Thursday, November 21, 2013

Tony Abbott: leader of the bloke nation

Tony Abbott: leader of the bloke nation

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Tony Abbott: leader of the bloke nation
Tony Abbott dons body armour flying into Afghanistan on Monday for a ceremony to remember the 40 Australian lives lost during the 12-year conflict in the region. Abbott’s “manly” image appears to be resonating with the electorate. Photo: Andrew Meares
ELENA DOUGLAS
Change the prime minister, warned Paul Keating, and you change the country. John Howard intended us to become “relaxed and comfortable” with traditional notions of Australia’s achievement and ­history. Prime Minister Tony Abbott appears to model what it means to be relaxed and comfortable with older ideas about manhood. Australia, already known for the red-blooded masculinity of its men, appears ­destined to become more hairy-chested. The personal is political.
Under Abbott it looks like the gender wars could be on the other foot, a contest about manhood. The fault lines of gender and ­identity are far more clearly drawn for men than women. One of the markers of progressive identity is what it means to be a modern man. The changes in women’s rights are enshrined in law and company procedures manuals. But the changes in notions of ­masculinity are not legislated – they are pure cultural expressions.
Tony “I love John Wayne movies” Abbott, who prides himself on his traditional ­masculine identity replete with the time-honoured notions of chivalry (outside the blood sport of Parliament that is), seems like a throw-back to another age.
Last week during the agony of the NSW bushfires, Australians saw Abbott in his fire-fighting gear and heard of his 13 years as a devoted “firie”. This week we saw him don a flack jacket as he flew into Tarin Kot in Afhanistan. All this adds to stock images of Abbott as cyclist, surf lifesaver and fitness jock.
And now he’s the strong, silent type. ­Compared to our loquacious former PM, Kevin Rudd, Abbott seems bent on keeping a low profile during his early days in office. Even his speeches are shorter; Abbott PM, a “man of few words”, aiming for the quiet- achiever sobriquet.

MASCULINITY THE KEY TO ABBOTT’S SUCCESS?

One distinct possibility that must terrify Labor is that, outside the narrow latte belt, this masculine imagery could be one of the keys to his electoral success. According to the latest Newspoll, Abbott is now preferred PM with more than half the electorate.
Could this be the start of a national ­bromance with Tony Abbott? Perhaps Australian men, especially in the outer suburbs, crave a return to, or a restoration of, traditional masculinity with its emphasis on difference between men and women, physicality and strength, rites of passage for boys to become men, resonance with the old virtues of valour, honour and service and the focus on achievement outside the home? The big question is: is Abbott counter-cultural or mainstream?
Over recent decades we’ve seen vast changes in the presentation and self-perception of Australian men. This process has had its own rhythm while it has been influenced by trends internationally, particularly in the US and Britain. Progressive and conservative notions of masculinity are very different. Of course some men mix it up, but the fault lines remain more acutely drawn for men than for women. This could spell trouble for a Labor Party that just received its lowest ­primary vote in 100 years, and seems determined to hew close to the value system and world view of the progressive end of its base.
Remember when the reconstructed, so-called metrosexual man arrived fully formed in the late ’90s: house-proud, design-friendly and into fashion, products and cooking up a storm? The natural habitat of metrosexual man is the inner city, especially of Melbourne and Sydney, although eventually they began to inhabit all the nation’s ­capital cities.
But in the traditionally macho states of Queensland and Western Australia the staying power of the RM Williams and moleskin man was well entrenched. Unreconstructed man continued to strut down the boulevards of George Street in Brisbane and St Georges Terrace, Perth. To this day, the over-50s in these towns continue to wear the old Australian male costume. The under-50s, however, stand out with their well-groomed eyebrows and foodie ways, not to mention skinny jeans. (Note to over-45s: don’t go there, unless you’re really skinny.) Now you can find metrosexual man in all capital ­cities, but not many outside them. Outside the inner-city belt, things are different.

TONY TAKES US BACK

Enter Tony Abbott. Abbott takes us back to the days when men were men. Being a man, in those days, meant emphasising your ­difference from women. Abbott (who possesses an Oxford boxing blue) exudes aggressive physicality. The two defining images of his first day as Prime Minister were the 5am cycle ride with his mates, and wheeling his bike across Parliament House from old office to new. Values-wise Abbott stands for the old ties and institutions: religion, the ­military, the monarchy and active community service. He knows the power in the politics of the old bonds and cultivates these assiduously, often outside the field of vision of the inner-city media.
Abbott is no metrosexual. In fact, he is from the real-men-don’t-eat-quiche-or-fish brigade (He cooked salmon for Annabel Crabb, but cooked himself a manly steak in his pre-election Kitchen ­Cabinetappearance. It went unremarked, but spoke volumes).
There are risks in all this of course. Abbott could become a Putinesque he-man caricature. He proved himself tone-deaf about the expectations of the modern reconstructed male who would never refer to a professional woman’s sex appeal (remember Fiona Scott, the then candidate for Lindsay). And no reconstructed male would countenance a swagger like Abbott’s. His persona forces the gender distinction in a world which, especially in professional ­settings, seeks an American-style gender blindness.
American professional culture is as female as it is male. There is an ambivalence – sexual difference is diminished at all costs among professional people of Abbott’s generation in the US. These days there is rarely a sense of testosterone in American corporate life, except perhaps in the wilds of Wall Street. But even this, post-global financial crisis, has been the subject of various straitjackets and re-education programs. (In Australia, Macquarie and other investment banks have reputedly undergone such ‘retraining’ too).
In the US, masculinity has been on a rapid descent for some time. Susan Faludi picked the trend back in her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. Faludi gave her project six years of embedded research examining what she called the betrayal of blue-collar American men in the 1990s. Faludi, famous as a big-book feminist, offered an impassioned argument for men who she saw had much to be angry about. American men, she argued, had been betrayed by a culture that had undermined their old loyalties and communities: churches, unions, political and civil groups, veterans’ associations.
But no loss has been as great among this community as the loss of the stable, long-term, well-renumerating blue-collar jobs.

MEN HAVE GONE ‘SOFT’ SAYS FALUDI

Meanwhile in the upper echelons of the social sphere, Faludi’s analysis presented modern masculinity as having gone “soft” – surprising for such a feminist iconoclast.
She presented a portrait of the modern American man (in the middle and upper classes) more obsessed with his image than his role. She explained this change in identity focus as relating to the insecurity of jobs in the modern commercial landscape. She held the mirror up to an American manhood, like his Australian counterpart of this age, defining himself not in opposition and difference to women, but in opposition to notions of traditional manhood, and interested in fashion, food, products and sculpted eye brows. In the US, such fears have become more serious. Hanna Rosin and other commentators lament the precipitous decline in educational outcomes and employability of America’s blue-collar men. Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women charts the cultural significance of these escalating trends.
In Australia, the China boom and mining have created some blue-collar and many fluoro-vested jobs for Australian men. But even here there has been a decline in labour force participation by men (82 per cent in August 1961 to 72 per cent in August2011). Full-time male employment over 15 has declined from 80 per cent in 1966 to 57 per cent in 2011. Something significant is under way.
Now we have a new protagonist in the tale of the Australian male: a prime minister whose old-fashioned suburban values make him an unpredictable political force. Masculinity is yet another dilemma to add to the many challenges facing Labor. Images of Bill Shorten as the worker’s advocate after the 2006 Beaconsfield mining disaster are fading. It might be time for a new fitness regime for the newly installed Opposition Leader. Or, more importantly, some curiosity about how Labor can contribute to the revival or replacement of institutions that once engaged men but have lost their traction in the contemporary world: the churches, unions, political and civil groups.
This is the heavy lifting of connection with the electorate that Labor has no choice but to undertake. The recent leadership ballot was perceptibly an inner-city, progressive phenomenon. Comfortable and reassuring it may have been, but when the coalition can steal 31 seats away from Labor over two ­elections (2010, 2013) under Abbott’s leadership, something’s up and heads must come out of the sand.
Some politicians try to go beyond the ­gender debate. The record of the ­Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era for transcending gender, versus using gender, is mixed. Julia Gillard was correct that “the reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my time in the prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership”.
But she couldn’t resist stoking fears that Abbott represented a threat to women with her famous misogyny speech, at the moment of her maximum weakness.

MEN IN BLUE TIES

With “the men in blue ties” speech, ­Gillard underlined the sharp cultural distinction “unreconstructed man versus metrosexual”. This strategy relied on Abbott’s personal narrative as socially conservative, and his presentation with all the trappings of traditional masculinity. There was a dog whistle in Gillard’s stance “traditional men oppose the advancement of women”.
Of course, the strong, confident, glamorous daughters – not the paid parental leave scheme – blew the notion that Abbott somehow had the power, or desire, to stop women flourishing, out of the water.
Gender and identity terrain is different for women. Australian women juggle roles: most women mix it up between quite traditional notions of womanhood as carers-in-chief at home, and gender-neutral professionals and workers at work. Women bristle, in the workplace, when faced with expectations they be more nurturing than male colleagues, yet take it for granted at home. Whether they are of a progressive or conservative persuasion, across the socio-economic spectrum, most Australian women have not abandoned traditional female roles, they’ve added new ones. For men it’s all still binary.
We have entered a new era in Australian politics. At 55 Abbott is a fit and young Prime Minister, but he appears as a figure seeking to restore older ideas and identities. He has surprised everyone – especially his own party – with the traction he’s achieved with the electorate. He treads on, and trips over, cultural fault lines and sacred cows with every step; he simply doesn’t see them. Nonetheless, the progressive side of politics would do well not to underestimate this daggy Dad. Abbott’s man-appeal is the closest thing the Coalition has to a secret weapon, and it’s hiding in plain sight.

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Elena Douglas is a social and economic commentator based in Perth, at the University of Western Australia.
The Australian Financial Review

Thursday, October 17, 2013

The gift that keeps on giving - The super-wealthy who give it all away


ELENA DOUGLASThe super-wealthy who give it all away
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The super-wealthy who give it all away
Andrew and Nicola Forrest are Australia’s most visible “philanthrocapitalists” – a new-generation of outcome-oriented, epic philanthropists seeking to solve global problems. Photo: Penny Bradfield
Talking Point
ELENA DOUGLAS
“The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” wrote industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, of those who died without disbursing the fruits of their endeavour in his famous essay “The Gospel of Wealth”.
“Yet the man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away ‘unwept, unhonoured, and unsung’, no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him.”
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett – and Andrew and Nicola Forrest – have pledged to give away half their wealth in life. They all subscribe to Carnegie’s creed that those best-placed to distribute money for the greatest benefit are those with the skill to amass a great fortune to begin with.
The Forrests’ $65 million gift to the University of Western Australia – $50 million for post-graduate scholars and researchers, and $15 million to build a world-class hall of residence – aims to remake the intellectual landscape of Western Australia with a perpetual influx of the world’s brightest minds.
This will be the tip of the Forrest iceberg. They will donate billions and have picked slavery as their big target. (There are 27 million slaves worldwide, more than in 1860.)

NEW GENERATION OF GIVERS

The Forrests are Australia’s most visible “philanthrocapitalists” – a term used to describe the new-generation of outcome-oriented, epic philanthropists seeking to solve global problems using the tools of commerce: “I want to have charity managed like a business with hard-edged targets, timelines and being driven by outcomes,’’ Forrest says. “And I want the people in the business arm to know what they are really working for.’’
Celebrating the Forrest gift, admiring the “fiercely competitive spirit” of successful Australians, Prime Minister Tony Abbott challenged: “Wouldn’t it be good to see our greatest magnates outbidding each other not to buy a bigger boat or to build a bigger mansion, but to create a better future, to leave a better legacy for our country?”
Acknowledging the nation’s “comparatively thin culture of philanthropy”, he said the Forrests’ gift, like Kerry Stokes’s to the War Memorial, Greg Poche’s $30 million to the Mater Hospital, and Graham Tuckwell’s $50 million to the ANU, demonstrates change.
In contrast to the class-envy stoked by Wayne Swan in the Rudd-Gillard era, Abbott invests philanthropy with hope: “Individual wealth would seem less a personal benefit and more a national asset.
“We wouldn’t just be a richer country – we would be a better country.”
High-profile philanthropy has a way to go in Australia’s egalitarian culture, and there are limits to its role in funding the social and cultural activities we desire.
Even in America with its established culture and practice, philanthropy is dwarfed by governments and markets. (Annual US philanthropic giving: $300 billion, Government spending: $6 trillion. Economy: $16.6 trillion).

GIVING IS GETTING

Expectations must be realistic. At their best, creative, intelligent philanthropists are innovators and risk-takers: they pilot things, develop deep knowledge and expertise, and connect people. New approaches are then rolled out by not-for-profits, businesses and governments.
But the biggest secret is that philanthropy is incredibly rewarding for the giver.
Experienced philanthropists say the more they engage, the more they learn and the more humbling the experience. It changes their lives. Givers speak of a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and of flow-on benefits to family life. (If you think raising well-adjusted kids with feet on the ground and hearts in the right place is hard with never enough money, the very wealthy will tell you just how hard it is when you’ve got too much.)
Tony Abbott seeks a national giving competition. Others, like Daniel Petre, try to persuade with guilt, citing the comparative stinginess of Australia’s rich.
But you catch more flies with honey.
The prophets agree: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?” said Churchill.
The message from the Forrests’ new adventure is they are making their lives and wealth count. This is the gift that will keep on giving.

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Elena Douglas is the convener of the Centre for Social Impact at the Business School, University of Western Australia, where she teaches Philanthropy and Social Investment to post-graduates.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Aboriginal policy a hard act for PMs

ELENA DOUGLAS

Aboriginal policy a hard act for PMs

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Aboriginal policy a hard act for PMs
Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce chairman Warren Mundine with Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
ELENA DOUGLAS
Australian leaders arrive in office yearning to improve Aboriginal wellbeing. Some, like Paul Keating, demonstrably have. Others leave disappointed in their record: witness both Bob Hawke and John Howard. Tony Abbott wants to be “not just Prime Minister, but a Prime Minister for Aboriginal affairs”.
His promise is to convert “good sentiment” into “practical changes to improve lives”; his mantra: “Aboriginal children need to go to school, adults to work and the ordinary rule of law needs to operate in indigenous communities”.
No comprehensive roadmap yet exists. The newly minted Indigenous Advisory Council offers the best insight into the Coalition’s agenda. The public statements of Warren Mundine, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Peter Shergold give us a sense of the terrain.
Mundine, former ALP president, now Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce chairman and a company director, is a powerful backer of the pro-business, economic empowerment agenda to “get people off welfare into jobs; get private home ownership on traditional lands; and for commerce and economic development to blossom for indigenous people through their land and native title rights”.
Since his 2000 Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture, Pearson – Mabo negotiator, founder of Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership and one of the country’s most eloquent political philosophers – has challenged Australia to build a new consensus on welfare “on the principles of personal and family empowerment and investment in the utilisation of resources to achieve lasting change”.
His litany: “Dependency and passivity kills people and is the surest road to social decline. Australians do not have an inalienable right to dependency they have an inalienable right to a fair place in the real economy”.
Indigenous academic Marcia Langton spelt out the changing economic, demographic and cultural landscape in Australia’s north, where 82 per cent of the land is owned by indigenous people, in her 2012 Boyer Lectures. Economic interests, she argued, are now closely aligned with non-indigenous Australians in mining, cattle and tourism.
Langton made a fierce case for indigenous entrepreneurs, wealth creators and workers to be the centre of policy efforts to expand this economic renaissance: “Aboriginal people, like other humans, have an economic life” – and progressives not wedded to this notion will harm, not help, their progress.
The Coalition wants to sing to these song-sheets.
Peter Shergold, secretary for the prime minister and cabinet under Howard, laments vast sums spent on benefits that “too often entrench the poverty the payments are intended to eradicate”. He claims 20 years in public administration as a “personal and systemic” failure to produce “equal opportunity, economic and social mobility, human rights and civic responsibilities, control and empowerment” for indigenous people.

FOCUS ON BUSINESS

The Coalition will continue the former government’s “Closing the Gap” framework. However the new council emphasises economic development and wealth creation. Business will play a starring role. This council is likely to direct government investment – $24.5 billion (55 per cent federal, 45 per cent states) in 2010-11 – in new ways.
Wealth creation requires the restoration of work-readiness of young people and the conversion of assets into income streams, both driven by communities themselves. This will present heroic challenges, yet offers the most realistic prospect of “closing the gap” in living standards.
New approaches are required. The definition of solutions on white boards in Canberra must stop.Understanding context and place, empowering local leadership and measurement of progress at community level will all be crucial.
Great divergences in indigenous wellbeing exist in Australia. Multimillion-dollar native title agreements have made some indigenous communities among our wealthiest. Here legal parameters must be flexible enough to allow enduring economic dynamism to be ignited.

EMPLOYMENT RATES

Of the 548,370 Aboriginal Australians (2011 census), an increasing number are middle-class and thriving. More are employed than ever before: 58.8 per cent of males over age 15, compared to 84.8 per cent of all males (42.9 per cent to 69.4 per cent for females). However, in some communities, the employment rate is below 20 per cent and crushing poverty prevails. Policy must respond to particulars.
Mining is changing the landscape and raising incomes. Witness, in the Pilbara, Newman’s indigenous median household weekly income: $2583 ($2876 for non-indigenous), compared to $1472 Australia-wide and $983 for indigenous.
Averages conceal more than they reveal. Each community requires different strategies and investments to create job readiness and employment opportunities.
Each generation, and its leaders, hopes to close the gap in indigenous living standards. The Coalition’s roadmap is emerging. The terrain is uneven, every community’s story is different, and the journey is unlikely to be smooth. But the destination is central to our hopes for the nation’s future.
Elena Douglas is convener of the Centre for Social Impact, UWA Business School, which hosts the Indigenous Business, Enterprise and Corporations Conference.
The Australian Financial Review

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

ABC RADIO NATIONAL - Saturday Extra

Election 2013: Foreign policy

Click here to listen

Saturday 31 August 2013 8:05AM
Tomorrow (Sunday 1 September) Australia becomes the President of the UN Security Council for the first time in more than 27 years.
No matter who is in government after the election, they’re going to be faced with the massive dilemma of what to do about Syria.
So what are the challenges and the possibilities in the months and years ahead?

Guests

Elena Douglas
Research Associate, Perth-USA Asia Centre
Convenor, Centre for Social Impact, University of WA Business School
Michael Fullilove
Executive Director, Lowy Institute for International Policy
Anthony Milner
Basham Professor, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
Thom Woodroofe
Co-founder and board member of Left Right think-tank, associate fellow of The Asia Society and freelance journalist.

Credits

Presenter
Geraldine Doogue
Producer
Dina Volaric

Monday, August 26, 2013

Health spending needs reform

ELENA DOUGLAS

Health spending needs reform

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Health spending needs reform
Western Australia is netting significant savings by privatising public hospitals, with other states to follow. Photo: Sylvia Liber
The reform of any system requires three things: incentive, clarity of authority and responsibility. Australia’s health system lacks all three, yet significant change is necessary to curb government health spending that, in the past 10 years, has increased by an unsustainable 80 per cent.
Firstly, take incentive to reform. States run the lions-share of health. Under current GST arrangements, states don’t benefit fiscally from their reform efforts. The Business Council of Australia’s proposal for GST by population would close this incentive gap.
Incentive is necessary because hard decisions are required, like private provision of public care. A 2009 Productivity Commission study compared government-owned and non-government-owned hospitals and found that on average, across the country, NGOs delivered services at lower cost, with better infection control. Internationally, post-ideological Sweden embraces the purchaser-provider split – 20 per cent of public hospital-care is delivered privately and 30 per cent of public primary-care.
Western Australia is actively privatising public hospitals: St John of God runs the Midland Health Campus, netting significant savings: $1.3 billion to date. Queensland is following suit: private providers will build and run Sunshine Coast University Hospital – to be Australia’s largest publicly owned, non-government-run teaching hospital. NSW is commissioning a non-government-designed, built and managed solution for the new Northern Beaches Hospital.

AUTHORITY SHOULD BE DEVOLVED

The second question is authority. The consensus is authority should be devolved as much as possible, to the local hospital, service delivery level. However to make meaningful change, local managers need the authority to hire and fire clinical staff on flexible terms, circumventing state-wide employment conditions restricting hospital productivity. This is the states’ reform task.
In Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott we have two contenders who are both natural centralists. Rudd is running a scare campaign on Abbott’s “cuts to health”. In 2010 it was then health minister Nicola Roxon running a scare campaign on Rudd in an infamous Sky News interview when she recalled how, “with four days’ notice”, Rudd wanted to “take over the entire health system” without any materials for Cabinet or legal advice. Now that’s scary.
As a former federal health minister, Abbott’s instincts are centralist but he’s changing his tune. In the sanitised, updated 2013 edition of Battlelines Abbott says: “John Howard was right to express scepticism about whether Commonwealth bureaucrats would be better at running hospitals than their state counterparts, but wrong to imply that a Commonwealth assumption of responsibility for public hospitals would just swap one lot of bureaucrats for another.”
Shadow health minister Peter Dutton on the other hand is a fan of devolution. Dutton will close the “12 new health bureaucracies” in Canberra and “bolster front-line services by redirecting resources from bureaucratic structures that don’t provide patient care”. The Coalition will have local boards managing hospital budgets and appointing chief executives.

RESPONSIBILITY BUCK STOPS WITH US ALL

On the final issue: responsibility, where does the buck stop? The answer’s obvious: with each of us. When it comes to health spending, transparency and individual funding are paramount to engage citizens in spending health dollars wisely, putting a value on health and the behaviours which support it. Change must come. Incentive for reform is essential; authority should be clear and personal responsibility for health must be taken by each of us.
Make no mistake, there are votes in health. It has polled highest as “very important” to federal voting intentions in every Newspoll for six years bar one.
Elena Douglas is an economic and social policy commentator based in Perth.
The Australian Financial Review