Sophie Mirabella, and why elites shouldn't be trusted to govern ...

(Above: and of course we can't actually have politicians go about the business of governing, because that would be elitist. We should leave it all to the community. Government should abandon the game, leave the field, because less is more, and politicians can sit on their bums and consult the community. And perhaps we should have a hundred and fifty citizens sort out climate change for us, seeing as how the community is so all seeing and wise and politicians are such fuck-witted and inept elitists .... Phew, I can feel a session with Sophie Mirabella coming on).

When I last checked there were just one hundred and fifty members of the federal house of representatives out of a population of 21 million plus, and collectively they have the power to make laws which - upper house willing and amenable - determine everything from the tax I pay to the medical benefits I receive.

By any standard definition, they constitute an elite:

a. A group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status: "In addition to notions of social equality there was much emphasis on the role of elites and of heroes within them" (Times Literary Supplement).

They might not be as handsomely paid as some elites - why pay parliamentarians well for the privilege of persecuting the populace - but elites they are, which amazingly and astonishingly means that Sophie Mirabella is a member of an elite.

But in The lesson from the new paradigm: less is more, Mirabella splashes the word around in that new Bob Katter paradigm way:

It’s just that I think we have to take a step back from the idea that Government has all the answers. We have to re-think the notion that a bigger Government splashing around more of our money (or worse, borrowed money we have to pay back with interest) is a positive thing.

It’s a concept that has grown rapidly in recent years and is very popular with the elite and so-called progressives – that the role of Government is to provide solutions to all of society’s problems, be they social or economic. That Governments ought to be the driving force for change, rather than the people. It’s a paternalistic, “Government knows best” approach.

There, did you catch it at the start of the second par? The elite and so-called progressives ...

So it begins - the classic 'quoi moi' routine as a dissembling member of an elite pretends not to be an elite member of an elite.

I like to think of it as the new Bob Katter paradigm, a term once used routinely to demonise academics for being poncy poseurs out of touch with reality, adherents of Thomas Kuhn, or even worse, French structuralists.

It's hard to think of Mirabella as a member of an elite, as opposed to a whack a mole columnist who turns up in The Punch on a Friday to torture any stray reader who might stumble on her word-smithing. Think too long on it and it might spoil your weekend.

First point of irritation. Mirabella spends her entire piece capitalising Government with a giant G to make an ideological point about big spending Government and the need for smaller Government. You'd think that a member of the modern elite would know what is the current convention in relation to capitalising the word "government":

A commonly followed convention is to capitalise "government" only when referring to a specific government. Lower case is used when referring to governments generically. For example:

The US Government should consider ...

It is a function of government to provide health care.

In the first sentence, we were referring to a specific government, so we used a capital. The second sentence was referring to governments in general, so no capital was needed. (here)

Try this grammatical advice sometime Ms Mirabella about the use of the big "G". Your fear about Big Government with a capital "G" might well Disappear and For Good and Overnight.

Second irritation. The growing realisation that Mirabella is yammering on about government in a tea party way, mixed with a dash of David Cameron's big society,

... the real lesson of the past few weeks, the real message we ought to take from the sideshow is that it’s not about the Government of the day. It’s not really about Government full stop.

This on the basis that for the past couple of weeks there's been an interregnum caretaker Government, presumably meaning we haven't been able to declare war on New Zealand in a speedy, expeditious way. Never mind that the business of government - pension cheques, Medicare benefits, the military and so on and so forth - has been rolling merrily along.

It's a false rhetorical divide, classic tea party logic, wherein there are tears about the size of government, mingled with complaints about how government has failed everyone, but usually and most particularly the whiner and the whinger. You know, the cut my taxes, put everyone out on the street, watch crime grow, throw them in jail, see the bill for prisons, what you want to raise my taxes to pay for the prisons, privatise the prisons, see the private prisons rip off the government in immortal Blackwater style brigade.

The classic big versus small government mantra misses the point, which is to provide effective, good government. By definition these days government will be comparatively big, especially if you want education and hospitals and reasonable access thereto ...

Mirabella in her elitist way is of course just fashioning a cudgel with which to beat her opponents, yet all the same it takes some unmitigated gall and cheek to be a member of a party that offered up a major piece of middle class welfarism and electoral bribery, in the form of a much enhanced paternal leave scheme, involving a tax on big business, and yet at the same time spend an entire column urging on the electorate the benefit of small government.

It also takes some cheek to lead with the standard drivel about the schools hall routine, never mind the circumstances (the GFC, now long forgotten in the China dependent lucky country) and a report which gave the program a guarded tick.

When it comes to elites and rhetoric, rhetoric always wins. That's how you can deliver this mindless blather, while being a part of the Howard government, which upped electoral bribery and middle class welfarism and instituted a great big new tax, the GST, while sundry governments then forgot to retract other taxes:

If we truly want a new paradigm in Australian politics, we ought to be arguing for smaller Government, lower taxes, less imposition on people’s lives by Governments desperate to regulate and dictate, and we ought to be encouraging and promoting community and business enterprise and engagement.

When it comes to effective Government, the truest concept is “less is more”.

Actually when it comes to effective government - with a small 'g' - the truest concept is best is best, and good practice is good practice, and efficiency and engagement with community is good, and simple minded mantras about less being more, as a way of opposing say an NBN, turns out to be so much blather.

When we were installing sewerage and water supply and electricity or roads or airports or railways across the land or providing for defence, did gherkins run around the country spouting 'less is more' drivel?

Well I guess they did with railways. Welcome to urban transit in Sydney. Where they've suddenly discovered that less light rail is less, and maybe more light rail is more.

As for less imposition on people's lives, by governments desperate to regulate and dictate, we look forward to Mirabella's active campaign for gay marriage, instead of governments regulating and dictating who might get married in this country and in what circumstance (and no blather about polygamy or bestiality as out clauses, please).

Along the way of course Mirabella takes time out to deliver an idle whack to white elephant bureaucrats, and who might we thank for that?

... if Costello's aim was to hold the line on Australia's total tax burden, he failed. On the Howard government's own numbers, the ratio of Commonwealth taxes to gross domestic product rose from 22.3 per cent in the final Keating budget of 1995-96 to 24.6 per cent in the final Howard budget. This increase of 2.3 percentage points amounts to $23.9 billion (in 2008 dollars), equivalent to the GDP of Ethiopia or Iceland, both ranked around 90th among the 185 nations covered by the World Bank's global economic survey.

Howard presented this not as a failure of fiscal discipline but as a triumph of sensible spending. "We had differences on a number of issues in relation to the surpluses. It's fair to say that, if it hadn't been for me, we would not have spent nearly as much on defence. That is the spending I'm proudest of."

The Howard government's last budget allocated $22 billion to defence, an increase of 107 per cent over the course of 11 Howard budgets. Defence is the third-biggest area of spending by the federal government, after social welfare and health. (here)

What's that you say? The Howard government was a big spending, big taxing government? Spending squillions on fucked helicopters?

Yet somehow it wasn't a big Government with a capital 'G'?

I've come to the conclusion that the worst thing about elites is that, in the manner of an English aristocrat, you can become a member of an elite while remaining eternally dumb, a parrot spouting a party line, without the merest clue of what it all might mean ...

The idea that somehow government can shrink, and politicians can hand over responsibility to communes and we can all proceed by community consultation is worthy of a sixties hippy, or a Ron Paul libertarian, but not the kind of thinking required for dealing with cities heading towards six million citizens and a country well on the way to thirty million. That ain't villages, though in world terms, it might be quaint enough to seem like a small village settlement.

We certainly seem to send villagers to Canberra to form part of our political elite ... and nothing wrong with that if they're from Tamworth. If they're Sophie Mirabella ...

Mirabella's nonsense is like those sheltered workshop tea partiers who simply don't have a notion of the current American empire, the pampered lifestyles it's produced for rich Americans, and the way that government has facilitated the pampering ...

Mention to them the vast ineffective government apparatus that's been whipped up around fears of terrorism and suddenly it's spend, spend, spend, regulate, wire tap, and officiate as much as you can ...

With Sophie Mirabella as part of the Canberra elite, utterly confused about Government, or even government, this pond's forlorn cry for good government, as big as it needs to be, as small as it sensibly can be, recedes like a mirage into the distance ...