It's preselection time again, and the intensity of the battle seems a little stronger than usual. Here in Victoria half a dozen sitting Labor MPs (Corcoran, Crean, Jenkins, O'Connor, Sercombe, Vamvakinou) are facing carefully orchestrated challenges. There are plenty of commentators tut-tutting it, dismissing it as a source of disunity and observing that many of the challenges are merely the result of the shifting sands of faction politics.
I, for one, would like to stand up for the challengers.
Free markets are wonderful things. Healthy competition keeps all players on their toes and requires them to strive for quality and innovation to survive in a Darwinian marketplace. The same is true of members of parliament. Without the threat of competition, MPs can become self-absorbed, slothful and lazy and do little more than, quite literally, occupy a seat. It's bad for them, it's bad for their constituents, and it's bad for their party.
Given that many Labor MPs find themselves in seats with such healthy margins that they face no realistic challenge at the ballot box, it is necessary for them to have some internal challengers before they get there. One of the reasons for the ALP's malaise over the past 10 years has been the substandard performance of many of its MPs. Check out this list here, and keep a straight face while you tell me it's a galaxy of stars. The Liberals have done much better in recent years and have attracted a more talented selection of backbenchers, which has put upward pressure on the performance of members further up the hierarchy.
There's nothing inherently meritorious about the challengers. Some of them will no doubt end up being just as lame as those seatwarmers they seek to replace. But the mere fact that the incumbents have had their chances and done little with them is reason enough to think positively about the challenger.
Rather than trying to limit the number of preselection battles, the interests of democracy says we should be encouraging more. At the moment it is mostly factionally-fuelled battles in one party, in one state. Let's open up debate nation wide, across parties. Solid, hardworking MPs should be left alone, but there are plenty of others who would benefit from some healthy competition. Though the US Primaries perhaps a tad too divisive, they do offer a glimpse of what could happen here if we encourage democracy and competition in party preselection.
This time around, some of the challengers will get up and some of the sitting MPs will survive, but you can be sure that the mere threat of a challenge will force whoever gets the nod to improve their performance over the next three years. And for that, we should be thankful.
Monday, 27 February 2006
Friday, 24 February 2006
Club BBQ, Thursday 23 Feburary
One more reason to be in this club...
Would you like AAP with that?
More pics coming shortly...
Friday, 3 February 2006
Of Wheat and Weasel Words
Continuing our venerable tradition of cross-posting from members' blogs (original post here).
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One month in and it's already been a great year for political scandal. Overseas the GOP is on the back foot over Abramoff and unwarranted spying on US citizens, while in Australia we've been treated to internal backbiting over party preselections and defecting senators. Now it's emerged that the country's monopoly wheat exporter was defrauding a UN trust fund to underwrite Saddam Hussein's regime. But the red meat is the growing evidence of the federal government's role in this sorry affair, which each day looks less like a wink-nod arrangement and more like application of strategic pressure to keep the grain flowing.
It's settled ground that AWB inflated sales to Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program to cover $300 million of kickbacks to Saddam's government, disguised as transport fees and laundered through a Jordanian trucking company. Apart from the fact that this scheme was cooked up before AWB was privatised, we now know (inter alia) that in 2002 DFAT officials accompanied an AWB mission to Iraq ending in a $2 million bribe; that this mission followed correspondence between AWB execs and the Prime Minister; that DFAT was aware in 2003 0f a pervasive kickback culture surrounding oil-for-food contracts; and that Australia's Washington ambassador helped scuttle a US congressional probe into AWB's Iraq deals in 2004.
The right's counterattack has run a national interest line, examples of which can be found in the comment threads here and here. The argument boils down to claims that a) everyone else was rorting oil-for-food and b) this was no different from greasing business in any third-world country. Even if one accepts that bribing government officials is legitimate under normal circumstances, this was no ordinary squeeze. Iraq bought this wheat via a UN fund set up to allow purchases of humanitarian necessities. Every cent that went to Hussein's regime as a kickback was a cent denied to Iraq's citizens, who were otherwise blocked from buying such goods by international embargo.
Our government's probable complicity in the swindling of a UN program designed to relieve child-killing sanctions is a matter for public concern, pace the Herald Sun and the RWDB crowd. Commissioner Cole should get an expansion of his terms of reference, because if this goes where it's heading then the implications are far direr than an ALP or Fairfax beatup. Our elected leaders, going right to the top, made decisions to undercut a sanctions regime justified by the charcter of Hussein's government and its failure to come clean on WMDs - the same justifications for invading Iraq in 2003. And it's a fair bet that some of that $300 million was squirelled away in private bank accounts that now fund the Iraqi insurgency.
Leftie conspiracy-theorists will see this as more evidence of a grand Western design to squeeze blood out of the third world. We centrist joes see opportunism and moral bankruptcy on the part of our government.
But a large number of Australians, judging from newspaper op-ed pages and blog posts, see nothing wrong at all.
____________________________
One month in and it's already been a great year for political scandal. Overseas the GOP is on the back foot over Abramoff and unwarranted spying on US citizens, while in Australia we've been treated to internal backbiting over party preselections and defecting senators. Now it's emerged that the country's monopoly wheat exporter was defrauding a UN trust fund to underwrite Saddam Hussein's regime. But the red meat is the growing evidence of the federal government's role in this sorry affair, which each day looks less like a wink-nod arrangement and more like application of strategic pressure to keep the grain flowing.
It's settled ground that AWB inflated sales to Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program to cover $300 million of kickbacks to Saddam's government, disguised as transport fees and laundered through a Jordanian trucking company. Apart from the fact that this scheme was cooked up before AWB was privatised, we now know (inter alia) that in 2002 DFAT officials accompanied an AWB mission to Iraq ending in a $2 million bribe; that this mission followed correspondence between AWB execs and the Prime Minister; that DFAT was aware in 2003 0f a pervasive kickback culture surrounding oil-for-food contracts; and that Australia's Washington ambassador helped scuttle a US congressional probe into AWB's Iraq deals in 2004.
The right's counterattack has run a national interest line, examples of which can be found in the comment threads here and here. The argument boils down to claims that a) everyone else was rorting oil-for-food and b) this was no different from greasing business in any third-world country. Even if one accepts that bribing government officials is legitimate under normal circumstances, this was no ordinary squeeze. Iraq bought this wheat via a UN fund set up to allow purchases of humanitarian necessities. Every cent that went to Hussein's regime as a kickback was a cent denied to Iraq's citizens, who were otherwise blocked from buying such goods by international embargo.
Our government's probable complicity in the swindling of a UN program designed to relieve child-killing sanctions is a matter for public concern, pace the Herald Sun and the RWDB crowd. Commissioner Cole should get an expansion of his terms of reference, because if this goes where it's heading then the implications are far direr than an ALP or Fairfax beatup. Our elected leaders, going right to the top, made decisions to undercut a sanctions regime justified by the charcter of Hussein's government and its failure to come clean on WMDs - the same justifications for invading Iraq in 2003. And it's a fair bet that some of that $300 million was squirelled away in private bank accounts that now fund the Iraqi insurgency.
Leftie conspiracy-theorists will see this as more evidence of a grand Western design to squeeze blood out of the third world. We centrist joes see opportunism and moral bankruptcy on the part of our government.
But a large number of Australians, judging from newspaper op-ed pages and blog posts, see nothing wrong at all.
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