Guy Rundle nails the "wrongity" in the Summer 2009/10 edition of 'Overland' magazine:
... New Labour's experience has been a major influence on Rudd Labor. Quite aside from the transmission of ideas, half a dozen British New Labour policy wonks of various stripes are in Rudd government offices.
Yet Australia is not Britain. Here, the neoliberal reconstruction of the economy was undertaken by a Labor government, which re-emphasised a collective engagement with the nation, and offered some compensation for the effects of economic restructuring. And, by the standards of Thatcher, the Howard government changed almost nothing of the fabric of Australian life.
In line with its New Labour inheritance, Rudd Labor seeks to manage the reproduction of a society it has no intention of transforming, and must therefore shape social and personal character to accommodate. Federalism means that in Australia many specific New Labour policies are the responsibility of the states. Yet, as the farcical alcopops saga demonstrated, Rudd Labor will grab whatever micro-social issues it can. In the federal arena, social and psychological management forms the core of policy. The proposed internet firewall is one example. Ill-conceived, and probably unworkable, it differs from old-style censorship in that it does not proscribe a certain number of books deemed to be dangerous but a general style of material as harmful, in a mixed psychological-social-therapeutic mode. The concern is not so much that a citizen might act on dangerous ideas but that a subject may be deformed by harmful 'content'. McClelland's proposed 'psychological harm' legislation has a similar content - it assumes not only that subjectivity is as material as physicality (a reasonable assumption), but that particular theories of subjectivity (such as the current emphasis on trauma and anxiety disorders) can be regarded as 'true', in the same way as it is true that an assault broke an arm. The assessment of psychological harm as quantifiable and specifiable implies not a bodily bounded citizen, for whom politics is a matter of action in the public square and whose inner life remains a zone of privacy, but a subject whose inner condition becomes a matter for political action.
The approach extends to wider areas of policy: witness Lindsay Tanner's interest in so-called 'nudge' theory, whereby small changes in the built environment and social process control behaviour. Tanner's favourite example is that of a fly painted on the bottom of urinals, which forms a target that men tend to aim at. More seriously, small alterations in urban design - such as the elongation and tapering of bus and taxi shelters to promote queuing and minimise late-night fights - become a substitute for, say, adequate public transport. Again, the person is seen not as a citizen but as a behavioural atom to be shaped to given conditions.
By the time John Major was turfed out in 1997, many in the UK were aghast at how their country had been wrecked by Thatcher and Major. They had good reason - over eighteen years whole swathes of the country, all but the south-east, had turned to rust-belt. Poverty had more than doubled; northern cities were rotting at their core; individual anger and aggression had been elevated as virtues. As a society, Britain appeared broken. This was not the perception of Australia at the end of the Howard regime, which means that Ruddism faced no reconstructive challenge.Equally, though, New Labour never sought to construct intellectual life in the service of the state. Intellectual culture in Britain is too broad and its autonomy generally recognised as a social good. The Rudd government, however, drew on Labor's old image as a party for intellectuals to subsume debate to a process of problem solving within a set of fixed goals.
In the process by which the intelligentsia were entranced into Rudd's service - most particularly, the 2020 conference - no space was provided for the more radical questioning that Rudd himself countenanced in his essays on Howard's Hayekian 'brutopia' (something I have discussed in more detail for Arena Magazine). Indeed, the very form of the 2020 event sought to 'nudge' people into a microsocial problem-solving agenda and so, not surprisingly, what arose was overwhelmingly a catalogue of measures for social control: more particularly, control by the sub-class from which the conference participants were drawn of the people who weren't there. The old Whitlam-era relationship with the intellectuals had been reversed, for it was not ideas that Rudd wanted but methods.
When it comes to reversing liberatory potential into a system for administering social and psychological life, Rudd Labor has thus gone one stage further than Blair. Rudd's latest intervention - an attempt to end the 'history wars' by courtly fiat - is a similar attempt to draw the untidy processes of debate into service to the nation. Ruddism is a mode of post-social democratic labour adapted to Australian conditions and history, one that displays no real interest in challenging an atomised neoliberal social order and must therefore explore increasingly specific coercive measures in the management of a population.
The paradox of Ruddism is that the modesty of its aims, its absence of anything other than a series of quantitative, untransformative aims, attracts supporters from the world of ideas precisely when the inadequacy of the conventional political frame to humanity's challenges is becoming unmistakably clear. In the current period, 'ideas' have been radically separated from practice. Ideas festivals are everywhere - there have never been more of the damn things around! - yet they float above an undifferentiated bedrock of a hypermodern marketised society which remains unquestioned and unchallenged. ...