Allan Patience
Recent articles by Allan Patience
Charlie Hebdo: free speech or provocation?
Terrible events in France a teacher beheaded, stabbings of innocent bystanders, and the shooting of a Greek orthodox priest are recent examples of a clash of cultural identity systems that remain stubbornly alien to each other.
The hyper-masculinised culture of the Australian economy
With eminent justification, feminists have long criticised the patriarchal structuring of the Australian economy. Yet women continue to hold only a tiny fraction of CEO positions, board memberships and senior management appointments across the country.
Your ABC is turning into their ABC
The combined savagery of the Murdoch media, the jejune fogies in the Young Liberals, their fogy elders on the extreme right, as well as their urgers in reactionary organisations like the Institute of Public Affairs, is culminating in an unhappy deterioration in the ABCs programming and in the quality of its presenters.
COVID-19's lessons for Australia's post-pandemic governance
The notion that government is the problem not the solution for the political failures of the late twentieth century was the most devious and destructive attack on representative government, ever. Its time to bring government back to centre stage.
The politics of the coming generation.
ANUs 2019 Australian Electoral Survey showed that among young people in Australia today there is evidence of a growing divide between the voting behaviour of younger and older generations.
Frydenberg, the hollow man: Thatcher and Reagan's political grandson.
It has never been clear what ethical principles guide Josh Frydenbergs politics. He appears to be a hollow man, especially with his recent declaration that he will look to the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan for inspiration to shape Australias economic future.
Australia's American dreaming is turning into a nightmare.
Since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australians have been living a dream that America shares their countrys cultural values, language and democratic institutions. They dream that they are safely cacooned in Tony Abbotts beloved anglosphere, with the USA in the lead. As with all dreams, this fantasy has always had the flimsiest basis in reality. And today the dream is turning into a nightmare.
Dan Tehan, BA (Hons): Biting the educational hand that fed him
Someone recently observed that Education Minister Dan Tehan is as dumb as Peter Dutton. Tehans latest foray into higher education policy certainly puts him in the same class as Dutton as a hoary wielder of a sledgehammer when it comes to making public policy.
It's time to reform Australia's higher education system.
The drying up of international student numbers because of the coronavirus border closures, plus the Coalition governments indifference (indeed, hostility) to universities, is undermining morale right across the countrys higher education sector.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Dealing with China.
Scott Morrison and Marise Paynes call for an international independent inquiry into the Coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the ham fistedness of the Morrison governments approach to diplomacy.
ALLAN PATIENCE. The Future is global.
The closing of borders because of the coronavirus pandemic has inflamed opinion around the world that the era of globalisation is coming to an end. Governments are raising the sovereignty flag, hunkering down behind their borders.
ALLAN PATIENCE. The coronavirus pandemic and the crisis of Australian federalism.
Despite the Prime Ministers daily press conferences in which he fatuously tries (as is his wont) to reassure all Australians that they are on the bridge to the other side of the coronavirus pandemic, confusion and fear continue to stalk the land.
ALLAN PATIENCE. The Leaderless Country
Australia has been leaderless since the federal election last May.
ALLAN PATIENCE. The Flimflam man.
Amid the devastation of the bushfires and drought, what has become bleedingly obvious is that Australia is bereft of the leadership so urgently necessary at this time of national crisis. Morrison is the emperor without clothes, revealing his total lack of moral authority.
ALLAN PATIENCE. The shonk from the shire.
Maybe Australians took to Scott Morrison during the election campaign for two main reasons: (1) He was not Bill Shorten; (2) He cunningly presented himself as an authentic bloke, a daggy dad, Mr Mainstream. There were no airs and graces. He was happy to be photographed goofily playing amateur soccer or wearing a baseball cap not so subtly in the style of Donald Trump. He made sure never to appear superior to ordinary Mums and Dads. He cleverly claimed to be the champion of the quiet Australians getting on with their lives outside the Canberra bubble. The remarkable fact is...
ALLAN PATIENCE. The ALP and the religious right in Australian politics
The religious right is casting a darkening cloud over Australias democracy.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Schmoozing America, antagonising China
The Morrison government is cleaving ever more closely to the USA, asserting that the two countries have shared values and aligned interests. Meanwhile it has taken to lecturing China about human rights abuses and emphasising how the values of the Chinese Communist Party are anathema to Australias cultural values and democratic politics.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Getting Morrison's boot off Labor's throat.
The Guardians political editor, Katherine Murphy, recently observed that Scott Morrison and his band of merry ministers were recklessly ignoring the most pressing policy issues while making a pretence of being in opposition. Labor, the Morrisettes insist, is responsible for all the countrys woes, giving the impression that somehow Labor is still in power.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Re-imagining Australia's higher education sector
Recently a report commissioned by Education Minister, Dan Tehan, recommended a tightening of the criteria by which any tertiary education institution can call itself a university.
ALLAN PATIENCE. W(h)ither Labor?
The election loss in May devastated the ALP. The loss was made worse as the party realised that those voters who were heartily fed up with the shenanigans of the Liberal-National Coalition had nonetheless avoided turning to Labor. Since then, Labor MPs and the administrative machine of the party have been licking their wounds while trying to work out what went so horribly wrong.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Complacency is the opiate of the Australian masses.
So, QANTAS CEO Alan Joyces annual salary is now some $24 million dollars. This is over three hundred times the average Australian salary. Other CEOs are also being paid well into the tens of millions of dollars. Meanwhile the wages of the vast majority of Australian workers are flat-lining as the cost of living relentlessly heads upwards.
ALLAN PATIENCE. American realism versus Australian independence.
During his recent visit to Australia, the American International Relations scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer, warned his Australian hosts that the United States superpower would not tolerate any serious deviation by Canberra away from the ANZUS alliance for example, by aligning with China against the USA. He was echoing George W. Bushs warning that youre either with us [the USA], or against us. Mearsheimers message was brutally clear: Australia has no choice other than to remain a loyal ally of the USA, come what may, even in the Trump era. His policy prescriptions were absurdly simplistic and morally repugnant.
ALLAN PATIENCE: What are Australia's values?
There has been talk of late about Australias values which are said to parallel the values of related countries, especially America and Britain. Implied in this talk is a view that these values characterise civilised even superior nations, in contrast to certain countries in our region, especially China. However, precisely what constitutes Australias values is not coherently addressed by their advocates, many of whom appear unconcerned that their values narrative contains echoes of the old white Australia policy, with all its insular, racist and xenophobic connotations.
ALLAN PATIENCE. How to advance Australia.
In his important new book How to Defend Australia, Hugh White has placed before us a very clear picture of the contemporary security challenges now confronting Australia. First and foremost is Chinas re-emergence as a (or maybe the) major power in the Western Pacific. This challenge for Australia is heightened by the Trump administrations confusing responses to Beijings assertiveness across the region. Moreover, the United States may not be all that interested in guaranteeing Australias security into the next three or four decades. And even if it were so inclined, will its military capabilities be able to easily counter those...
ALLAN PATIENCE and GARRY WOODARD. Morrison as a middle power statesman?
In attempting to predict how Scott Morrison will develop as a foreign policy Prime Minister, the obstacles in his way should first be noted. While his potential authority within the party room is considerable, he lacks the foreign policy experience of previous Prime Ministers such as Menzies, Whitlam, Hawke and Rudd.
ALLAN PATIENCE It's time for a democratic socialist agenda for Australia
Australians have suffered greatly because of the free-market fundamentalism that has been running riot across the political landscape for nearly half a century. Neoliberalism has at last run its destructive course. Its time for a new era of public policy reconstruction for which a democratic socialist agenda has much to offer.
ALLAN PATIENCE. America- Australia's Fool's Paradise
Deeply ingrained into Australias collective psyche is the nave conviction that the United States is the countrys most important, entirely reliable, and utterly benevolent ally. This obsequious sentimentalism was embarrassingly expressed in the words of former Prime Minister John Howard: The relationship we have with the United States is the most important we have with any single country. This is not only because of the strategic, economic, and diplomatic power of the United States. But of equal, if not more significance, are the values and aspirations we share.
ALLAN PATIENCE Are we seeing the beginning of America's fragmentation.
In his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, Malcolm Fraser issued Australians with a timely warning. He pointed out that the America with which Australia had signed the ANZUS treaty way back in 1951 is a very different country to the great and powerful friend we imagined it to be at the end of World War II. Its internal politics are riven with religious fundamentalisms, factionalised political parties, gun-toting madmen culturally and politically licensed by the NRA and elements in the Republican Party, narrowly-conceived identity politics, worsening economic divides, decaying cities, a class-based culture of populist resentment, and major cultural and political...
ALLAN PATIENCE Labor must broaden its base
Like all mainstream, once-reforming parties in the liberal democracies, the ALPs base has shrunk, mainly to inner-city dwellers with progressive views on issues like same-sex marriage and climate change. These people many with university degrees and professional careers incline to supercilious indifference, even hostility, when confronted by the resentful prejudices, religious fundamentalisms, and sense of exclusion of people struggling in industrial suburbs, on the fringes of cities, or in regional areas across the country. The relatively privileged elites have little compassion for, or understanding of, what motivates once rock-solid Labor voters to turn to the likes of Pauline...
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountain: Writing from Manus Prison
In the foreword to this harrowing narrative about asylum seekers incarcerated on Manus Island, Australian author Richard Flannagan writes: Reading this book is difficult for any Australian. We pride ourselves on decency, kindness, generosity, and a fair go. None of these qualities are evident in Boochanis account of hunger, squalor, beatings, suicide and murder. Flanagan has put his finger on an ugly irony in Australias national self-imagining. Many Australians would be amazed that they might not be viewed as decent, kind, and generous folk with an acute sense of social justice. Arent they a people intuitively practising the virtues of...
ALLAN PATIENCE. It's time for a constitutional reform commission
Acting on references from attorneys-general, the independent Australian Law Reform Commission and its state government equivalents review and recommend reforms to existing laws, and/or identify where new laws are necessary. When it comes to the Australian Constitution, the highest level of law in the country, the case for an independent constitutional reform commission along similar lines to law reform commissions has never been stronger.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing
When Scott Morrison announced that the Sydney Opera House was the biggest bill board in the country he displayed a crass mindset straight from the commercialized anti-culture of the neoliberal era. Plastering a racing industry advertisement across the sails of the Opera House meant nothing more to him other than a great marketing opportunity. It didnt occur to him that it amounted to the vandalising of a culturally sacred place.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Teaching as a vocation.
Good teachers are equal to good parents in any civilized society. They are infinitely more important than politicians, civil servants, professionals, business people, media commentators, celebrities and sports stars all put together. (Good nurses come a very close second.) Yet they remain among the least valued, respected and rewarded for the amazingly vital work they perform. While concern about the quality of students enrolling in teacher education programs in our universities is warranted, its time to address the low status accorded the teaching profession. It also means asking some searching questions about how up-and-coming teachers are being taught in universities.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Saving some of the Liberal furniture.
Time is running out for the Liberal Party and the Coalition as the 2019 federal election looms. The change of Prime Minister from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison was a classic example of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Opinion polls have consistently shown that the Coalition is running significantly behind Labor. Can anything be done to save at least some of the furniture? Not much. But some face-saving possibilities hover in the background.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Anthony Fishers message of ill will at Christmas tide
The archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher OP is the nominal head of the Australian Catholic Church despite the fact that Melbourne is the largest and arguably the most intellectually lively diocese in the country. Fisher is seen by many as an authoritative spokesperson for his brother bishops, priests and religious. So, his 2018 Christmas message offered him a golden opportunity to reach out inclusively, positively and generously to his fellow Catholics and to all people of good will across the wide brown land. In the event, he managed to disappoint, even anger, just about everybody except for the small...
ALLAN PATIENCE. It's time to cleanse the Augean stables of corporate and political governance in Australia.
It will require a Herculean effort to clean out the greed, corruption, sense of entitlement, selfishness and ideological blindness at the commanding heights of Australias government, economy and society. The banking royal commission has exposed merely the tip of this ugly reality. In business, in the professions, in the media and in politics, many of those at the top are the custodians and reproducers of a culture that is morally fetid. They remain obsessed with themselves, their cronies, their salaries and bonuses, their perks of office.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Scott Morrison a politician out of his depth?
Can Scott Morrison inspire the nation to reach for a better future for our children and grandchildren? Does he have a vision for the country? Or is he floundering as he tries to ride two tigers simultaneously his right foot on the back of the alt-right tiger with Tony Abbotts rictal grimace spread across its face; his left foot on the back of a tiger of panicking moderates? If the tigers head off in opposite directions, Morrison will fall flat on his face.
ALLAN PATIENCE: Capitalism has run amok!
If the 2007/08 Global Financial Crisis wasnt sufficient evidence that something is deeply pathological within the contemporary capitalist system, then Ken Henrys at times truculent, at times ruminative responses to questioning before the Financial Services Royal Commission should provide food for thought. He pinpointed some serious defects that have grown like virulent cancers across the finance industry in this country. The economic blinkers blinding our big bank officials are being stripped away and they dont like what they are at last being forced to acknowledge. The Royal Commissions work has revealed in lurid detail, that contemporary capitalism in Australia has...
ALLAN PATIENCE: The dilemma now facing Coalition politics in Australia
The results of the Victorian State election are devastating for right-wing politics right across Australia. It is now blindingly obvious that the policies that they have been spruiking are irrelevant to mainstream voters. It is as if the Coalition parties presently exist in a parallel political universe, hermetically sealed off from the everyday opinions and needs of contemporary Australian voters. Its time for the Liberal Party leadership to understand that the party is no longer a broad church embracing liberals and so-called conservatives. The increasingly phalangist tendencies of the alt-right rump in the party (along with their mates...
ALLAN PATIENCE: Hubris doesnt win elections
Australias conservative leaders are proving to be increasingly unattractive to voters because in its ranks are those who have no other way of making an honest living other than to live off politics (for example, Pauline Hanson), those who are all about settling old and irrelevant scores (for example, Tony Abbott), and those whose monstrous political cynicism will never change (for example, Peter Dutton). Coalition members are waking up to the fact that electoral oblivion may now be staring them in the face.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Politics as a Vocation
In his famous essay Politics as a Vocation the great German scholar Max Weber explained that the kinds of people who tend to become politicians lie along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are those who live off politics. They are there to boost their own egos and serve their own interests and the narrow interests of those who subsidize them. They see politics as a profession a means for accruing status, power and material rewards entirely for themselves and their cronies. At the other end of the spectrum are those who live for politics. They are...
ALLAN PATIENCE: Whose class war?
The Murdoch media and its political minions in the Coalition have declared that Bill Shorten is conducting a class war against hardworking Australian aspirationalists. The pseudo-conservatives in the media and the parliament equate Labors opposition to their taxation policies with seriously undermining the Australian economy while destabilizing Australian society.
ALLAN PATIENCE: Fragmenting Australia
CEDA (the Committee for Economic Development of Australia) has recently published a report (Community Pulse 2018: The Economic Disconnect) that shows that there is a disconnect between Australias strong economic record and the communitys sense of having shared in the growth (p. 5). The report adds to others that show that today a majority of Australians is deeply distrustful of politicians and political parties; that there is disillusionment (particularly among young people) with the ideals of democracy; and that socio-inequality is increasing in Australia today. It is bizarre that the political class seems oblivious to the very serious problems inherent...
ALLAN PATIENCE: Our ABC!
Grimly ideological neoliberals in the ranks of the young fogies at the Liberal Partys recent federal council sponsored a motion to privatise the ABC. In an astonishing display of shooting themselves in the foot, the old fogies present (including Ministers Mitch Fifield and Julie Bishop) glumly and dumbly let the motion pass, thereby handing the Turnbull government a hefty political migraine for the by-elections on 28 July and the coming general election.
ALLAN PATIENCE:The serious under-development of Papua New Guineas university system
There is a crisis in Papua New Guineas university system. Universities are devastatingly under-resourced and under-performing. The bizarre persecution of PNG University of Technologys Vice-Chancellor, Dr Albert Schram, also points to a disastrous governance breakdown at university council level. Can the Australian university sector do anything to help? Yes it can.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Compassionate policy planning as the antidote to populism
The Italian election has shown, very clearly, that ordinary voters are deeply angry with mainstream politicians and political parties. What is true of Italy is also true of Australia. The political class sneeringly dismisses voter anger as populism, blindly believe it will evaporate once voters come to their senses. Theyre wrong. Anger is mounting exponentially across the country. Voters are looking for alternatives any alternative than to vote for the narcissists currently governing us. This poses a serious danger to the political system but it also offers a golden opportunity for Labor.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Time to inject some realism into the China debate.
A rising chorus can be heard in Australia voicing fears about Chinas alleged intrusions into our domestic affairs. There are disturbing echoes in all this of a narrative about a dangerous China lurking in the interstices of Australias society and economy. These echoes need top be addressed before we can have an intelligent debate about how to respond to Chinas re-emergence as a great power and how our foreign policy can be revised to prevent Australia being drawn into great power rivalries in the Asia Pacific.
Changed America is now a threat
Malcolm Frasers lucid case for Australia to strike out independently from the USA in its foreign and defence policies (Dangerous Enemies, MUP 2014) pointed to a vitally important fact. The America we signed the ANZUS treaty with in 1951 is absolutely no longer the America with which Malcolm Turnbull would have us joined at the hip today. It is time to face the fact that the contemporary USA is a major threat to Australias security and prosperity. Its time to replace ANZUS with a more mature agreement that will not constrain Australias independence.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Australia Day and all that.
The moral basis of contemporary Australian society is being squeezed dry by political opportunism and contempt for civic virtue among our political leaders. The ignorance those leaders demonstrate about the insult Australia Day has become for many Indigenous people is evidence that Australia has become a morally backward society.