[Noel Pearson is one of a whole bunch of particularly articulate Aboriginal leaders at the moment - to my mind, the very best of 'em - indeed this is so brilliant a speech, I think it the best contribution to Australia's mainstream for many years. It's about Oz, but it's about all of us and everything, too. Please give it a go, eh? Social Democracy at its most enlightening and inspiring. Here endeth the rave. Rob.]
and
[Gawd, I love this bloke. Here he goes on to take the bleeding-heart armchair lefty to task. Says things only a very brave - and practical - lefty would say. And nails it, I reckon. Mebbe not revolutionary enough for some, but replete with a materialist grasp of our time and place - and the bullet-biting priorities thus indicated. Noel for PM! Rob.]
Both of which, I can sort of see -- it's a very interesting speech, and the good bits are very good; it's as good a defence of the concept of class as you'll get, and the bits on the development of the (white) welfare state are really very good. I don't really know enough about the "culture production" bit to tell whether there's anything in it, but it certainly reads better than most of the mmorning papers. But a lot of the rest of it reads like the sort of stuff Thomas Sowell writes. A few of my problems with it:
1. According to Pearson, the central problem of the Aborigines is the corrosive effect of spending too much time receiving "passive" welfare payments. There's no real argument for this proposition, or any real explanation of the mechanism whereby this operates. It looks to me to be too similar to the old Tory handouts-corrupt-the-soul rhetoric, or something that is headed quickly in that direction. I don't see why the persistent receipt of transfer payments should necessarily lead to such a plethora of social problems, and I don't think that the views of the "theorists" and "armchair lefties" deserve to be dismissed out of hand quite so much.
2. I'd like to see a lot more facts and figures backing up the assertion that "The bulk of the gross domestic product is now generated by a symbol and information-handling middle class and some highly qualified workers. These qualified people have a bargaining position in the labour market because of their individual competence, whereas traditional workers are interchangeable and depend on organisation and solidarity in their negotiations with the employers. ".
For a start, I don't think it's factually true of the Australian economy. Second, it misses the material base of this section of the economy; very few people are able to be paid for just manipulating symbols and information, the point is that these symbols and information denote ownership and control of material production. And finally, he shouldn't be swallowing the idea that the "highly qualified" have such a great bargaining position. They're completely replaceable, their large rewards actually come from their current position as guardians of an overflowing granary, and their threat to take their valuable skills away is almost always hollow.
3. An "inalienable right to a fair place in the real economy" sounds like an expensive thing to provide for a completely dislocated community, and I think that Pearson is guilty of suggesting that this could be provided just by legislating it so. He seems to elide the fact that, to give the Aborigines a "fair place in the real economy" would involve transferring large lump sums to them, to give them a fair share of the means of production of the economy. The basic problem of the Aborigines is that they lack wealth, not income; they can't begin to do anything because they don't have the table ante.
I quite like a lot of the things in this speech, and would second Rob's exhortation to read it. But it makes me feel uneasy; if he keeps saying this sort of thing, Noel Pearson is likely to find a lot of money thrown at him by a certain kind of think tank, so long as he keeps on churning out well-written monographs full of lurid images of alcohol and petrol abuse by black people, with last chapters that blame it all on "passive welfare".
dd
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