Tag: ABC The Drum

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club that she did not want to start “the nation’s longest election campaign”, the whole room laughed.

Because that’s what she had just done. She knew it, the press gallery knew it, and the public knows it.

The announcement only happened on Wednesday but the intervening six days have been an eternity. One MP has been arrested, two senior ministers have resigned, we have a new Attorney-General and a new Minister for Immigration (the Commonwealth’s two most contentious jobs) and now the Prime Minister is reprimanding Labor MPs for leaking against her Government.

But let’s stick with the election announcement for a bit. It exposed pretty much everything that’s wrong with Australian politics today. The obsession with minor media idiosyncrasies. Our parliamentarians’ ridiculously self-important attitude. Most of all, the drifting aimlessness of the parties. Julie Gillard didn’t just reveal a date – September 14. She opened a little window into our current malaise.

There are three public explanations for why Gillard announced the election now.

The first two are briefly plausible. In her speech, the Prime Minister said it would give the business community “certainty”, and spike the inevitable press speculations about the date.

The former claim inflates the importance of politics. It’s easy for the political class to imagine the whole country lives on their every word. It flatters the politicians, who want desperately to believe when the government changes the country changes. It flatters the pundits, who imagine their interpretation of the momentous events of Canberra are of great significance. It patronises everybody else.

The latter claim ridiculously, hilariously exaggerates the importance of opinion columns. Are we really so obsessed with the media we think the occasional, harmless speculation about an election date hurts our democracy? That spiking the future column ideas of press gallery reporters is somehow a brilliant political manoeuvre?

If Julia Gillard’s office genuinely believes so, Labor is in more trouble than even the polls suggest. For the last few years anti-media hysteria has grown out of control. Now all that marginal bleating about the “MSM” is starting to subsume the functions of government itself.

Gillard’s third and final explanation for announcing the election date isn’t even coherent, let alone convincing. Why would announcing an upcoming election date make it “clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning”? It does exactly the opposite. It blurs the boundaries.

The announcement has left everybody confused. Her parliamentary colleagues seem to have gone into a strange, half-hearted campaign mode, not sure where they are in the political cycle. Wayne Swan went on 7.30 the night of Gillard’s Press Club speech for no obvious reason except to demonstrate he exists. If the Treasurer had something to announce, some new question to answer, it never came out in the interview. Was Swan campaigning or governing? Did he even know?

A “campaign” is not a strictly defined thing. It exists in the mind of the beholder. It’s an attitude. That some state parliaments have fixed terms is irrelevant. In federal politics the campaign starts when the Prime Minister reveals the polling day. If something looks like a campaign, smells like a campaign, then it’s a campaign.

Indeed, the launch of a campaign is the only way Gillard’s Press Club speech makes sense. Labor has long hoped voters would eventually be so revolted by Tony Abbott they would turn against the Coalition. The Press Club address was one final ploy to up the stakes; a last attempt to try to shift the burden of proof onto the Opposition.

The Government needs the election to seem imminent enough that voters start really questioning Abbott’s preparedness for government. But electoral attitudes don’t change overnight, so there needs to be time to turn the public around.

Certainly, Gillard didn’t just announce the election date at the Press Club. She gave a 3,500 word speech. The rest of it was a serious discussion with a few important arguments about the state of the Australian economy. Unsurprisingly people have criticised the media for ignoring all that heavy stuff.

But whose fault is that? Julia Gillard didn’t come down with the last shower. She must have known people would focus more on the surprise election date reveal than her thoughts about long-term trends in superannuation returns. The Prime Minister couldn’t have diverted more attention from the body of her speech if she tried.

Yes, we’ve got to the stage that people are blaming the press for what politicians do.

Labor people want Tony Abbott’s Coalition to be subjected to more scrutiny. That’s fair enough. The Coalition has been calling for an early election for years, and we’ve a right to see more of what they’ll do in government, not just how much they think Julia Gillard is a bad prime minister.

So for all its flaws Gillard’s early announcement gambit could work. Even if it doesn’t, what has the Government got to lose?

But let’s not pretend it isn’t an explicitly political gesture, only made possible by our sickly and dissatisfied national political culture.

Last Monday the left-wing magazine New Statesman declared it was “Orwell Week”.

How utterly shameless.

George Orwell is no longer a journalist. He is an all-purpose, all-terrain vehicle for the vanities of other writers.

This is particularly obvious in the case of the New Statesman. In 1937, the magazine’s editor, Kingsley Martin, rejected two of George Orwell’s pieces on the Spanish Civil War for being excessively critical of communism. His articles would “cause trouble”, Martin claimed, because Orwell had described fascism and communism as two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
The New Statesman was a bastion of sympathy for the Soviet Union. Orwell later said its typical reader “worships Stalin”.

Now the New Statesman wants to wear George Orwell as a political badge.

Orwell has an outsized reputation. It goes something like this: he brilliantly captured the essence of socialist totalitarianism, and did so against the political fashion of the time. Other intellectuals had been seduced by the Soviet experiment. He was a lonely apostate. This required great moral courage.

There is less to these claims than the Orwell idolisers will admit. He was a good writer – and a great journalist – but the Orwell cult has gotten way out of hand.

People imagine if they talk about their heroes they will imbibe their qualities. Politicians make speeches about Winston Churchill hoping his reputation for leadership and grit will rub off on them. Journalists use Orwell for independence and integrity. Christopher Hitchens – usually such an iconoclast – did more to inflate the Orwell cult than anybody in recent decades, and did so transparently to make himself Orwell’s political heir.

But Orwell got one big thing wrong, and it goes to the heart of his political thought. He misunderstood the basic nature of totalitarianism. He rightly believed the all-powerful state was terrifying. He wrongly thought it could function.

The state in Nineteen Eighty-Four has complete control over society. The Thought Police sees all. The four great ministries of government (Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love) command all. It was totalitarian in the most fundamental sense – state power was total.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was nothing like this. Konstantin Simis’ great book USSR: The Corrupt Society makes clear how broken the Soviet system was. It was held up by networks of patronage and bribery and an underground economy and interpersonal politics. The USSR didn’t have high-tech telescreens feeding a central authority. Soviet control came from informants and petty betrayals. Totalitarianism was anything but complete.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s protagonist fantasises that the state might be rotten under the surface.

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.

It’s a telling difference, that between Orwellian fantasy and crooked reality. In 1944 Orwell wrote a downbeat review of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He accepted Hayek’s political critique of socialism. A state that tried to control an economy would eventually control a society.

But Orwell does not seem to have taken in Hayek’s more crucial message: communism did not function as well as communists imagined.

No matter how unconstrained and all-powerful a central planner was, they would never be able to marshal enough information about the economy to plan it effectively. Big Brother could never see everything. Orwell did not accept this. He remained a socialist, albeit a democratic one.

That, ultimately, is what makes Orwell interesting. He succeeded where so many of the pre-war left failed. Rather than wilfully defending and promoting the Soviet dictatorship, he attacked it. His fame is tied to their infamy. This is why the New Statesman’s appropriation of his name so obscene. It was the moral bankruptcy of Kingsley Martin that makes Orwell important.

Orwell was not the only intellectual to identify the totalitarian impulse in Marxism, and certainly not the first. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1948. Eugene Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future was published nearly 60 years earlier, in 1891. Richters’ book is also a dystopian imagining of a communist state. But Richter was a German liberal, and was as interested in discrediting how socialism worked as exposing its dictatorial tendencies.

Another “Orwellian” vision, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, was published in 1921. We is on the other side of the spectrum – it is even more fantastical than Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even more extreme. Zamyatin had personal experience of Soviet communism. (His book was the first to be censored by the Soviet literary board.) The totalitarian state in We has even stripped citizens of their names. Zamyatin’s protagonist is referred to as D-503. Where Orwell explored how a state used language for control, Zamyatin’s state used mathematics, giving the book a surreal feeling that Nineteen Eighty-Four lacks.

Jack London also wrote a dystopian novel in 1908, The Iron Heel, which Orwell is known to have admired.

Neither was Orwell uniquely clear-headed about the nature of the Soviet Union. From 1917 onwards there were credible reports from émigrés, Christian missionaries and even the occasional tourist revealing all was not well in the USSR.

Details were sketchy but as this newspaper search demonstrates Soviet persecution was no secret. Western Marxists who discounted these reports were being wilfully ignorant. Those that ignored them are morally culpable.

Orwell did neither. But surely this is the bare minimum we ask of an intellectual – to not completely sell out, to not outright lie, to not distort known truths in service of an ideology. Once again the idea of Orwell as a truth-seeking hero only makes sense when we account for the intellectual depravities of his comrades.

A writer does not have to be ground-breaking to be valuable and insightful. And it isn’t fair to heap the egos of half a century of jealous polemicists on to Orwell.

One of the charms of Orwell’s journalism is his modesty. And a person cannot be held responsible for what others do with their reputation. But, no doubt, George Orwell would be amazed at what his has become.

In 1979 Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, wrote to a friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Amis’s son Martin had just published his third novel.

Kingsley was a conservative who hated feminism, welfare and the Labour Party. Martin was a young radical who hated nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. Martin had just left Britain.
“Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE?”, the elder Amis wrote, obviously annoyed.

“Last year he earned 38,000 pounds. Little sh*t. 29, he is. Little sh*t.”

So that’s a conservative father angry at his left-wing son for avoiding taxes. Imagine how Kingsley felt when Martin published his most famous novel a few years later: Money, a satire on eighties greed.

Yes, people have strong feelings about tax exile.

Gerard Depardieu left France in December because he didn’t want to pay president Francois Hollande’s 75 per cent top rate – the so-called “millionaire tax”.

The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Michael Caine, Noël Coward, David Bowie, Sean Connery, and the journalist David Frost have all at one time in their careers left home to find a cheaper tax rate.

But their actions are rarely welcomed by taxpayers who remain behind. When Depardieu joined the tax exile ranks, the French press was furious.

Take this piece in Libération by another actor, Philippe Torreton:

You are leaving the French boat in the middle of a storm?

Scroll through the whole thing. Even muddled by Google Translate it’s extraordinary. Angry, deeply nationalist, and betrayed. Torreton pretty much accuses Depardieu of treason.

To be fair, Depardieu is no freedom fighter. He has gone to Russia, a country now famous for locking up musicians. And he’s not just running away from taxes. Depardieu didn’t appear at a drink driving hearing in France last week. But, then again, those aren’t the reasons Torreton is angry.

Why do tax exiles spark so much resentment? Our views on immigration-as-tax-avoidance expose deep political differences.

But these differences are implicit rather than explicit. We’re used to sterile, utilitarian debates about the size of government or economic regulations. The Amis family would have split on these issues along standard left and right lines. Tax exile raises deeper, thornier questions about the relationship between nation and individual; between democratic obligation and liberty.

In many ways, it’s like the debate about compulsory voting. We’re not sure what the social contract actually says.

Democracy is a mechanism for making collective choices. Universal suffrage gives those choices legitimacy. That’s all good. But what happens to those who object to a democratic decision? Depardieu obviously disagreed that his tax rate should be 75 per cent. So he left. Is this legitimate? Is he being fair to France?

Let me give the classical liberal answer. When faced with something we dislike we have two choices. We can use our voice to get things changed – we can vote or protest or complain. Or we can exit. Depardieu took his business elsewhere.
But voice and exit are not mutually exclusive. The threat of exit adds strength to the voice. The fear people will send their money offshore is a powerful limitation on how much governments can tax.
So French taxpayers owe tax exiles like Depardieu some thanks. The actor’s highly-publicised flight demonstrates emigration is not an idle threat.

Reflecting in his memoir about when the Rolling Stones left England, Keith Richards wrote that:

The last thing I think the powers that be expected when we they hit us with super-super tax is that we’d say fine, we’ll leave… They just didn’t factor that in.

Governments don’t always remember their power is not absolute. Allowing citizens to leave is as powerful a check on state power as a constitution or a bill of rights.

And of course if we care about liberty, then the freedom for an individual to choose where they live has to be respected.

One major source of resentment about tax exile is that it is a luxury of the rich. A French dock worker, no matter how heavily he feels the tax burden, will not be personally welcomed into Russia by Vladimir Putin.

This is a reasonable objection. But it’s directed at the wrong culprit. Around the world, immigration policies favour high-skilled, high net-worth individuals. They specifically and intentionally keep out the poor and unskilled. This is obviously unjust, but immigration policies are to blame, not tax exiles.

Depardieu is not unique. France is experiencing a wave of tax exile much like Britain before the Thatcher years. Musicians and actors fled Britain’s high tax rates in endemic numbers. There’s a great story about Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, dragging himself out of hospital after a car accident and rushing to the airport in order to maintain his British non-resident status for tax purposes.

There was such interplay between culture and taxation in Britain that musical genres could be defined by where the artists stood on the tax ladder. In 1976 Mick Jones of The Clash summarised the difference between new punk and old rock by saying:

We’re all down [on] the dole anyway, coppin’ our money off Rod Stewart’s taxes.

Jones was teasing. Stewart had left Britain the year before.

Many British tax exiles went to France. Today many French exiles live in Britain.

If Francois Hollande persists with his supertax on high income earners (not a sure thing, as the 75 per cent rate was recently ruled unconstitutional) then tax flight will shape French culture this decade as sure as it shaped British culture before Margaret Thatcher.