‘border or limit situations’. These are moments when events push you towards the limits of your normal experience and when you are forced to realise that you have to accept responsibility for what you do. This idea struck me as particularly resonant with the situation in which we now find ourselves. We either take responsibility and act accordingly – as have many people: helping others, showing gratitude for the selflessness of health care workers, and coming together to show solidarity in the face of existential danger. While we have also seen cruel and selfish behaviours from people unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, let us hope that they continue to be crowded out by examples of generosity and kindness. We can only hope that experience of this border situation changes us for good and creates a solicitude that sustains beyond the pandemic.
3 April
Just posted something on Individualism and the rôle of Government. See the menu under Thoughts on Economics and Politics
1 April: Thoughts on Political Economy
‘Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.’
‘And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families’
These two statements from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher respectively encapsulate the neo-liberal philosophy that has been the prevailing social, economic and political discourse since the late 1970’s, despite financial and economic crises that have taken place in 1982, 1987, 1989, 1997 and, most memorably, in 2008. This last crisis, which required staggeringly large injections of liquidity into banks and the market, represented the biggest challenge to neo-liberal hegemony, but one that it was able to withstand. Those who suffered from the Global Financial Crisis were not the bankers, or the wealthy, but the poor and already disadvantaged. After a brief period of hand-wringing and feeble acts of penance, everything went back to normal. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and those in the middle saw real wages continue to decline and consumer debt increase (no surprise, since for purposes of capital accumulation, consumption needs to increase without pause). Anyone who doubts this conclusion need only read the Hayne Royal Commission report into the Australian Financial Services Industry, which was a depressing catalogue of the sort of egregiously bad behaviour that banks had apologised for only a few short years before. And, as happened post-GFC, a few senior people lost their jobs, but no-one went to jail.
Ok. So what? Well, during the GFC governments bailed out the ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions (now called Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions – a fancy name for the same thing) in an unprecedented socialisation of losses – banks win both ways: they capitalise gains and socialise losses – there was an opportunity to reshape the way in which governments, civic society and private enterprise interacted. But the forces of neo-liberalism, in concert with feeble, and often corrupt public institutions, proved too resilient and the opportunity passed by. Instead, austerity was the way forward. Now, as we confront the global COVID-19 pandemic and historically non-interventionist governments of the Right inject trillions into the economy to keep it going and Boris Johnson contradicts Thatcher by tweeting that there is such a thing as society, we have yet another opportunity to reshape the structure of the global economy and to create a new social, political and economic architecture that changes the respective roles of government, institutions, labour, civil society and private enterprise. To do so will need us to look at history, not to repeat its mistakes, but to learn from it and adapt its lessons for the post- coronavirus world. Commentators are already beginning to discuss these issues, and I will attempt to make my own contribution to the debate.
I want, over the next few days and weeks, to publish longish pieces, and the occasional short post, on this subject. But to quote George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. So, I want to put things in some sort of historical perspective, to help answer the question of how we got here. It is not intended to be academically rigorous, and neither will it be strictly linear. I will be, as the was the great WG Sebald, prone to digression. You are welcome to use my feedback page for constructive criticism. I will post those that add to the debate in what I consider to be a meaningful way and ignore those that are merely abusive. Such is the privilege of authorship.
Before I start I want to thank Dr. Tim Thornton and Dr. Ha-Joon Chang for awakening my interest in economics and helping me to think about the dismal science from a heterodox perspective.
1 April: JobKeeper
A question: the idea of a universal basic income has been debated among politicians and economists for years, and roundly criticised from both the Right and, occasionally, from the Left. I don’t propose to repeat this debate here. If you’re interested, do a Google search. However, crises do have a way of making strange bedfellows, and of overturning what was established dogma. I find it very interesting that an Australian Government that has steadfastly refused to increase the Newstart pittance has now introduced what is, in effect, universal basic income. I wonder what will happen when this crisis is over, and whether the Government will think it will be able to go back to the way it was. There is an established economic theory called path dependence which basically says that we are restricted in the decisions we make by the decisions we have made in the past, even if the circumstances we faced in the past no longer apply to the current situation. Except of course on Star Trek.
30 March
For those of you still needing an armchair travel fix, try this
Update 29 March
I’ve posted a brief essay on the great writer, WG Sebald. Bit of a change of pace, but I need one after a series of travel pieces reconstituted from my journal
Update 23 March
I’ve added new page called A Passenger in India. It describes a journey I took with my partner a few years ago and is reconstituted from my journal and photos I took at the time. You’ll find it on the menu.
Miscellany 