Looking at the election campaign through a Greens prism

One good reason for a policy free election zone. It’s worth remembering as we bemoan how this election campaign is a relatively policy free zone that neither Labor nor the Coalition can really promise to do very much at all. When neither side will end up in control of the Senate the best a promise can be is a promise to try and do something.

Everything needs to be looked at through a Greens prism. Would Bob Brown and his expanded team after 1 July next year (and perhaps after 21 August if his party can manage to win an ACT Senate seat which has got to be some sort of a chance) support what  Labor or the Coalition in government promised while campaigning?

The example that immediately comes to my mind is industrial relations where Labor and the trade unions keep pretending that a Tony Abbott administration would reintroduce the old Howard Government WorkChoices plan.

In truth there is no way that a Senate with a combination of Labor and Greens in a majority would pass the legislation. The only way of going backwards would be to get it through the upper house before the new Senators arrive midway through next year.

A sop to the Greens. Labor has made little effort to date to maximise its share of Green preferences. Climate change is largely being ignored as an issue and the only policy announcement of relevance I have noticed came this morning when Agriculture Minister Tony Burke promised that a re-elected Labor government would crack down on illegal timber imports by introducing new legislation and a code of conduct placing the onus on suppliers to ensure wood is coming from where it is supposed to.

A debating win for who? As for yesterday’s National Press Club debate on the economy all that needs to be said is that it was completely irrelevant. Not a vote will have changed because of it.

A rave review for Professor Quiggin. You just have to visit the blog site of economist John Quiggin to know he’s a man with a self-deprecating sense of humour. I mean, how could you not like a man who heads a list of Testimonials with these words from Senator Richard Alston, the Liberal ex-Minister for Communications: “I do not know how he is a professor, but anyway he purports to be an economist” and follows up with a Jason Soon declaring that he is “more intelligent than Britney Spears”?

And should further proof be needed that Prof Quiggin is no dry as dust academic, herewith the cover of his latest book:

The book, not being published by Princeton University Press until Halloween in October , has this week earned a rave review from the Buttonwood’s Notebook financial markets column on the website of The Economist.

It is an entertaining and thought-provoking book by an Australian academic John Quiggin, which also works as a good summary for non-specialists of how the economics debate has developed… The analysis is quite worrying.

As Mr Quiggin points out, this school [the Chicago monetarists led by Milton Friedman] generally saw government as a problem and argued that economies, left to themselves, will generally tend towards equilbrium. Elaborate models were created that showed how smoothly economies would work, given rational consumers and producers. This led them to struggle to explain why recessions did occur. Economists came up with “real business cycle theory” and “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” to explain why such fluctuations happened. This ended up blaming the Great Depression, for example, on the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, even though he didn’t take office until 1933 when a lot of the damage had already been done.

The problem, as Mr Quiggin argues, is that economists develop their elegant models, with rational consumers, perfect information and liquid markets and then try to adapt it to reality. In other sciences, one would surely take the world as we find it, full of irrational consumers, imperfect information and markets that suddenly freeze.