This is a cut and paste from Nick Cater’s column in today’s Oz. It again illustrates the ditzy, dingbat, juvenile and wooly thinking of Labors spokesman on childcare Kate Ellis. As I mentioned in a post several months ago and as Cater points out, this is Moral Narcissism writ large as defined by Roger L Simon in his book How Moral Narcissism is destroying our republic (ie) it’s more about being seen to weep and bleed and spend big money on an issue with no attention to detail or whether your idea will work. In other words it’s all about (in this case) how Kate Ellis wants to be perceived as compassionate rather than the nuts and bolts and viability at the pointy end of delivery of the actual childcare policy.
“If your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine,” writes Roger L. Simon in I Know Best, an insightful critique of the politics of good intentions.
“It doesn’t matter that they misfire completely, cause terror attacks, illness, death, riots in the inner city, or national bankruptcy you are that good person. You can do anything your wish….”
“… In the real world, the shortfall between what childcare services cost and what parents can afford must be topped up with taxes. In the real world, we’re staring at almost half a trillion worth of government debt with no conceivable way to repay it. In la-la land, on the other hand, it’s about fairness, equity and social justice, the touchy-feely drivers of public policy that got us in this mess in the first place.
No policy speech these day that fails to mention the words budget, debt and deficit deserves serious attention, yet the indifference to fiscal reality on Labor’s frontbench suggests the question of how you’re supposed to pay for stuff is not a matter of great concern.
Nor, incidentally, is the question of whether the policies will ever deliver what they promise. Inputs, not outputs, are increasingly Labor’s measure of good policy. It’s not what comes out that matters but the amount of compassion one invests in it. How can it be wrong when it feels so right?
The infiltration of this moral narcissism into mainstream politics is a disturbing development in a fiscally challenged era when hard-headed policy thinking is needed more than ever before.
Many on the progressive Left are dumbfounded when asked to justify the expenditure of public funds on their latest plan to edge us closer to their imagined utopia.
Victoria’s Education Minister James Merlino is so convinced that lecturing schoolkids about male privilege is “the right thing to do” that he was astonished that his $21 million program was being questioned.
“It’s astounding that anyone could think teaching our kids about respect for other people is a bad thing,” he told The Australian’s Rebecca Urban last week.
Few public policy areas are as prone to the tyranny of good intentions as childcare.
Ellis’s plan to tackle rising costs floated at the press club is the kind of barmy, socialist, centrally planned scheme that should have disappeared in 1949 with the fall of Ben Chifley’s government.
Ellis proposes that the government should buy up childcare places in bulk from private operators and negotiate down the cost.
Bureaucrats will be required to calculate the number of kids requiring childcare in each suburb and ensure that the right number of places be made available. Ellis’s explanation that she has not yet had time to get the experts to look over the scheme is simply no excuse.
You don’t have to be Milton Friedman to know that organising the childcare market in the manner the Soviet Union used to manage the production of shoes is nuts.
Labor in its present state of mind would never accept that parents, not the state, are best placed to decide what constitutes quality care.
The notion that a bureaucrat should decide is unlikely to go down well. Like the last Labor government’s centrally planned super GP centres, it has the smell of disaster about it. Most things are better left to the market.
Yet one senses that Labor will brook no argument on this one since in its socially orientated world, it’s simply the right thing to do.
“If your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine,” writes Roger L. Simon in I Know Best, an insightful critique of the politics of good intentions.
“It doesn’t matter that they misfire completely, cause terror attacks, illness, death, riots in the inner city, or national bankruptcy … you are that good person. You can do anything your wish….” Compassion’s fine but ignoring fiscal reality won’t pay the bills