Communique from El Presidente Turnbull

El Presidente gives “field guidance” at Mal Colston Memorial (formerly Liddell) Power Station!

Mal Colston Memorial Power Station lives again!

John Winston Howard City (formerly Canberra)

Long live the Menzian revolution! Presidente Malcolm Turnbull, leader of the Menziezista Republic of Australia, has announced that he is taking personal control of the distribution of power in Australia at a plant-by-plant level, and will be preserving the use of Mal Colston Memorial Power Station for the people!

“Rootless cosmopolitan wreckers have …” Ah well, you get the drift, no point extending the parody.

The Liberal Party of Australia, the home of free enterprise, small government, property rights and rule of law is, with this bizarre process around Liddell power station, managing the economy not merely at a sector or industry level, not even at a company level, but at the individual plant level.

By now, the energy crisis story moves hourly. Did Barnaby Joyce really complain that AGL was “shorting” the market, by running its business for the maximisation of its own profits? Is Graham Richardson really complaining about government by back-room deals, because it is to the disadvantage of his first love, coal? What’s next?

The government is now summoning in energy sector leaders on a weekly basis, giving them pep talks, vaguely threatening them if they don’t stop gouging consumers. Now it is making their investment plans for them, with a strategy of bullying and shaming AGL into running, or selling on, a knackered old plant it has long calculated on shutting down.

[Buyer beware: the warning signs for Liddell buyers]

This, surely, is one of the most bizarre things we have seen in Australian politics for a long time. We have known for a long time that Malcolm Turnbull’s “innovation” and “agility” routine is bullshit, the flim-flam of a venture capitalist and dealmaker who has never managed anything to fruition. We’ve heard the talk of pragmatic conservatism, that justified government assistance and free bungs to Adani, et al.

But Liddell is something else. This is a government willing to reach into the deepest workings of capitalism to achieve its particular ends, which appears to be some hedge against closures of other plants, and a desperate desire to keep alive the fiction that coal is a worthwhile investment.

What’s both significant and symbolic is that the attempt to keep Liddell going, or to falsely assign it a value of more than $0, is that Turnbull’s government has gone to war against every single principle of capitalism, the free-market, etc, etc. The whole idea of the state as guaranteeing a stable investment environment appears to have gone out the window long ago.

But so too has the most basic proposition of capitalism: marginal utility and creative destruction. AGL wants to kill a hopelessly outdated power plant, to speed up their switch to renewables — and they don’t want to sell it on to a low-rent operator who will run it into the ground for a few years more. That’s a business decision in a privatised environment — and one, apparently, that the government is willing to reach in and meddle with.

This is where 25 years of privatisation and deregulation have got us. The measures were meant to give us the self-regulating maximal efficiency, the invisible hand. The invisible hand is giving Turnbull an extended prostate exam by now, and the paradox is obvious: reforms that were meant to make the process as autonomous as possible have created results so contradictory to the general interest that the government has to become statist, dirigist, and soft-dictatorial in its approach.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed that the government that Turnbull’s now resembles, on these matters, is some gimcrack banana republic, with one panicked improvisation after another — and Matt Canavan, the Darling Downs caudillo, shrieking at AGL on radio and Twitter, for their disloyalty.

With these failures has come, inevitably, talk of the re-nationalisation of power. But I suspect this is a sort of lure, designed to convince people that, as bad as it now is, private ownership of the energy sector is the less worse option. Top-down national, or state, bureaucratic control of major utilities had its own problems, even in the post-war heyday of social democracy. A unitary system would be even less efficient and flexible now.

What we need is not re-nationalisation, but social control, and socialisation of key parts of the energy sector — while preserving a space for private operators, and for community and post-commodity operators to grow — so that modular and scaled energy operations expand into the field occupied by private and public behemoths

That would involve the transfer of key assets from private hands into social holding companies, with a public board, and run with the usual statutory expectations of corporate, non-profit, good governance. The ratio of fees, wages, profits, and re-investment, could then be set as a social goal, rather than as a corporate one. Compensation could be paid in the form of bond issues and the like. But, in many cases, some of these companies are so broke that the assets can simply be transferred to social ownership for a write-off of tax and other liabilities.

Ultimately, the goal is a socially distributed energy system whose scaling is a smooth curve — upwards from the individual solarised house, through efficient and self-generating apartment and office blocks, to non-grid networks of energy generation, exchange and storage, to larger solar, wind and hydro plants, and the remnant fossil fuel plants as they are phased out. This isn’t a distant future scenario. With expanded tax credits and incentives for solarisation, and the creation of neighbourhood, etc, exchange and storage networks, this could be done in a decade.

That’s the point of course. The beginnings of post-capitalism are starting to intrude — pushing in from the future — on late capitalism, whose one-dimensional model of success no longer serves our needs. With every new crisis, from hurricanes there to blackouts here, it’s clear that our solutions must be ends-based, not means-based — i.e. financial profit as a sole measure — and better still, it’s becoming clearer to ever larger numbers of people. The last to twig seem to be the left neoliberals — the Keatingista generation, market Trotskyists. They never understood the inevitable failure of a system that tries to make key decisions about social ends — i.e. the difference between the crucial and the dispensible features of social and economic life — through the market mechanism, which works by annihilating that distinction, and rendering the value of everything in terms of everything else. That only works until the lights go out.

[Turnbull plays favourites as pre-Keating economics become ‘cool’ again]

The Greens have had a raft of such proposals in their policies for years — but of course they’ll never get any publicity for them from the mainstream press. Labor will, if it adopts policies that look forward to a social, efficient, well-managed future, that cuts with the grain of contemporary existence, rather than proposing a false choice between Omnicorp Power and the revival of the State Electricity Commission.

We are helped immensely in this, by Turnbull’s incessant meddling. With every meeting he dragoons corporate leaders to, every interference he makes in individual business decisions, the Napoleon of Bellevue Hill establishes the over-arching political consensus: that the economy is a social entity, to be socially managed. Turnbull has done more to move the debate leftward than any of us could. What better figure than a film-flam venture capitalist, to deliver the message that capitalism can no longer deliver? Ole!