In the post-truth world nobody has a memory longer than a goldfish. “Populism” is the latest victim. Judith Sloan has a crack at it:
Having read quite widely on the topic of populism, what emerges for me is a confusing quagmire of what is actually meant by the word. At best, populism is a very fuzzy term.
For the left, populism is the refusal to sign up to all the mantras that its members hold so dear, such as climate change, refugee and immigration policy, big government, gender and minority rights, and the like. For the right, it would seem to be about people being insufficiently concerned about individual rights and too caught up in their local, daily lives.
Another way of thinking about this issue is to note the distinction between globalism and globalisation. The first term refers to the scope of international institutions to determine the policies and actions of sovereign governments, with one world government being the ultimate endpoint of the globalist movement.
Globalisation, on the other hand, refers to the relatively free movement of goods, services and capital and the controlled movement of people between sovereign states. Some people may have reservations about globalisation, although the benefits of trade are not difficult to appreciate.
But globalism is something different altogether; the intersection of opposition to globalism with populism is what makes populism an interesting phenomenon and one that politicians cannot afford to ignore. Populism at least forces elites to discuss issues they would prefer to remain unaddressed.
ABC’s Q&A gathered the Bootleggers and Baptists together to trash “populism”:
Following Mr Abbott’s call for reduced immigration to ease population strains, the panel largely disagreed with the proposition but said “candid” conversation around the issue was necessary.
“I don’t agree with reducing immigration in that way I think that certainly there are concerns in our community about, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, the pressures of population growth,” said Liberal MP Zed Seselja.
“There’s no doubt about that. So people will always look for answers. Now, population growth – if it’s not matched with infrastructure spending and availability of housing, availability of health and education, and the ability to get around and not be stuck in traffic – people do get frustrated. I don’t think the answer is to go and cut immigration dramatically.”
There was some agreement from Labor MP Clare O’Neil: “I think we saw Tony Abbott doing what he does best, unfortunately – and that is playing to the politics of division. This is straight out of the Donald Trump playbook, straight out of the UKIP playbook. It’s a disappointing thing to hear from someone like him.”
So, the implication is that Tony Abbott is literally an insane populist for raising immigration as an issue.
Neither Sloan nor the ABC has this right, though Sloan’s distinction between globalisation and globalism is close. Populism is not the pursuit of policy that may or may not be popular. It is the pursuit by elites of policy that is represented as popular but in truth benefits only the same elite few putting the argument. It is the difference between pretending to be “of the people” rather than actually being “for the people”. The “old bread and circuses” policies of Rome being the archetype.
Donald Trump is a populist because he represented his corporate tax cuts as beneficial to working class Americans when they the opposite. UKIP is not a populist. It is a nationalist. It misrepresented withdrawal from the Eurozone as beneficial to working classes when it won’t but neither will elites benefit. In both cases, however, given low inflation, the immigration cuts proposed will lift living standards for working classes as wages rise more than versus the counter-factual.
In the context of Australian immigration, the populist is not the person that seeks cuts to historical norms to ease pressure on wages, house prices and infrastructure. Rather the Australian populist is the elite beneficiary of mass immigration that seeks to keep it going while misrepresenting it as in the people’s interests. We are fortunate in Australia that there are no populists arguing for mass immigration to be reduced (One Nation comes closest). The suggestion is mostly being discussed without reference to classic populist notions like reductions to free trade (to protect a local interest) or regressive tax cuts.
Where we are very unfortunate is in the populist’s wall-to-wall occupation of the media. Q&A’s pro-mass immigration panel of elites, arguably the entire national broadcaster itself, is a deeply confused populist. Likewise for the immigration cheerleaders at News and Domainfax, who are protecting their firm’s realty-addicted profits, not the living standards of “the people” they claim to represent.
