Local Story: Polling indicates USB might be wrong way up

 Last week I was asked my opinion on how to like, fix everything.

This post is in the same vein, but not the answer I gave. It is how some select number of people living in the same state as I do, could make a difference.

However, I would point out that it is somewhat applicable in any two party system, though some less than others.

Australia has a) compulsory voting and b) preferential voting and c) funding linked to votes cast, so in Australia no vote is wasted except for the vote that isn't cast.

Now, to declare my bias up front, the Australian Liberal party, which is our conservative party, is done, one way or another they deserve to be swept into the ashcan of history and replaced. 

What they aren't is an Australian fascist party, as the Republican party in the US has become, nor are they (neo)patrimonial which the Trump and Putin regimes certainly are. I have not seen anything that convinces me personally that the Liberal party have a particular problem with believing the Australian nation exists in the blood of the people, nor that they wish to basically scrap regulation and legalise fraud in order to syphon public funds into personal wealth based on personal relationships to party members.

What the Liberal party certainly are, is neoliberalist and though hard to define, I feel it is lets say, fittingly reductive to say that neoliberalism is the ideology that has precipitated all the overlapping crises we are seeing in the world.

Again, being reductive for the sake of brevity, it is neoliberalism that basically froze wages in the late 70s. And by that I mean real wages. This means that since then, all growth in consumption, which under neoclassical economics is the purpose of the economy - GDP/GNP growth is what makes life better, has been fuelled by debt, not income.

By Lee Kuan Yew's rule, in 2026 we can say that neoliberalism doesn't work. Mark Blyth encourages everyone to look up the RAND corporation's paper "Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018" and the RAND corporation with names like Kissinger and Rumsfeld in their Alumni, (so center right) found:

We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion. 

Bringing us back to a state election in Victoria, Australia that is only remarkable in the sense that neither of the two-parties are bat-shit crazy. However, if what you are hoping for is for things to get better by voting in the Libs and ousting Labour after 12 years, I will make a prediction now that anything you profess to care about will just get worse under the Libs.

The best argument for voting Liberal, is that after 12 years, the Labour government needs negative reinforcement for not doing enough.

But if you feel the Labour government with their state-level powers have not done enough, better than voting for the Liberal party or the coalition candidate, would be to vote for a party left-of-labour, or even an independent.

Now if you care about potholes, housing affordability, even crime, my reading of the liberal party's plan pretty much has nothing to address these issues. Where I have the most understanding, is on economic policy, for which the plan is an uninspiring suite of neoliberal thrice-reheated plastic container of cooked rice. Somehow without putting in any new taxes and removing a bunch of existing taxes, they are going to deliver a balanced budget by 2032, which they will not, because the only thing left to do if you cut taxes - the only way the government generates revenue to pay down debt, and debt grows because gov expenditure exceeds gov revenue, is to cut gov expenditure aka austerity whose empirical track record is dubious at best.  

Of course, there is a chance that if you care about crime and public debt, there's a good chance you will suffer less because of how our Murdoch dominated press behaves - as such if public debt and crime and potholes actually increase under a liberal government, there's a good chance you might assume it is reduced because the papers simply wont report it and go on and on and on about it.

What everyone likely will notice is that cost of living, and housing affordability will get worse, those are unavoidable because they don't require newspapers running stories about people you will never meet in a place you never go to offend your sensibilities. 

A Wilson government is likely to cut land tax rates, making our existing housing stock more attractive for investors which will make it less affordable.

I acknowledge that too many, especially owner-occupiers are effectively made conservative the moment all their wealth is tied up in housing, and a neo-classical economics apologist like Australian content creator "Economics Explained" is not entirely wrong when he call housing affordability  a problem nobody really wants solved, at least not in the single most obvious way of bringing house prices down. A majority of people in many of the wealthiest countries "own" their own homes, a few genuinely do so outright, and others via a mortgage they have to repay. Furthermore about 20% or one fifth of Australians own an "investment property"...

The basic problem with wealth inequality, is that you have wealthy people, and the debilitating impacts of inequality on a society are pretty easy to demonstrate empirically - less equal countries by various measures are generally worse countries than more equal ones. And if poverty and crime are spiking even the wealthy can want something done about it. I mean even wealthy parents feel anxiety in Australia that their offspring can't and won't be able to get on the property ladder and they lose sleep over it. Furthermore they are themselves hurt by many of the knock on effects of this - their children marrying later, lacking financial independence, inability to save and not having children or even pets.

Alas, the individuals that form the collective tend to demand "is there a way to make things more equal, but where *I* can stay rich?" and that's the sticking point, like Homer with arms trapped in two seperate vending machines refuses to let go of the cans he is trying to steal.

These are just my preliminary thoughts, on a "plan" that is reductive, uninformative, unserious and infantilising - to which may be added that our society has no excuses now to think that election promises mean anything at all.

The above video is a more thoughtful and informative breakdown of the Liberal plan. This change of government though, is likely to fix nothing you care about.

It is my opinion and my assertion, that how you cast your vote if you want things to improve needs to have as its central strategic vision the abandonment of the current economic orthodoxy - which is to say, to abandon neoliberalism. 

This is no small feat given the economic illiteracy of the population at large, and how depressingly easily concepts like austerity play to public sensabilities.

Not however impossible, as in we have the post-war or mid-century period to draw on as a more successful paradigm, as this was when the middle class was more or less created in one generation. We also have nations like Germany to draw upon whose Ordoliberalism allows for a strong state role - as in you would be voting for your own expansion of powers as a citizen, whereas Neoliberalism is a vote for an expansion of the powers of property owners.

Germany is not perfect, but its this kind of thing where you want to cast your vote for a party that will pursue some kind of meaningful reform rather than just wanting to keep a fully depreciated economic vehicle on the road for a little while longer - in perpetuity.

I won't lie, I just don't think the Liberal party need exist anymore, and for me, Australia's left-wing parties in so far as they too, since Bob Hawke have been pretty much neoliberal parties too, are a perfectly serviceable center-right party. 

You need to vote in a way that drags your politics toward reform, not in a USB way of just flipping it over when the problem isn't that your USB stick was the wrong way up, but that it wasn't aligned with the socket you want to plug it into.

In the Victorian election, that might be as simple as voting for the greens or an independent or whoever you've got in the local seat 1, and then Labour 2, or whatever. Then make sure you chat to your friends and say "I'm giving my first preference to a third party, because I want to send the message to [insert major party] that I'm done with swapsies on the identical economic policies and they are going to have to bight the bullet and offer serious reform." 

I also still like the idea of just voting for whichever candidate spends the least, which you can just eyeball in your electorate by the political messaging you got. This too would work well in somewhere like the US, where Super-PAC money has thoroughly turned the country into an oligopoly, though some states are trying to enact legislation to say incorporated bodies ie. corporations have no place in the electoral process which was a state right reserved for them by the supreme court.

I mean the US is in a lot of fucking trouble, but I like the beautiful simplicity of "the more money you take the less you are my candidate." which is fucking true.