Category: Articles

Diaries claim to reveal more about their author than a traditional memoir. They usually reveal much less.

Hopefully Bruce Hawker’s diary, published this week as The Rudd Rebellion: The Campaign to Save Labor, is not, in fact, an accurate account of the thoughts of Kevin Rudd’s chief strategist during the 2013 campaign.

If it is, then Hawker has a crippling lack of self-awareness.

Take just one example. Hawker does not explain one of the most bizarre and ludicrous decisions Labor made throughout the first few weeks – to run a scare campaign on the GST. The only justification for this scare was the Coalition was going to conduct a broad tax review.

On this thin hook Rudd hung almost his entire economic message. Don’t vote for Abbott: he’ll increase the GST. Don’t vote for Abbott: he’ll increase the GST. It was unrelenting and desperate and obviously false. The word “vegemite” does not appear anywhere in Hawker’s diary.

So let’s be charitable and say there was a lot more to the Labor campaign than Hawker suggests.

The political diary is the falsest, most self-serving form of confession. No wonder it’s grown to be a favourite genre for political warriors.

For a long time it was a tradition that Australian politicians wrote themselves out of their own memoirs. The political historian Sean Scalmer points out that Australia’s insider accounts tended to be an account of political history where the protagonist was strangely missing.

Alfred Deakin’s story of federation included this disclaimer: “Those who desire to know the part the writer himself played in the public debates or campaigns must turn to the Reports published officially or by the press.” What a tease.

Over time such nineteenth century modesty was abandoned. The audience came to expect more reflection and more personality in political memoirs.

Memoirs are usually written years after the events they depict. They have a certain distance. Diaries promise something else entirely – a sense of intimacy with the author.

In theory, political diaries can take readers inside the tent. More than memoirs, they can convey some of the pace and excitement of politics, the sort of energy and uncertainty that is hard to reproduce in retrospect. And – most of all – they do so in an unedited, raw and highly subjective fashion.

After all, diaries are where we keep secrets. That’s their appeal. To read a genuinely private diary – even of someone long dead – feels like crossing an ethical boundary.

The modern political diary is the exact opposite of this. They are deeply self-conscious. They are public statements only pretending to be private.

Of course, every political diarist promises their book has been published with minimal edits. But there is no reason to believe, and every reason to doubt, these books are faithful records of the private inner thoughts of their subject. These diaries are written to be read. Hawker is a spinner. That’s his job.

Samuel Pepys – the diarist by which all others are measured – wrote his diary in code and it was not published for 150 years. Bruce Hawker’s diary was published in 50 days.

Why does this matter? Because it’s deceitful. The modern political diary is narrative construction and score settling and blame shifting masquerading as honesty.

When Hawker skips happily over the most bizarre decisions he and Kevin Rudd made, it’s obvious readers are being played.

The interest in political diaries does not come from the revelations about how the author felt in key campaign moments, but what they want the reader to believe they felt.

And it seems, as Katherine Murphy points out in the Guardian, that Hawker wants to be seen as a nihilist.

I don’t mean to pick on Hawker specifically. Few political diaries show the author in a positive light.

The 2010 equivalent of Hawker’s 2013 diary was Paul Howes’ Confessions of a Faceless Man. It was as much a confession as the author was faceless. Howes’ diary was obviously supposed to be an apologia for his highly public role in the spill that replaced Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard.

But as the blogger Piping Shrike has argued, the only impression Howes’ diary gives is that high politics is utterly inconsequential. Howes surely doesn’t believe that nicknames and YouTube videos win elections, but – if one were to trust his diary – they seem to have been his primary focus during the campaign.

When Mark Latham released his diary in 2005 it was impressive how unguarded it was. It was packed with devastating character assessments. Its depictions of internal Labor politics were so sharply negative they could have been satire.

But since then we’ve come to realise that bile and insult is actually Latham’s usual writing style. His diaries weren’t an expose. They were an audition.

There was nothing revealed in Latham’s diary of his character that he hasn’t revealed over and over in the years since it was published.

Just as there is nothing in Bruce Hawker’s diary that he didn’t want thousands of people to read.

The political class has co-opted the private intimacy of the diary to deliver nothing more intimate than snarky interpersonal rivalries and ham-fisted narrative-shaping.

But that’s politics, I guess.

The most interesting thing about Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Russell Brand isn’t what the comedian says.

No, it’s Paxman’s horrified reaction. Just watch it. Brand is a twit. But Paxman is glorious. He’s just so … shocked. Uncomfortable. Confused.

Paxman is supposed to be one of Britain’s leading political interviewers. He’s questioned top politicians and royalty.

Yet he is apparently flummoxed by this simple idea: voting and political engagement are not the same thing. The first does not equal the second. The second is not dependent on the first.

Fluffy movie-star Marxism aside, Russell Brand is right. Voting is one of the most futile ways to engage in politics.

Your vote – my vote, Brand’s vote, Paxman’s vote – doesn’t count. Not individually. Not to an election.

This is intuitively true, easy to demonstrate, but strangely controversial.

The New Zealand economist Eric Crampton offers a survey of the academic evidence about the notion that an individual vote can change an election here.

The best data is from the United States. A massive survey of 56,613 Congressional and state legislature elections could find only 10 elections where the result had come down to one vote – that is, where the result was a tie or the count revealed just one vote between the candidates.

Even that depressing result overstates the likelihood of a single vote deciding an outcome. Counting is not an exact science. Mistakes can be made (just ask the AEC). Five of those 10 elections were either recounted to reveal much larger margins, or just re-run.

The chance your vote will make a difference is infinitesimally small. So small, in fact, it’s not worth voting.

Not worth it, that is, if the reason you want to vote is to make a difference. There are other reasons one might vote apart from affecting an election outcome.

Many people follow politics like they follow sports teams. If they draw joy from voting, who are we to judge? Others vote because it is part of a ritual that underpins community and nation. That’s nothing to be scoffed at. Purely instrumental claims that voting is “irrational” simply because an individual cannot change the outcome miss the point. There’s nothing irrational about doing something you enjoy.

For some, voting is expressive. How they vote is part of who they are. A “Labor man” is a man who votes Labor. Humans build their identities out of their opinions and values – voting can help reinforce those identities.

And if voting is, legitimately and profoundly, a vehicle for personal expression, then so, surely, is the decision not to vote.

Brand explained his views in the New Statesman the next day: “I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance.”

Many people claim that treating the decision to vote as a personal choice is somehow undemocratic, or a rejection of hard-won liberties.

These arguments should be seen for the nonsense that they are.

There’s a big difference between a right to vote and a positive duty – whether enforced by legal requirement or moral obligation – to do so.

The great battles for freedom and democracy of the past were not fought so that the state could coerce people into political participation. In Australia, we have turned democratic rights into legal requirements. (Yes, voting is compulsory.) Breaches of the law are punishable by the courts. This is a sickly ironic revision of the liberal cause so many died for.

Choosing not to exercise the right to vote is a very democratic choice.

There are far more effective ways to engage with the political system than voting. After all, politics is an ephemeral business.

Paul Samuelson, who wrote the textbook Economics that monopolised post-war university education in the United States, once said “let those who will write the nation’s laws if I can write its textbooks”.

It’s easy to overstate the differences between major parties, when, in fact, partisan differences don’t account very well for changes in public policy over time.

In the 1930s and 40s governments around the world, of left and right persuasion, increased control over their economies. In the 50s and 60s they built welfare states. In the 80s and 90s they privatised and deregulated.

Elections didn’t drive these epoch-defining changes. Voting certainly didn’t. Ideas did. The sort of ideas developed in textbooks and magazines.

But that’s where Russell Brand goes off the rails.

There’s a lot not to like about government of the twenty-first century – the institutionalised rent seeking, the expanding web of regulatory control, the lack of accountability, the national security excesses.

Yet it remains the case that elections are the most equitable, peaceful and legitimate mechanism to fix those problems.

Calling for “revolution”, as Brand does, is childish and naïve. At best such calls result in the kind of nihilistic destruction we saw in the London riots. At worst, well, I’m sure you know your history.

Democratic institutions ensure that if you want to alter policy, you have to convince your fellow citizens that change is desirable.

And, because any single vote will not change an election outcome, you have to convince a very large number that your cause is so important they should make an expressive, personal, “irrational” stand at the ballot box.

The futility of voting means that democracy resists sudden radical change. This is a good thing.

So many people who complain that the “system” is rigged are in truth complaining that most other citizens don’t agree with them.

But Russell Brand’s instincts on voting are correct. There is no civic duty to vote. His personal vote will not make a difference.

Abstaining is as powerful a democratic statement as any vote could be.

The Abbott Government’s expenses scandal has been a wonderful natural experiment.

Most political scandals are three-pronged contests, pitting opposition against government against media. Each vie against the others to pursue their goals: winning office, keeping office, selling eyeballs to advertisers.

So usually it’s hard to tell which faction is the driving force behind the controversy – political party dirt units, muck-raking journalists, or partisan commentators.

But not this time. The Labor party has dealt itself out of the expenses debate. (Fair enough, too. They’ve been busy with a leadership ballot. Nor has Labor wanted to expose itself to charges of hypocrisy. See, as an amusing exception to this discretion, Mark Dreyfus.)

Labor’s absence has left the whole expenses scandal as a simple, clean contest between media and the government.

That seems to have made it more frustrating for the Coalition, rather than less. There has been no way to dismiss the allegations as the product of Labor dirt. But more importantly, this natural experiment reveals just how indulgent the debate over the influence of the media was during the Rudd and Gillard years.

Left intellectuals have spent the past six years obsessing over the wickedness of Australia’s press corps. First we were told the press didn’t care about policy, then that the press was speculating about leadership tensions that didn’t exist, then how it was trying to secure government for Tony Abbott.

At its most lucid, the obsession with the media was displaced frustration with Labor’s hapless performance turned into anger about Rupert Murdoch. At its worst, it produced the sort of mad conspiracy of the #ashbygate crowd.

The expenses scandal demonstrates how off-target all that outrage about the media really was. It turns out the press is more interested in muckraking than kingmaking.

Those Labor supporters who imagined Abbott to be the media’s darling must be very confused.

Remember being told that Abbott was a former journo himself, he provided great copy, and therefore journalists in the press gallery had taken a personal liking to him?

Contrast that with the obvious frustration the new prime minister has had trying to deal with the expenses story in the middle of the APEC summit in Bali.

It’s not like the expenses affair is a particularly scandalous scandal. Parliamentary expenses are one of those stories that journalists can pull out of their pocket on a rainy day.

Questionable expenses claims are regularly reported. They will be with us forever. And compared to the British expenses scandal a few years ago, it’s all a bit pathetic. No Australian politician has billed taxpayers for cleaning their moat.

If the Coalition thought the press was on their side before the election, they no longer do now.

Hopefully there’s another lesson the Coalition will learn from this episode – there’s no such thing as media management.

It seems like yesterday that commentators were telling us just how calmly and quietly the Abbott Government was going about its business. This was apparently a revolutionary change from the media hungry style of Kevin Rudd.

One week after the election, Laurie Oakes wrote that Abbott had shunned the demands of the 24 hour news cycle and gotten on with “working rather than talking”.

They say a week is a long time in politics, but, really, it’s not that long. When all this was being said, the government hadn’t even properly formed. Technically Kevin Rudd was still prime minister.

And, in retrospect, the argument that the Coalition had invented a brilliant new style of media management is pretty funny. The government has wasted two entire weeks trying to bat away the expenses affair.

Politics cannot be willed off the front pages. The media cannot be managed. It can only be defended against.

Kevin Rudd’s infamous one-announcement-per-day strategy was less about controlling the news cycle and more an attempt to out-run negative publicity. But the negativity caught up.

And a good thing too.

Most people say the media should aim to rigorously scrutinise government actions. But it should do more than that: the media should be openly hostile to the government. It ought to be fickle. Sometimes even unfair.

After all, the government is the single most powerful institution in society. Australian governments consume or redistribute over a third of the total resources of the nation.

With such power concentrated in one institution, the real risk to liberal democracy isn’t that the press is unfair to the government, but that it is too indulgent.

During the Labor years, nobody could accuse the press of that sin. And, if the last fortnight is any indication, this term of government will be the same.

Five years ago, the United States Congress was debating its $700 billion bank bailout bill.

Lehman Brothers had collapsed a fortnight earlier. Global share markets were in free fall. It was a time of panic.

But half a decade onwards it is clear the global financial crisis was a cultural crisis as much as an economic one. That’s only natural. Assigning events with cosmic moral significance is part of the human condition.

In his famous crisis-era Monthly essay, Kevin Rudd said the economic downturn was so great that we were entering a new epoch in human history. But Rudd was positively restrained compared to what you heard on talkback radio and newspaper letters pages.

Take this letter, in The Age at the time, in which a professor of medicine speculates that our brains may need rewiring after the crisis. Meanwhile, this is a good example of the typical hand-wringing column warning of the danger of greed and avarice.

All pretty ridiculous in retrospect. And all, of course, from the political left. Perhaps understandably so. The left’s opponents had crowed for three decades that there was no alternative to deregulation and privatisation. Now those certainties seemed dead. The political high ground was up for grabs.

Well, for a bit. The financial crisis quickly morphed into a sovereign debt crisis. That development somewhat dirtied the otherwise clean political message. Turns out the societies most damaged by the crisis were not those who had let their markets run rampant but rather those whose governments had been unregulated by the norms of prudence and responsibility.

So much for the revolution.

The crisis has prompted some modest changes in economic policy – the renewed interested in Keynesian demand management, for instance – and has entrenched government deficits into the foreseeable future. None of these are welcome, but they are reversible.

But it seems likely that the most significant long-term consequence of the Global Financial Crisis is a deeper, more prejudicial popular cynicism about our economic and political institutions.

And rightly so. The GFC involved multiple institutional failures. All sides of political economy were found wanting. Politicians, regulators, central bankers, and markets were all equally corrupt or incompetent. They all failed in their own special, complex, and opaque ways.

In retrospect, the crises of the 1970s – symbolised by but not limited to Watergate and Vietnam – were less damaging to public confidence than the financial crisis of 2008. As I pointed out inThe Drum last year, polls record higher dissatisfaction with government now than they did then.

Here’s some indicative American polling data from Gallup on confidence in institutions, from the presidency to organised labour to banks. In almost all, there has been a clear long-term decline, a decline which was been exacerbated over the last five years.

Such cynicism inevitably manifests itself in popular culture. Hollywood has made a business of selling our neuroses back to us.

Yet most movies that directly tackle the crisis have been either forgettable or too heavy handed to succeed – for instance, the completely unnecessary Wall Street sequel. They tend to suggest that the crisis was caused by the Wall Street lifestyle; that the long economic slump can be blamed on greed, carelessness, or criminality.

As an exercise in fictional villain creation, this approach is fine. But it doesn’t quite capture the all-encompassing nature of the crisis.

There are just so many villains to go around – not just Wall Street excess, but the politicians who forged the massive bailouts, the ratings agencies, the financial regulators, and the central banks.

(It is interesting that one of the only films ever made which shows financial trading in a positive light – The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith – was released at the end of 2006, just months before subprime started to hit.)

More evocative of the crisis was the 2009 George Clooney film Up in the Air. This film said nothing about the causes of the crash, but instead focused on the economic despair it caused.

Australians tend to call the whole episode the Global Financial Crisis, but in the United States it goes by the prosaic “Subprime Crisis”, followed by “the Great Recession”. That different emphasis – from the origins of the crisis to its consequences – explains some of the pessimistic ennui which has enveloped the Western world.

It would be one thing if the 2008 crash had been followed by a strong recovery. But instead the world has experienced a long, uncertain slump.

Up in the Air depicts an economy battered by anonymous forces that the victims neither see or understand. Clooney’s job is to fire employees one by one. The recession in Up in the Air could be any recession. It doesn’t matter how it started. All the sacked workers know is that they have no control over their fate. The existing institutions have let them down.

It captures, in other words, a sense of institutional estrangement.

Such estrangement, and the cynicism it breeds, will be the long-term legacy of the Global Financial Crisis.

Earlier this year, Tony Abbott promised there would be no “night of the long knives” if he won the election.

Back in 1996, John Howard dumped six departmental heads – one third of the total – immediately on taking his position as prime minister. It was the biggest overhaul of the public service since federation.

Howard’s one fell swoop is now legend. With this act, he took absolute political control of the public service immediately – a public service that had worked for Labor for 13 years.

But his critics claimed the night of the long knives was destabilising. Subsequent opposition leaders have rejected doing anything of the sort. Mark Latham promised no public service upheaval on the eve of the 2004 election. In 2007, Kevin Rudd left things as they were.

Abbott’s promise no doubt was to reinforce that there would be nothing controversial about returning the Coalition to government. Yet the new Prime Minister may end up regretting this promise more than any others.

Like it or not, the Westminster tradition – of a frank and fearless public service dispensing objective and politically neutral advice while unflinchingly obeying the elected government – has always been a self-serving fiction.

The tradition dates back to the British Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854. Essentially, the idea is that public servants serve at the pleasure of the monarch, not the elected government. Yet, at the same time, they are supposed to be nothing more than servants of their ministers.

No surprise then that there have been constant complaints throughout Australian history that the public service has pushed its own agenda.

The new government will be deluding itself if it thinks it can just seamlessly slot itself straight into the bureaucratic institutions of the previous government.

John Howard knew this better than any other new prime minister. Howard had been treasurer in Malcolm Fraser’s government two decades before he formed his own government.

Treasury has always been the most powerful department of state. And Treasury has always been the most capable of wielding independent influence over politicians.

The new Treasurer Joe Hockey has been waging a Cold War against his now-department for the last year or so. He is even going to bring in external auditors to scrutinise the methodology behind Treasury forecasts.

But once the political heat dies down, and the government gets on with the tedious job of governing, Hockey is going to come face to face with the “Treasury view”.

The Treasury view is the institutional economic philosophy that governs Treasury advice. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Treasury view consisted of unflinching support for balanced budgets and low inflation.

After World War II, Treasury was converted to Keynesianism, and the goal of preventing inflation was pushed aside for greater public spending.

The disastrous stagflation that resulted in the 1970s saw Treasury move towards free market economics, with an emphasis on privatisation and market reform. In the 1980s and 1990s, academics were complaining that the public service had been captured by “economic rationalists”.

But there were changes still to come. In their book Shitstorm, Lenore Taylor and David Uren recount how at the end of the Howard years, senior Treasury figures secretly brainstormed a change in how the Australian government should deal with economic downturns. Rather than relying on monetary policy to keep the economy above water, it would immediately enact massive Keynesian stimulus.

When Labor took over in 2007 just before the Global Financial Crisis, this policy revolution had its moment to shine. Treasury’s revived interest in Keynesian activism lined up with the interventionist instincts of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan.

Yet the interests of the bureaucracy and the interests of their political masters don’t always line up so neatly.

David Kemp tells a dramatic story about Treasury’s opposition to the decision to devalue the Australian dollar by 17.5 per cent in 1976.

Malcolm Fraser requested Treasury write an economic statement in support of devaluation that he could read in Parliament. Yet the department sent back, churlishly, a bare, useless paragraph. As Kemp says, this was extraordinary. When asked to defend a policy it did not support, Treasury essentially went on strike.

So much for the Westminster ideal.

Still, such a public service strike could not happen today. One reason is introduction of New Public Management – the reorganisation of the public service since the 1980s to make it more efficient, more corporate, and more responsive to its political masters.

Another reason is Howard’s dramatic demonstration of political control in 1996.

The last reason is the rise of ministerial advisors. This dates back from the Whitlam years. Gough Whitlam wanted to avoid being controlled by conservative public sector mandarins, so he brought in his own people as an alternative source of advice.

Political advisors will be particularly important for the Coalition because new ministers – especially those without any previous experience – are vulnerable to capture by their departments.

Neil Brown’s book On the Other Hand ought to be compulsory reading for new Coalition ministers. Brown joined Malcolm Fraser’s ministry at the tail end of the government, and in his book he amusingly documents the experience of being a ministerial trainee up against the permanent, experienced public service.

Brown says the public service divides ministers into good and bad categories. The good ones act on behalf of their department, approve their proposals, and fight for their department to get more money at budget time.

The bad ones are those who believe they are there to control their department, to scrutinise and sometimes reject its policy recommendations, and to do their own reading and thinking.

As Brown wrote, “If a minister is regarded by the public service as bad, he might just be coming close to being what ministers should be.”

Tony Abbott will probably not renovate the upper stories of the public service as his mentor John Howard did. But the first few months of a new government are critical.

If ministers like Joe Hockey don’t push back against the institutional orthodoxies of the public service early on, they may find themselves unable to do so when it counts.

Tony Abbott promised the Liberal Party faithful last week that “By the end of a Coalition government’s first term, the budget will be on track to a believable surplus.”

Got that? Not in surplus. On track to surplus.

Given the Coalition’s near-certain victory, Abbott’s surplus expectations management may be the most significant promise of the whole campaign.

Significant not just for this government or the next, but for Australian governments far into the future.

First, the obvious. This is quite a backtrack. As recently as January, Joe Hockey was promising a budget surplus in the first year of government. By April, the promise had been downgraded into a surplus in the first term.

Here’s the new promise: “Within a decade, the budget surplus will be 1 per cent of GDP.” The Coalition is only willing to guarantee a budget surplus by 2023.

Abbott fudged it a few days later by saying “the Government is proposing to bring us back to surplus in 2016/17 and we will do at least as well as the Government”. But there’s a catch. Abbott doesn’t think the government is able to achieve a surplus in 2016-17.

OK, sometimes public finances change. Tax receipts are unpredictable. (Just ask Treasury.) And promises are easy to regret. (Just ask Julia Gillard.)

But the upshot of the revised promise is the Commonwealth budget will have been in deficit for 15 years – more than half of that time under a Coalition government.

This would be the longest stretch of deficits in Australian history. It would be twice the previous record of seven years, incurred after the Recession We Had To Have.

In their classic 1977 book, Democracy in Deficit: the Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, the Nobel laureate James Buchanan and his co-author Richard Wagner argued that democracy systemically favours deficits.

Politicians want to be loved. And voters love services and infrastructure and big bold plans for the future.

But all these things are costly. Politicians have just three unpleasant ways to increase expenditure. They can increase taxes, they can print more money, or they can borrow.

The first is unpopular. The second increases inflation, also unpopular, and hard to do now our central bank is independent. That leaves borrowing.

The great advantage of borrowing is that by the time debt has to be repaid, the government will have changed. The year 2023 would be the Coalition’s fourth consecutive term of government. Even if the Coalition holds power, odds are Prime Minister Abbott and Treasurer Hockey will be on the book tour circuit by then.

Of course, temporary deficits are natural. In any economic downturn, the government’s budget will go into the red. On one side, taxation revenues fall. On the other side, calls on the public dollar increase as workers drop onto unemployment rolls. It would take hasty, herculean cuts to avoid a deficit in those circumstances.

The Keynesian revolution convinced politicians that they should use the government’s budget as a tool to manage the broader economy; that they ought to spend their way out of a recession by propping up aggregate demand.

Hence Kevin Rudd’s stimulus packages of 2008 and 2009.

The adoption of Keynes’ doctrine, Buchanan and Wagner argue, blew a hole through the classical belief that deficits are something to be ashamed of, and ought to be avoided.

To be fair, John Maynard Keynes himself believed that deficits, once incurred, must be quickly repaid. Preparing the British government’s 1944 policy on full employment, Keynes wrote that “the ordinary budget should be balanced at all times”.

Yet enticed by Keynes’ spending recommendations, the norm that budgets need to be quickly returned to balance was thrown away.

In a way, we should be thankful the Coalition made such a song and dance about the deficit over the last few years. Budgets are only balanced when there is political pressure for them to do so.

That’s what makes Tony Abbott’s backtrack so concerning.

Demoralised and in opposition, Labor will hardly be able to criticise the Coalition for the deficit. And economics commentators have spent the last few years trying to convince us that debt is nothing to worry about. The surplus pressure will be off.

If the global economy stays slow for the next few years, as most indicators suggest it will, Joe Hockey won’t be able to rely on growth alone to rebalance the budget.

And if the global economy takes a turn for the worse, a Coalition government is just as likely to try to spend its way out. It’s often forgotten that the Coalition supported the first tranche of Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package. It still supports Keynesian countercyclical spending.

If deficits are not flushed out early, they fester. When George W Bush dropped his government into deficit with tax cuts in 2001, his defenders said it was a temporary measure to simulate the economy. The US would be back into the black once the crisis was over.

Twelve years later and there’s still no light at the end of the tunnel for the United States.

If the Coalition doesn’t return to surplus soon, these may be the economic consequences of Mr Abbott.