Local government & public administration

#auspol #covid19aus Barely removed from Trump's constant Fauci-trashing. If you say you follow the health advice, and then don't like that advice, don't pressure the advice. Just more attempts to disguise a total vaccine procurement…

#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

⁦@Peter_Fitz⁩ did you hear this? As a governance professional, I find the republic vs monarchy debates a bit jingoistic and simple-minded. Very pleased to see Altman, a republican, unpack some of the complexities. https://t.co/ge3b5q30KB

#auspol Afghanistan's aftermath is a lesson in modern conservative politics. Populist, reactionary decisions that play out across decades, leaving others to deal with the mess. Like flogging off public services and assets. The villains…

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it's a new low in NSW governance that the NSW Premier first reiterates the worst case and death numbers are in the weeks to come, and then says the government will now no longer front the daily press…

#auspol Imagine if Australia had nuclear powered: - vaccine procurement - progressive taxation - funding to public universities, schools and hospitals - political donation laws - controls on political grants schemes - independent…

‘Authoritarian’ and ‘free democratic’ are both PR terms. As a governance person, I’m more concerned about ‘free’ democracies electing reality TV stars who advocate flushing lungs with floor cleaner against Covid, and who reject election…

There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

The real politics of the nation are seen in our footpaths. Anybody who works with footpaths knows that the old collective public service ideas build and maintain them. Libertarian ideas are destroying them, with the smallest trip…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

The surge in informal voting for NSW local government elections is attributed to the absence of 'How To Vote' handouts at polling booths, due to Covid. Many assumed these were 'how to pick party X' flyers, all these years. But for many…

Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

We focus on hospitals. The real game-changer will be workplaces, that’s where the ‘live with the virus’ nonsense will be exposed. #covid19aus https://t.co/FQzkeQK65n COVID-19: Contingency plans drawn up over fears a quarter of public…

Josh Frydenberg says the approx. $260 billion Australians have saved in the pandemic will fire economic recovery. That 'saved' money barely dents the 2 trillion in personal debt. Debt generated by devolving collective public services to…

"Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly and La Perouse beaches would also be closed for 24 hours while council lifeguards looked for any further sightings of sharks." 1 shark death = lockdown of beaches. >2000 people dead of Covid since…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move…

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

It’s not a vaccine ceiling. It’s a governance ceiling. A vacuum where leadership was needed. Thus, everything ground to a halt. What happens when you elect governments who don’t believe in government. https://t.co/757YVJ6Opq

The PM didn’t just miss competent governance of aged care by 🤏 much. He missed it by 🤏…………………………🤏 much. https://t.co/ctJ8HByzvs

The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job.…

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd said the Australian public service “has been eroded through political appointees, private contractors and institutional decline”. K Rudd sees that the decline in our democracy is down to institutional…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

The existence of local councils was driven by public health action in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sewer, clean water, garbage collection, drainage. The shape of our societies was driven by public health. Ventilation should be next. The…

Governments invented public health. They said to their experts 'find us a way to prevent widespread disease and death, so we can keep society going.' It's why we have local councils, for example, that was one recommendation. No 'balancing'…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

In local government entire councils are replaced with a single non-political administrator when they’re deemed to be incompetent. State and federal governments? Populist grandstanding on basic services that any administrator could do for…

Here are the relevant sections of the Constitution. Did the Federal Executive Council recommend these appointments? A quorum for their meetings is a minimum 2 Ministers or Assistant Ministers. So somebody else in the Ministry was there.…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

Will conservatives care? For modern conservatives, the collapse of nationalised health care is a long-held dream. They won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it, this is their standard methodology. Cripple the public service, then privatise…

The brutal reality of our health system. A privatised and often exorbitant pay scale for doctors overlaid upon a public service funding model. No other public servants get to dictate their own fees, with those fees then subsidised by the…

The US, UK and India were famous Covid outliers, with uncontrolled tsunamis of infection. The democidal debacle overseen by our National Cabinet since late-2021 puts them all in the shade. There must be consequences for this collapse of…

It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains historical continuity in its core DNA. Populism reinvents the world…

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

Tales from the Covid front lines. 1. RN Breakfast, Jane Halton asked how her review into vaccine procurement is going. Couldn't reveal details, except to give a general sense that we have the '4th lowest death rate' i.e. it seems the…

It's very common for Covid minimisers to say that letting Covid rip in late-2021 is justifiable because our deaths compared to the rest of the world are still very low. Yeh, nah. A disgrace, the greatest failure of governance in our…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to be governance and accountability. You know, the stuff the…

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

A university. And a ‘Trust & Safety Council’. Society entrusted stewardship of knowledge to universities more than 1000 years ago. Institutions. Social media employing well-meaning people with pretty lanyards is no substitute. This is…

Can we get rid of billions of taxpayer subsidies to a hopelessly inefficient industry, private health insurance? If politicians want market-based public services, let them live by the market. Private health insurance never worked.…

The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperial rule. In the West those same ideas are crumbling, leading…

Most defenders of democracy defend the wrong things, because their experience of actually running one is zero. Nothing but idealistic fairy tales. They should be required to spend a day on the switchboard of their local council. They would…

National Cabinet took a distributed, federalist governance structure for public health, and replaced it with a small group governed by its own internal social conformity. That was the plan. A forum where to act on public health advice…

Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectonic plates of all human history. The battle between Church and…

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

The anti-State crowd want us to believe super was designed to replace the aged pension. It wasn’t, and it wouldn’t work anyway if it was. It’s just one more lie designed to try to dismantle what’s left of public services.…

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

Committing the budget to impossible sums has the (not accidental) benefit of providing cover for further gutting of public services. It’s a death cult, wrapped in flags and bibles. https://t.co/Kvca1tn0a9

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

Friend at a local government conference says there was unanimity as to the greatest barrier to good governance. The elected body. The same for every level of government. The world is far too complex and technical now for popularity to be…

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

Because it’s a Kings sort of day, this excerpt from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, two late prominent anthropologists, gives a sense of how simple-minded our thinking on governance mostly is. Even what we think of as democracy, ‘the…

Time series charts of results show the true nature of elections. This one from the UK, for local government. Red and blue, Labour and Tory. Mirror images of each other, one is in fashion, the other out, and that position swapped regularly…

It's dangerous to think most of the problems we face emanate in the public service. There's been a concerted campaign to politicise the PS for 50 years. I encourage people to read about the Robodebt RC, what came out.

Testament to how deep conservative spin is in people, that this review calls Utopia a show about “the pettiness of public service bureaucrats”. The show is about the vacuous populism of elected politicians. The bureaucrats are the only…

If we want public health back, we need the public back. The public is brought into existence by the ‘public service’. It’s in the name, an administrative construct. Until its authority is restored, we’re pissing into the wind.

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as well, you only have to read their mission statements.…

A job is not an economic construct, It’s a social construct, a method of social control. Once people are totally reliant upon a job to survive, society’s governance shifts to employers. None of that is accidental. https://t.co/WUT4scwGZX

One of the things about adopting a reality-based politics, rather than a popularity-based politics, is that you see clearly how the hot air of all elected politicians and social media debates are irrelevant to what actually happens. Covid…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Beautiful description of the transition from a publicly-funded set of public health measures, allowing significant freedom, to privatised home lockdowns. Paid for by each of us individually. This is all that happened, just another…

People at the front line of essential public services have to endure this every single day. Magistrates have ‘sovereign citizens’ in front of them quoting chapter and verse from some YouTube clip. Social media is making this the norm. h/t…

Tell me the story again about how electing people leads to better governance. https://t.co/wiTXgzqvYa

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

My local council has just lifted rates by 50%. In the middle of a cost of living crisis. I don’t blame them mostly, I blame vertical fiscal imbalance. On in non technical terms, higher levels of government hogging revenue, and pissing it…

Most of what Obama describes as democracy here, the mobilisation of ordinary people, ‘self-governance’, is not democracy. No human societies have ever operated that way, and nor will they. It’s the same libertarian framing of his enemies.…

The frustration of genuine expertise in this pandemic is palpable. But expertise has never translated directly into political action. Even the collective of a university doesn’t. Humans solved this problem though. They developed…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

For those who missed @latingle’s fantastic Quarterly Essay at the time about the deliberate assault on the Australian public service, the week of Robodebt might be the time to revisit it. https://t.co/Wo9VAa1iRG

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

This is an interesting governance problem. 10,000 members of this group. Who knows how many are actual ADF personnel. But clear disrespect for the law here. We’re not a military junta. https://t.co/YwOfNvzaBY

Let’s dissolve both houses of parliament indefinitely. Let the public service run the country, and emergency teams led by experts to deal with Covid and climate change. Have citizen assemblies for public input. https://t.co/T1ybon9Aw1

Another glaring problem with popularity-based governance, through elections. Decisions that can impact a society for generations are made by people whose political careers at the top last less than 3 years. Total disconnect of timelines.…

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

On the major consultancy firms, some structure themselves as partnerships, so they become a sort of ‘governance shelter’, like a tax shelter, but designed to avoid major governance accountability through basic processes like audit and…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

Federal and State governments are administrative entities, not close to most peoples’ geographical lived experience. What’s beginning to happen at local government level is being ignored. This trend from the US is well underway here too.…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

The young in particular should feel some connection with Aboriginal Australia. Being dispossessed of land, and now also infected repeatedly with an uncontrolled pandemic virus. Squattocracy has been our governance model since settlement.…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

People think I’m mad when I say we need to get rid of politicians and let the public service run countries again. Politicians are already well underway in doing the opposite. And that’s a very, very bad thing. https://t.co/cBbv6KWirT

I recommend everybody attend their local council meetings, to see firsthand the incredible damage social media is inflicting upon societies. It’s the front-line of a collapse that’s happening frighteningly fast.

The pattern repeats and repeats. Social and community goods destroyed by social media activism. Social media is the problem. Look at local governance if you want to see the front-line of the assault. https://t.co/Qhw11o2b5z

This increasing (uninvited) freelancing by failed politicians on the world stage is often at the behest of think tanks they're part of, showing where their real loyalties were even when they were in power. Privatisation of governance.…

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s…

Those still confident elections are a valuable tool for democracy only need to look to NZ. Where several years of sensible governance now flipped completely back over to the regulatory capture of small government ideologues, funnelling…

The Minerals Council trying to make solar installations into political pink batts. The narratives and strategies are so transparent. Alas it doesn’t stop them being effective. https://t.co/sFu2Zh4GWb

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

The front-line of populist collapse is local government areas. Go to any LGA in the country right now and watch the heated battles to do even basic work, because of continuous obstruction from social media groups. And how what we call…

UK news discussing whether ‘political chaos’ will end in 2024, with elections there. The chaos is caused BY elections, populism means you change PMs more often than some people change their sheets or underwear. Popularity will never lead…

Get rid of all elections. Select public representatives via random lot, as we do for juries, when required for specific decisions. Citizen juries. The moment you allow popularity to determine governance, it's game over.…

We all see the UK collapsing from afar. Ordinary people choosing between eating and heating. And the Tories? Couldn’t care less. Tax cuts and destruction of public services is their only policy, in all situations. This is ‘the economy’…

'Stay home if unwell' is a lockdown. A privatised lockdown. They never went away, we just shifted the funding and governance model. https://t.co/phx544Y6ii

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

Ask your local council if tax cuts will fix this road. It’s not rocket science to do a basic accounting of gaps in public infrastructure and services, and to make that the baseline for all government budgeting. https://t.co/XWxeDrm76n

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

All the idiot supply and demand and price curves that get applied to politics. We'd be much better off applying the economies of scale curve. Showing that scale brings efficiency. The whole rationale for having a public sector, it's a more…

Meanwhile the actual architects of the scheme are not only not being charged, some are still members of parliament. Because in popularity-based governance, you can act criminally and unethically, but winning the popular vote cleanses you…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

The collapse of the post-WW2 massive investment in public services is accelerating. And that complete reversal isn’t limited to economics and politics. It includes culture. You don’t need a time machine, we’re living inside one.…

Extraordinary that nobody did these basic sums during the super-for-housing debates. Returning essential public services to public ownership and management is the best way to make life better for young people. https://t.co/qVX2RR9ucs…

Part of our mental health crisis is people simply being brutalised by bullshit jobs, and governments outsourcing public services to individuals to pay for, out of their own wallets.

It’s local government election day in the UK. Not democracy day. Elections are not democracy, they’re one mechanism of one tiny part of democracy that has grown to be a populist cancer on the entire idea. https://t.co/YgolSvGtUr

The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media gender team sports. The Council of Europe helps here. /1…

On any objective assessment the past 14 years of Tory rule in the UK have been the worst governance in modern Anglo history. And yet they’re there because our only test of competence is popularity. Elections. Popularity has zero connection…

For those who believe democracy = elections. There’s not one objective way in which this race should be close. Close to two decades of abject incompetence from the LNP, and they’ve provided no policy in Opposition. 1/4…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

Tim Costello’s piece today. The centrality of popularity-based governance to the problems of our time. Popularity is the beast that all societies must tame, to survive. In the big year of elections, a festival of popularity, it will be…

Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

This would be the same as Saudi Arabia in 1938 saying it wasn't going to drill for oil, it would sell sand instead. The future prosperity of this country and health of the planet being horse-traded for votes. Popularity-based governance…

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol…

If you’re not questioning the existence of ‘the economy’, rather than just trying to re-purpose it, you’re living inside a fantasy. ‘The economy’ and its ‘market’ is just society stripped of government. Exactly why it was invented, as an…

One of the most popular groups running for local government in my area openly describes Aboriginal Australians as primitives, who were ripe for colonisation. It was only WW1 and 2 that suppressed the dumb, violent get-rich-quick settler…

The US is approaching end-stage Restoration of a monarchy. King Trump. This is huge, gutting what little regulatory power institutions had left. The post-war shift to public-centred governance. Old hierarchies have restored their own…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

The thing about electoral democracy is: voters don't even like it. They will back their team, but increasingly they know that none of the teams achieve much at all. Because they can't. Popularity governance and practical outcomes are…

The story of Australian governance not being told right now is the infiltration of local government elections, by groups in the US using social media. A lot of that infiltration is flying under the radar, people don’t pay much attention to…

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

This is social media at work. Not the ‘far Right’ or any ideology. The practical, simple mechanism of connecting people to each other. This is the paradox of sociality. The more we connect, the less cohesive we become. /1…

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

Nobody pays attention to local government. Right now in NSW towns are looking at takeovers from social media groups. Some are naked Trumpians. Media in regional areas is dead, already destroyed by SM. So there’s no scrutiny.

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

'Endemic' diseases are normally only endemic to poor nations. It's not a disease pattern, it's a status pattern. Like some neighbourhoods are said to have 'endemic' crime. Usually poor, low-status neighbourhoods. 1/2…

The community will want whatever they are led to want. The basis of all governance, always. We stopped Covid action because failed prime ministers led that outcome. https://t.co/YxzAqGKlsC

The libertarians are targeting local government, that nobody pays much attention to at all. Much of this is social media, from groups in the US. In my own town a Trumpian SM group is currently leading in local government election counting.…

That black band (coal) overnight for NSW represents the perennial pointlessness of NSW governance. Daytimes are dominated by ordinary peoples’ solar (yellow), years ahead of government. I call the black ‘baseload black’. The slogans from…

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

I’m not anti-democracy, to clarify feedback I get. I’m anti confusing it with elections. Democracy is over 2000 years old. Elections are 100. Elections destroy democracy, popularity is not a system of governance. We don’t raise families or…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed? This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. So we’re now returning to the pack. I think we sometimes forget…

I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

Possibly up to a trillion dolars worth of nuclear reactors and subs, neither of which are needed. And not one cent or even care for any of this. The next generation. The complete insanity of popularity-driven governance.…

Economic ideas (like supply and demand) are powerless to understand the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the same reversal of public-focused governance, back towards status-driven societies. High status historically was always the…

Henry VIII used to cheat creditors by substituting for silver with cheaper metals, in the currency. If you use populism as a system of governance, you will always arrive at Kings. https://t.co/37kStylGOF

This triumvirate of train wreckers led the world to ‘living with’ pandemics. What that actually means is that they were offloading THEIR job, onto you. It was the exact equivalent of the local council saying now you should fix your own…

Incidentally, tip to see the team sports. Look at who lined up to applaud this policy. Builders and developers. Local councils too (because they will get some of the money). https://t.co/ARy7n0KsSO

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

Look at what elections produce. This is our governance. Gossip and scandal. Who gives an actual f**k. https://t.co/Je97ZsMIpz https://t.co/HrtdtdqSYs

At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense. National Cabinet was the key weapon to destroy the public health response. Time to…

Why don't we see how perverse it is to 'win' an election? Like governance is a competition to be won. That's team sports culture, staring right at us. https://t.co/MYfhmuSxLb

So many billionaires today think 'democracy' means the absence of government. By definition democracy IS government. Without government there is no system of governance at all. In reality they dislike regulation because it stops them doing…

Somebody ‘won’ America. Like the Superbowl. Nobody asks how bizarre it is that you ‘win’ the governance of a country. https://t.co/5w78eeoizU

In the post-orgasmic euphoria and devastation of another election, I invite people to zoom out and see the farce we’re trapped inside. 5 outcomes here from the annual review of the state of democracy, worldwide. /1 https://t.co/uLWtQnaUyL…

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t. Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid,…

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1…

One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a belief about how groups behave, that is also wrong. /1 The belief…

Dutton’s policy is so bad that it should disqualify the LNP from eligibility for office. Our natural advantages in energy completely abandoned. We should be the Saudi Arabia of coming centuries. Elections mean they may still win.…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

The Magna Carta signing in 1215 was one of the foundations of democratic governance. It was the carving up of power between Kings and barons/nobles. It never was about ‘the people’. Today the exact same negotiation is happening between…

Populist governance always leads to war. The ultimate team sport, as all the other team sports battles for status in a society accumulate to a point where total dysfunction reigns. Only stabilising the battle for status fixes this. Social…

Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

A system of governance where ultimate power is vested in the most popular will always be rigged. Popularity is the easiest thing in the world to game. https://t.co/mKr7AipNvB

Because we think elections are democracy, we think Trump won. He thinks he won. ‘What’s this button do?’ governance will be his ending. https://t.co/kC2itMYYAF

The glorious insanity of ‘what’s this button do?’ governance, where those supposedly freeing us from the State, run the State through social media instead. X becomes the State power its owner is claiming to dismantle.…

Private versus public is an old, legacy team sport that we still play. All of what Cory says here is disgustingly true. The answer isn’t necessarily ‘make everything public’. That’s what the team sport wants us to say. Everything is…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

It’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Also this piece’s solutions to me are nonsense. /1…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

‘What’s this button do?’ governance. https://t.co/ASHInpjJ3q

“…activists focusing ire on a corporation has a long history in America.” ‘Troubling’, yes, rather than people cheering on the destruction. It’s deeply unpopular to say this, and in populist cultures, that’s why it has to be said. /1…

Those pesky other arms of democratic governance. And if you read Trump’s drivel and hear Mussolini, rather than Henry VIII, read more history. https://t.co/Im06CQCiKl

I’ve worked with local government, and I think we’re now past the tipping point where towns even exist any more, as a functioning entity. They’ve been replaced by a collection of social media groups.

The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

We can’t vote our way out of the problems that popularity-based governance causes. Only catastrophe ruptures a status quo. Humans will not surrender status, because to do that is to surrender their identity. https://t.co/lLjy8T6P51

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that societies are like computers, with an operating system. But…

I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the ludicrous ideas we have about them. That we in the West are led by ‘the people’ while these evil regimes are led by authoritarian…

Almost universally the US is now described as a battle between democracy and fascism. What we call democracy is really just a monarchy with significant checks and balances forced by the King’s court (i.e. the aristocracy), to protect their…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

The 19th century was a century of rival kings. Here they are in 1815 carving up Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. “The Cake of Kings.” Most of the two millennia of modern European history were alternating empires and rival monarchies.…

‘The vulnerable’ is a political strategy imported from free market zealots. The idea we should all take ‘personal responsibility’ for everything, even the most basic public services, with a few crumbs (that never arrive) allocated to the…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

Without exception every person I meet who talks up the idea that ‘the people’ run democracies: 1. has never actually worked in any form of governance, and 2. has never met the people they advocate for. https://t.co/UCCLbDC6FR

Noah Smith. Funny how the worm is turning in understanding the deeper social transformations in play. But he ends with: “ I predict that the new age of kings won’t last.” The age of kings never ends. /1 https://t.co/K9UkkQP0Ux…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very dangerous misunderstanding. /1 https://t.co/OCFuRrJxZj…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s.…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

Serving people’s material needs. That’s the touchstone of governance. The West is off with the identity politics fairies, fighting status games in a dramatic overproduction of elites. https://t.co/8gqMoupMUL

European fascism in the 20th century was populations living in the economic ruins of a world war, coupled to a feeling of total humiliation generated by the truce. Are those preconditions in the US today? Or is it the B-grade Western that…

We can live inside Hollywood movies and pretend this nonsense is ‘totalitarian’ politics. Really it’s just bog standard democracy, crippled by a populist mechanism (elections) coupled to social media, that bypasses any connection between…

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

The ‘we’ many of us grew up with, where continuous calculation of collective good was centre to our governance, was not an initiative of any leadership. It was the repair of societies pulverised by war, plague and economic collapse. Only…

Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that…

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

It amazes me every day how ahistorical we are in our thinking. The populism Trump represents is common throughout history. It always represents societies returning to more monarchical forms of governance, after the violence of ‘flatter’…

Trumpism, and populist movements globally right now, are not ‘authoritarian’ hijackings of democracy. That’s us stuck in the old Westphalian Nation State framing. For a few years now I’ve tried to persuade people what we’re seeing is a…

The entire global infrastructure of governance, deriving from the Westphalian settlement in the 17th century, is falling apart. Most of our interpretations of what’s happening, including the idea ‘fascists’ are taking over ‘democracies’,…

Elections were ostensibly introduced as a mechanism to try to translate the ‘will of the people’, into governance. The idea was lethally flawed in almost every way. ‘The people’ is a nonsense concept, popularised by fascists. Hitler’s…

The turnaround in Australian governance that Covid revealed, where leaders now cower to the social media mob and vested interests, is a disgrace to the history of the country. Australia was famous for its strong, innovative governance. Now…

I own an EV. There’s a real chance that with the pissweak void where governance in Australia used to be, I’ll become one of my employer’s involuntary taxi drivers for workers who can’t otherwise get to work, if fuel becomes scarce.

It took Scott Morrison about a year to dismantle Australia’s public health system, under Covid, via the invention of his ludicrous ‘National Cabinet’. An abomination in governance terms, completely at odds with federalism and its checks…

The great delusion of populist/electoral politics is that we’re always just one election away from salvation. No governance system run by popularity can ever change the world in meaningful ways. https://t.co/kt4nh1WVgt

Dunkelman traces how nation-building institutions now struggle to build anything at all. We can easily list those who obstruct this building work, like the sponsored small government movements that are really about entrenching established…

Populism swings between landslides for either side, often within only a few years. The UK has had 6 PMs in 10 years. Politics has been transformed into trending fads and fashions. Because societies are now social media. Popularity…

Stop looking at our lives politically and economically. They’re social. ‘Unaffordable’ housing is really us returning to land as a feudal arrangement. To go alongside our re-energising of the monarchic/regal model of governance (Trumpian…

We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1…