Daily Archives: June 5, 2022

The lesson to be learned from the rise of the teals and other fracturing of the centre-right vote in Australia is that the Liberal party needs to have a clearly defined purpose if it wants to succeed.

This disintegration is not entirely without precedent. By the time the United Australia Party officially dissolved in 1945 the party had long been rudderless, its raison detre of getting the nation through the Depression with thrift and sacrifice having exhausted itself.

It was Robert Menzies who famously resurrected the fortunes of the Australian centre-right, but he did not do it by establishing a broad church. While it was certainly meant to have a broad appeal ranging from salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, Menzies explicitly founded what he called a party with a philosophy.

Recently in the Guardian Van Badham argued that history shows that the Australian centre-right succeeds most when it appeals to the centre. However, the formation of the Liberal party represented no leftward shift from its predecessor, which after all had been formed around an ex-Labor premier of Tasmania.

The Liberal party represented a revival of Australias strongest political tradition, namely liberalism, and with it came a clear sense of direction. Menzies was tapping into something with deep roots in Australian history, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century virtually every Australian politician called themselves liberal.

In the Australian context liberalism has conservative elements, which can often lead to confusion in definitions. By the time of federation liberals had triumphed such that defending that which existed was to conserve a liberal order. Australian liberals have always believed that freedom flourishes under our existing institutions, including parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy.

Australian liberalism thus contains many of the tenets of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, whom Menzies admired. During the 1940s when Menzies was giving his series of radio broadcasts made famous by the forgotten people, he quoted from Burke that a political party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.

The concept of the broad church when it comes to the Liberal party of Australia is a legacy of John Howard, who was trying to put to bed ideological infighting which had dogged the party throughout the 1980s. But the fact that the Liberal party was led out of the wilderness by Howard rather than a Peacock says a lot.

The Australian centre-right has tended to succeed when it has a clearly defined purpose, whether that be upholding patriotism during and after the first world war, maintaining fiscal conservatism in response to our gravest economic crisis, or defending the role of free enterprise threatened by Chifleys bank nationalisation and the rise of international communism.

The Australian centre-right has failed when it becomes purposeless, like the end of the UAP or even during the 1980s, when Labor had taken up the crucial job of Reagan/Thatcher style economic reform.

Leaders who define themselves by their moderation have failed because they go out of their way to make the party pointless. Look at not just Peacocks failure, but the unexpected near defeats of 1969 and 2016. It must be remembered that Malcolm Fraser, who was electorally successful, only drifted to the left after office.

Australias unusual system of compulsory voting and compulsory preferencing does drag politics towards the centre. Australia has a long tradition of sacred cows that cannot be touched because of this, namely the Australian settlement which endured for decades, and an industrial relations system that cost Stanley Melbourne Bruce and John Howard not just their prime ministerships but their seats. One could argue that border protection has become a new settled issue in this vein.

But just because our voting system nudges politics towards the centre does not mean that centre-right parties are rewarded for leaning into this and losing their sense of direction. People need to be motivated to campaign when they dont have a union cajoling them to do so, and right-leaning preferences are far less reliable at coming back to their respective major party.

The recent wave of teal independents follows the fracturing of the UAP into multiple parties towards the end of its lifespan, but even before this it was the centre-right who introduced preferencing because of a tendency to have a multiplicity of candidates.

People who value individual freedom and personal conscience tend to herd about as well as cats. They need to be inspired and led.

Moderate Liberals are often fond of quoting Menzies as saying that Liberals were determined to be a progressive party, but what is too often forgotten is that as a visionary with a strong will Menzies would define what progress meant. He was not a weathervane pointing the direction of social and political trends beyond his control, and which actively eat away at a liberal ethos.

The centre-right will recover sooner or later, when it again finds its purpose. It is difficult to imagine that this will happen by simply chasing the teal vote.

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The Liberal party cannot rebuild until it rediscovers its reason to exist - The Guardian

None of these stories can be said to reflect or advance the agenda of anything you might call the left. Mainstream American movies have, for decades, been in love with guns, suspicious of democracy, ambivalent about feminism, squeamish about divorce, allergic to abortion, all over the place on matters of sexuality and very nervous about anything to do with race.

I know there are exceptions, and Im not trying to flip the script and reveal the reactionary face of Hollywood, though its true that in the years of the Production Code (from the mid-30s until the late 60s), Hollywood upheld a fairly conservative vision of American life. Nonmarital sex was strictly policed, interracial romance completely forbidden. Crime could not pay, and the dignity of institutions had to be protected. Even in the post-Code years, what mainstream American movies have most often supplied arent critical engagements with reality, but fantasies of the status quo. The dominant narrative forms, tending toward happy or redemptive endings or, more recently, toward a horizon of endless sequels are fundamentally affirmative of the way things are. What they affirm, most of all, is consensus, an ideal of harmony that isnt so much apolitical as anti-political, finding expression not in the voting booth but at the box office.

At least since the end of World War II, the production of consensus has been integral to Hollywoods cultural mission and its business model. During the war, the studios worked closely with the military to deliver morale-boosting, mission-explaining messages to the home-front public, a collaboration that helped raise the industrys prestige and its sense of its own importance. In the postwar era, even as they faced challenges from television, the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the demographic volatility of the audience, the studios conceived their mission in universal terms. Movies were for everybody.

That article of faith has always been a hard sell in a society defined by pluralism and, perhaps more persistently than wed like to admit, by polarization. The notion that movies in the second half of the 20th century reflected a now-vanished consensus is doubly dubious. The consensus was never there, except insofar as Hollywood manufactured it. Perhaps more than any other American institution, Hollywood worked to foster agreement, to imagine a space within the theater walls and on the screen where conflicts could be resolved and contradictions wished away. In the westerns, the cowboys fought the Indians, the ranchers battled the railroads, and the sheriffs shot it out with the outlaws. But the outcome of those struggles was the pacification of the frontier and the advance of a less violent, more benevolent civilization. In the dramas of racial conflict, Sidney Poitier and an avatar of intolerance (Tony Curtis, Spencer Tracy, Rod Steiger) found common ground in the end.

This wasnt propaganda in the usual sense, but rather an elaborate mythos, a reservoir of stories and meanings that didnt need to be believed to be effective. Weve always known that movies arent real we like to insist that watching them is a kind of dreaming and thats partly why we love them so much.

By we I mean the movie audience, a collective that for a long time implied a parallel form of citizenship, a civic identity with its own ideology. The best cultural history of American movies, by the critic and scholar Robert Sklar, is called Movie-Made America. The corollary to that title, and one of Sklars arguments, is that moviegoing made Americans.

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Are the Movies Liberal? - The New York Times

The actor Johnny Depp has won his defamation case against former wife Amber Heard. The suit was provoked by an article in the Washington Post, penned by Heard in 2018, that cast her as the face of domestic violence. The jury awarded Depp $15 million in damages after finding that Heard's statements about their marriage were false and that she acted with "actual malice."

It was a stunning verdict, and one that seems to spell the end of the #MeToo movement's edict that we #BelieveAllWomen. But it should come as no surprise that these once ubiquitous and socially enforced liberal feminist edicts are now beginning to succumb to the scrutiny and skepticism that they have so far managed to avoid. The Depp v. Heard case breathed new life into once dismissed criticisms about the limits of #MeToo and the disregard the movement has shown for the importance of due process.

One of the most shocking revelations of the trial was the fact that the American Civil Liberties Union played a major role in getting the defamatory OpEd published, even writing the first draft. An organization supposedly devoted to due process and civil liberties had taken an egregious role in depriving those same rights to Depp.

Needless to say, #MeToo, like any other political or social movement, proved not immune to cynical weaponization. Though the sentiments and aspirations of the movement are in fact noble, the incentive structure surrounding victimhood, grievance and even feminism writ large in the realm of media and political organizations is rife with avenues for opportunism, careerist maneuvering and attention seeking.

Indeed, the liberal feminist mode has come to rely heavily on media spectacle, celebrity and a careerist incentive structure in which success is built on scalps taken without due process. After all, the #MeToo movement has been liberal feminism's greatest hit of late; what does it say of feminism more broadly that its most high-profile success devolved into celebrity smut and the cynical weaponization of grievance?

Of course, liberal feminism's influence in the media is not the only culprit in this pernicious trend. Race-related activism and the climate that grew out of Black Lives Matter has also been rife with similar incidents of cynicism and media scandal. The infamous Jussie Smollett case was yet another example of a celebrity making dubious claims about identity-based violence that ended up being proven false by a court of law. When the Smollett hate crime accusation initially emerged, there was an outpouring of sympathy and support from major celebrities and activists, while those who expressed skepticism were viewed as insensitive or hateful by comparison. Even after Smollett's narrative was proven false, BLM's co-founder Patrice Cullors asked followers to rally and "call the jails" to demand Smollett's release.

Cullors continued to beseech the public for sympathy and accused critics of spreading "disinformation" about the case, despite the clear evidence that Smollett fabricated the attack. "We need folks to challenge the misinformation and disinformation around this case," Cullors said. "That's so critical. What happened to Jesse can happen to any of us, and it's completely unacceptable."

The response of the liberal media in the aftermath of the Heard/Depp Case has included similar levels of cynicism; desperate attempts have been mounting to deflect and deny the consequences of a mode of operation that has gone unchecked in the name of protecting higher cultural causes and aspirations.

Just yesterday, The Root columnist Candice McDuffie wrote an absurd OpEd titled "Amber Heard Verdict Sends A Message to Black Women Everywhere." The piece attempted to argue that the skepticism and mockery that Heard's claims have been met with are not motivated by evidence but instead an undercurrent of seething misogyny.

These desperate efforts to conceal the chinks in the moral armor of liberal feminism continue to slip to new lows. The zealous and emotionally driven liberal media class are now being forced to confront the contradictions that emerge when grievance is portrayed as beyond reproach and scrutiny is equated with hostility.

We must continue to resist the incentive to adjudicate justice based on social edicts and influences instead of due process and evidence.

Angie Speaks is the cohost of the Low Society Podcast.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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Johnny Depp's Victory Is a Crack in the Moral Armor of Liberal Feminism | Opinion - Newsweek

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The problem isnt government. Its our government. Nor is the problem unions another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?

One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, the director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper titled State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back. His definition is admirably terse. State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively, he told me. When a government cant collect the taxes its owed or build the sign-up portal for its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail its already spent billions of dollars on, thats a failure of state capacity.

But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindseys argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isnt intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades; embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state; and recognizing the vital role played by the nations public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s; reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts; and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

The Biden administration cant do much about the rights hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.

A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In The Procedure Fetish he argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that thats because American politics in general and the Democratic Party, in particular, are dominated by lawyers. Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States, Bagley writes. And if all youve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.

This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this adversarial legalism and shown that its a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state, he writes. The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions the list goes on and on.

The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagleys ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow, he says. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair. That is what weve lost in fact, not just in perception.

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Opinion | What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds - The New York Times

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Premier Doug Ford had an impressive election victory on Thursday, but its not the start of a Progressive Conservative dynasty in Ontario and the Liberal Party isnt going to disappear.

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People who think in such politically apocalyptic terms dont know the history of Ontario politics.

Its going to be very difficult for the PCs to win a third majority government in 2026, whether Ford is still premier or has retired and been replaced by a successor.

The last time any party in Ontario achieved three majority governments in a row was when John Robarts and the PCs won the 1963 and 1967 elections, followed by Bill Davis winning a third majority in 1971 51 years ago.

Davis Ontarios longest serving premier in the modern era (1971 to 1985) never won back-to-back majorities, let alone three in a row.

Following his 1971 majority government, Davis won minority governments in 1975 and 1997, followed by a second majority in 1981.

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The last political dynasty in Ontario 42 years lasted from 1943 when George Drew was elected premier to 1985, when Davis retired from politics, 37 years ago.

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Since then, Ontario voters have elected and defeated Liberal, PC and NDP governments without any enduring loyalty to any one party.

The Liberals David Peterson won fewer seats in the 1985 election than PC premier Frank Miller who succeeded Davis (48 for the Liberals, 52 for the PCs).

But Peterson forged an alliance with then NDP leader Bob Rae (whose party won 25 seats in the 1985 election) to become premier.

Petersons Liberal government lasted five years a minority government from 1985 to 1987 followed by a majority from 1987 to 1990 before being defeated by Rae and the NDP, who won a majority government that lasted from 1990 to 1995.

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Rae and the NDP were defeated in 1995 by the PCs Mike Harris, who won two majority governments (1995 and 1999) before resigning in 2002, with the party choosing Ernie Eves as his successor.

Eves lost the 2003 election to the Liberals Dalton McGuinty, who won two majority governments (2003 and 2007) followed by a minority government in 2011.

McGuinty announced his retirement a year later and was replaced by Kathleen Wynne, who won a majority government, from 2014 to 2018.

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Wynne was defeated by Ford and the PCs in 2018, who won a majority government and have now been re-elected with a second majority, which will run until 2026.

The Liberal party isnt going to disappear, even though it was reduced to seven seats in the 2018 election and added only one more on Thursday, insufficient to achieve official party status which today requires 12 seats.

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The NDP lost official party status in the 1999 and 2003 elections and survived to become the official opposition party in the last two elections.

Since the end of the PC dynasty in Ontario in 1985, the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP have all been in government, all been the official opposition party and all been the third party in the Legislature.

The reason is that Ontario has a mature three-party system (the Greens having won only one seat in the last two elections).

A more enduring theme in Ontario politics is that voters prefer their provincial government to be of a different political stripe than the federal government which repeated itself Thursday, with Fords victory while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are in power in Ottawa.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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GOLDSTEIN: There's no Tory dynasty in Ontario and the Liberals aren't dead - Toronto Sun

A Liberal-led parliamentary inquiry into the complaints handling processes of the ABC and SBS will not go ahead.

The environment and communications Senate committee officially dropped its inquiry on Thursday after the completion of an independent review of the procedures.

The inquiry into the public broadcasters was suspended in November last year after the independent review was announced.

Ita Buttrose, chair of the ABC, had previously described the Senate inquiry as an act of political interference designed to intimidate.

The Greens also condemned it as a partisan attempt to undermine the ABCs independence.

The committees chairman, Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, wrote in a brief report tabled in parliament on Thursday that the ABC board had released details of its independent review on 17 May, which included the creation of a new position of ABC ombudsman.

As a result of the ABC board adopting all of the review recommendations, and in particular the board agreeing to the establishment of an ABC ombudsman appointed by, and reporting to, the board, the committee has decided not to proceed with its inquiry, he wrote.

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Liberal-led Senate inquiry into ABC and SBS abandoned - The Guardian

Labour Minister Seamus ORegan, seen here in a April 28, 2022 file photo, said the Liberals plan on introducing several measures to beef up the legislation in committee.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Liberals have thrown their support behind a Senate bill requiring government and businesses to annually report on steps they have taken to identify forced labour in their supply chains.

This means Bill S-211 stands a good chance of becoming law once it finishes moving through the House of Commons. The legislation, which has already passed the Senate, also passed second reading in the Commons by a vote of 327-0 on Wednesday. It now heads to committee for further study.

Labour Minister Seamus ORegan said the Liberals plan on introducing several measures to beef up the legislation in committee.

We need to substantively tackle forced labour in our supply chains. Bill S-211 is an important first step, he said via Twitter.

We voted to send this bill to committee. There, well look at amendments to strengthen it, the minister said. He did not elaborate on what improvements the Liberals had in mind.

Ultimately, we want to pass legislation that will be effective against forced labour.

Canada has repeatedly been faulted for failing to do anything to stop imports of goods made with forced labour despite a commitment it made in the renegotiated NAFTA deal to do so.

As The Globe reported last week, Canada has yet to stop a single such import since mid-2020 when Ottawa amended the Customs Tariff Act to prohibit forced-labour imports in keeping with a pledge made under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade deal that replaced the North American free-trade agreement.

The single shipment of goods impounded by Canadian authorities since then was later released after the importer successfully challenged the seizure.

By comparison, in the fiscal 2021 year alone, the United States intercepted more than 1,400 shipments of goods made with forced labour from a variety of countries, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The difference in the Canadian and U.S. records on this, critics say, cannot be accounted for solely by the far larger volume of imports into the United States.

The Global Slavery Index, produced by an Australian philanthropic foundation, estimated in a 2018 report that more than $18.5-billion worth of goods imported into Canada are at risk of being made with forced labour at some point in their supply chains, including computers, smartphones, clothing as well as gold, seafood and sugarcane.

Bill S-211, Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act, would require government institutions and businesses to submit annual reports to Ottawa outlining any steps taken during the previous fiscal year to prevent and reduce the risk that forced labour or child labour are being used at any step in their supply chains.

Critics say the bill falls short because it does not oblige government or businesses to take steps to rid their supply chains of coerced labour but only report on it.

There is no requirement to take any steps. There is no certification scheme, nor attestation that the supply chains are free of forced labour. There is only a requirement to report annually on if you took any steps, and your assessment of how effective they are. There is actually no requirement to report if you identify forced labour, said Emily Dwyer, policy director at the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability.

She said Canada should strive for legislation that goes further and includes an obligation to prevent forced labour from taking place. She pointed to a private members bill by NDP MP Peter Julian that would require companies to identify, prevent and mitigate human-rights abuses and provides for liability when companies cause harm in their global operations.

S-211 was sponsored in the Red Chamber by Senator Julie Miville-Dechne and is being sponsored in the House by Liberal MP John McKay.

Mr. McKay defended the legislation despite its shortcomings, saying companies could end up being embarrassed into taking action because the reporting will end up naming and shaming businesses or government departments taking no measures.

I wouldnt want to be the CEO filing a return that just answers nil to each question, he said.

He said Canada lags behind peer countries in the requirements placed on business and government to report whether they have taken action to weed out slave labour from their supply chains.

Lawyer John Boscariol, head of McCarthy Ttraults trade and investment group, said in his opinion the legislation is still an important and positive step despite the fact companies wont be required to scrutinize their supply chains.

There is an indirect impact here that will encourage companies to actually have due diligence measures in place and that overall should discourage the use of forced labour and child labour in supply chains.

The legislation would take effect as early as January, 2023, if it receives royal assent this year.

Mr. McKay said any amendments would mean S-211 would have to go back to the Senate to be ratified.

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Liberal government throws support behind bill aimed at tackling forced labour in supply chains - The Globe and Mail