Episode 141 – The New Liberals with Steve Keen & Victor Kline

This week we’re checking in with a couple of candidates from The New Liberals (TNL) of Australia. We’ll be learning about the traditional Australian political parties and getting an overview of how their electoral system works.

Steve Keen is an old friend of this podcast. In the past he’s joined us to talk about everything from climate change to Marx to the breakdown of supply chains during the COVID pandemic. Now we’re meeting him as a political candidate; soon Professor Keen will be Senator Keen. Victor Kline, the leader and one of the founders of TNL, is running for a seat in the House of Representatives.

TNL is only two years old but has already gained wide support. Unlike the US, where third parties have been almost entirely shut out of national elections, Australia’s preferential voting system and parliamentary style of government have made it possible for TNL to gain traction.

Voting is mandatory in Australia, which Keen explains is far superior to the farce called democracy in the US:

I see it as a way of making sure the politicians can’t ignore you because they can’t just hope to suppress different groups and stop them registering because it’s against the law not to register and not to vote. So therefore the politicians can’t ignore you. And I say this is a law controlling the politicians rather than the voters.

With an existential climate crisis bearing down on us and Australia just as eager to adopt the neoliberal agenda as western Europe and the US, Steve Grumbine asks how they’re breaking through the narrative of false scarcity. It’s not so difficult, says Kline:

Well, funny thing is that most people intuitively understand MMT or Keynesianism. If you say to them, look, we’ve got 3 million people below the poverty line in Australia. We want to put them back to work, and every dollar we spend putting somebody back to work gets spent and re-spent across the economy and stimulates small and large business alike … Now, most people get that, they don’t see that as strange. You tell them that a sovereign government can invest in what it wants to invest in. They get that.

Like the US, Australian politics are presided over by a duopoly of neoclassical parties – an “alternative autocracy.” The Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party are almost indistinguishable in their fealty to the neoliberal agenda, both “reporting to Rupert Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry.” However, unlike the performative opposition of American Democrats and Republicans, the two Australian parties tend to vote the same way. Imagine what kind of policy gets 100% “yes” votes.

Whether or not it’s possible to fix the mess we’re in through electoral politics, political campaigns allow for a dialog with the public, as Bernie Sanders demonstrated in the US. We’ll be watching and cheering on our friends down under.

Victor Kline is a Sydney barrister specializing in refugee law. He is the Founder and Director of the Refugee Law Project which offers pro bono legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and refugees. He is the Leader of TNL (The New Liberals) and one of its founders. TNL will be contesting the next Australian federal elections running candidates in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Victor will be contesting the House of Representatives seat of North Sydney in New South Wales.

Steve Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL and the author of “Debunking Economics,” “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” and his latest “The New Economics: A Manifesto.” He is one of the few economists to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, for which he received a Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review. His main research interests are developing the complex systems approach to macroeconomics, and the economics of climate change. Professor Keen is the lead Senate candidate under The New Liberals.

On Twitter:

@victorklineTNL

@ProfSteveKeen

Macro N Cheese – Episode 141
The New Liberals with Steve Keen & Victor Kline
October 9, 2021

[00:00:03.530] – Steve Keen [intro/music]

Everything that the MMT community globally can do to push us forward would be most beneficial because this interview will turn up, be listened to by a few Australians. All this stuff internationally will feedback to the domestic audience and give us a chance to be heard because we’re not going to get published by the Murdoch Press. We know that for a fact.

[00:00:23.340] – Victor Kline [intro/music]

The Australian people have so lost faith in democracy that any amount of clucking and soft talking on our part, is not going to restore that. They need to see that they vote for us. We get in, we put the bastards behind bars and they can say to themselves, “Well, my vote mattered. My vote caused this to happen. My vote caused us to retrieve our democracy.”

[00:01:35.280] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine

Alright. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We have two, yes, two people from Down Under. We’ve got Victor Kline and we’ve got none other than Professor Steve Keen joining us. Victor Kline is a first timer here with Macro N Cheese.

He is a Sydney barrister specializing in refugee law. He is the founder and director of the Refugee Law Project, which offers pro bono legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and refugees. He is the leader of TNL, The New Liberals and one of its founders. TNL will be contesting the next Australian federal elections, running candidates in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Victor will be contesting the House of Representative seat in North Sydney in New South Wales.

And Professor Keen really doesn’t need an introduction here, but I’m going to give him one anyway. He’s a distinguished research fellow at UCL and the author of “Debunking Economics.” And, “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” In his latest, “The New Economics, a Manifesto”. He is one of the few economists to anticipate the global financial crisis of 2008 for which he received a Revere award from the Real World Economics Review.

His main research interests are developing the complex systems approach to Macroeconomics and the economics of climate change. Professor Keen is the lead Senate candidate under the New Liberals banner, and I am so excited to be here to talk to them about this great news. This is huge. Gosh, we got a heterodox guy running for office in a very important race. So welcome to the show, gentlemen.

[00:03:29.120] – Kline

Thank you.

[00:03:30.100] – Keen

Thank you very much.

[00:03:31.160] – Grumbine

 Absolutely. So first of all, let me just start off with thanking you because here in the States, we’ve got a lot of funky election stuff. And so sometimes we’re not as focused on the rest of the world, but MMT and all the work that we do is not just a United States thing.

It’s a borderless, boundaryless thing that we have focused on a global fashion. And so your races and Australia are every bit as important to me as any other one. And so I’m very excited about this. So first of all, what got you guys to know each other? How did you guys even find each other? Because this is kind of cool. Both you, one’s running for the House, one’s running for Senate.

[00:04:10.290] – Kline

It’s interesting. When we set up this party, I was well aware of my economic ignorance. I was a bit of an old Keynesian, but very limited knowledge. So I started reading and I came across Steve’s book “Debunking Economics”, and they talk about the books that have changed your life. This changed my life. It gave me – no, it’s true. And I was looking for an economic model that could deliver the sort of promises we wanted to make as a political party.

And I was looking for a way in which my instinctual abhorrence with neoclassical economics could be expressed.  And I found it all there in that book. We were both on Twitter. And I just sent Steve a note saying, “thank you very much for changing my life” or whatever words I used. And that’s how we got to know each other. And then I think, Steve, you read my book, didn’t you? After that?

[00:05:04.190] – Keen

Yeah, well, I think I saw your tweets before we actually got in touch. At tea break I’ll go and check the history here of our messages to each other, but I’m very pleased to be asked, but I need to do a bit of due diligence on you and the party. And then I went, “there’s an autobiography. I’ll check that out.”

And I’ve got to say, equally, this was a remarkable read for me, because one thing, when we were chatting, I think well are you going to be a politician? You’ve not been a politician in the past, you’re my age. I’m slightly older, actually. So you haven’t been in the bear pit before. Maybe I should talk about how you need to watch out.

They’re going to be trying to dig through your past, trying to find secrets. And then I thought ah no I’ll be telling how to suck eggs. Well, Jesus. I’m glad I decided that because this is not giving any secrets here, Steve. You read the opening chapter and it’s a allegorical fictionalized account, which ends up being part of a play about Victor suffering sexual abuse from his mother as a child.

[00:06:01.670] – Grumbine

Oh

[00:06:01.670] – Keen

And I thought, woah, and then goes into – and you can cringe here mate – a life that I found myself quite admiring. I thought this is the sort of person I want to be dealing with. And so…

[00:06:15.110] – Kline

Thank you.

[00:06:15.660]

Having read I said, I’m on, count me in. So that was our beginning and we actually got in touch on the 3rd of April, 2021. So that’s only about five, six months. And the relationship has grown since there. And the party’s visibility has grown as well.

And I now think that we are potentially, if we have enough time to continue that momentum, a serious threat to the career politicians who run both major parties in Australia and frankly, most major parties around the planet.

[00:06:44.360] – Grumbine

That’s just fantastic. I have so many questions for you both, and hopefully we can get to them all. Let me just ask, Steve, you’ve been doing this economics thing for a few 24 hours. The last time we talked, we were breaking down Marx. And here now we’re talking about becoming an elected official.

That’s a bit of a departure. It’s a great departure because I’m so tired of the Simon Wren-Lewises of the world trying to advise people and telling them about this fake austerity that he’s baking into his beliefs. And somebody like yourself who’s got these great ideas, bold ideas, visionary ideas. And yet you’re not in a position to make policy. So this is a great thing.

[00:07:30.560] – Keen

Yeah. This is also a sign of how the party’s visibility is rising because we haven’t got the perfect system by any stretch of imagination but we’ve got a far better system than the farce you guys call democracy in the USA. And part of that, our Senate system, as you do, we elect multiple senators, but we elect six per state every election, and there are twelve.

So once you get elected, you there for a six year term and it’s done by proportional representation. To get elected you need one-seventh plus one vote to get through, and it’s preferential. First, voting is compulsory, and Americans might think that’s a denial of your freedom not to vote.

I see it as a way of making sure the politicians can’t ignore you because they can’t just hope to suppress different groups and stop them registering because it’s against the law not to register and not to vote. So therefore the politicians can’t ignore you. And I say this is a law controlling the politicians rather than the voters. So you’ve got to vote and you’ve got to vote for everybody.

It’s got to be preferential. And you say if there’s 73 candidates on a ballot sheet, and once there were 73 candidates on a ballot sheet, an election I voted for, you have to number them one to 73. Now then what happens is the first preference you’ve got gets one vote your vote, then your vote is allocated to whoever you gave number two to, and to three and four and five, etc.

Down to the point at which someone gets sufficient votes for being a quota. And then I’m not quite sure what happens at that point. I think your vote stops at that point because it’s gone to somebody who’s actually being elected. But it means that it’s possible rather than requiring roughly 14.5% of the vote to get a Senate seat it’s feasible to get elected with 8%. And there have been cases where people have done preference deals between parties where people with the trivial number of votes have gone in.

So initially, when we were starting, Victor chose to run for the Senate as the prime candidate in New South Wales. You put six candidates on a battle sheet if you can. But then, because we’ve been – and this is Victor, which again, I tip my hat to Victor’s activity on Twitter, in particular – we’ve got a large degree of visibility.

We’ve clearly tapped into a major feeling of disenchantment, particularly amongst people who vote for what we call the Liberals here that you would call the Republicans in America who are actually progressive people finding themselves voting for a reactionary party. So they want something else. That’s what the New Liberals appeals to.

And Victor’s now taken a gamble and thinking, well, there’s enough votes coming in, or the potential for votes, that we could win not just a Senate seat but maybe a House of Rep seat. Of course, only one person wins out of a House Rep seat, but the same story applies preferential voting and compulsory preferential.

So it’s possible to win a House of Reps with 40% of the first preference vote if you get sufficient of the second and third and fourth preferences. And Victor’s took the gamble for running for North Sydney, where he – I think you live, don’t you mate? North Sydney?

[00:10:24.480] – Kline

I do.

[00:10:24.480] – Keen

Indeed. Okay. You’re not a Laborite living in one seat and running in another.

[00:10:29.990] – Kline

No.

[00:10:29.990] – Keen

Okay, so he’s running where he lives, local candidate. And then that left the Senate vacancy free. And he then said, Steve, would you fill it? And I thought, Well, I’ve spent at least 15 years of my life arguing about policy and talking to people with marble ears. And here’s a chance to actually go and do it inside the marble chamber. And they can’t put fingers in their ears. They gotta listen to me. So I thought, “Why not? Let’s give it a try.”

[00:10:55.170] – Grumbine

I love it, when I think about what the standard fight is, just a little bit that I’ve picked up from Aussie politics. You’ve got the same kinds of stories going on, although much nicer and more gentle at this point than what happens in the United States. The idea, though, of this false scarcity, we can’t afford it. And with an existential climate crisis bearing down on us and the US employing its favorite export, neoliberalism, I’m sure we’re in the process of trying to privatize all your most beautiful public space now.

[00:11:36.360] – Kline

Correct.

[00:11:36.360] – Grumbine

The things that you’ve worked so hard over the course of your career. How do you bring that to bear against such bullshit austerity nonsense that is pumped out there? How does that message get laid out?

[00:11:52.940] – Kline

Well, funny thing is that most people intuitively understand MMT or Keynesianism. If you say to them, look, we’ve got 3 million people below the poverty line in Australia. We want to put them back to work, and every dollar we spend putting somebody back to work gets spent and re spent across the economy and stimulates small and large business alike.

And the person that we put back into work through our job guarantee scheme is then going to have plenty of opportunity in the now stimulated private sector to get an even better wage than we’re paying and move across. Now, most people get that, they don’t see that as strange. You tell them that a sovereign government can invest in what it wants to invest in. They get that.

One of the things that I use, the problem with preaching MMT is you can fall into a lot of technical wasteland when you see the eyes glazing over of the non expert. I’d like to just give an example from our historical past. We had a Liberal Prime Minister back when the Liberal Party of Australia was actually a Liberal Party. It’s now been taken over by these extreme right wing conservatives.

But back in the 50s and 60s in Australia, the Liberal Party held government for about 23 years from 1949 to 1972, and they had a Prime Minister called Robert Menzies. And Menzies ran what he would have called responsible deficits or deficits that were, in fact, around eight to nine times higher than anything we have in the modern world in Australia, when people are screaming that the deficit is too high and we have to get into surplus, and so on.

And this is not in dispute for any one of Australia’s 26 million inhabitants. He presided over the most prosperous time in Australian history, where there was real full employment only like 1.2%. And that was largely geographical mismatch, not what we talk about now or the journalists talk about. And the politicians talk about now in Australia 5% when it’s actually 15%, because if you work 1 hour a week, you get counted into the statistics as a fully employed person.

He presided over the most prosperous time in Australia’s history, with real full employment, minimal inflation, strong unionism, job security, where every working person had a job, the middle class were very comfortable and the wealthy class were wealthy, but not obscenely wealthy as they are now.

Now, when I talk about just doing what Menzies did, there are plenty of people that know what I’m talking about, and I guess it’s that combination of drawing on people’s innate understanding of the power of a sovereign government together with a little bit of historical instruction that enables us to put that across.

[00:14:40.980] – Grumbine

Very good. I’m interested in understanding the Australian governance because you guys will be handling two different sides of that government space. And I’ll be perfectly honest with you. Steve did a great job of explaining the way that voting works. What is the role of the Senate and the House?

[00:15:02.130] – Kline

It’s very different. It sounds like the American system because the names are the same, but it is quite different. So because, as Steve explained, senators can be elected on a lesser amount of votes than you might need for a House of Representative seat, the Senate is quite a diverse chamber.

So the two dominant parties, what we now call the duopoly because they’re almost indistinguishable, the Liberal Party of Australia and Australian Labor Party. They’re both neoclassical parties reporting to Rupert Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry in Australia. So one of those will have the government. The government is what is run out of what we call the Lower House or the House of Representatives.

And the Senate is known as a house of review. But it’s more than a house of review, because often there will be a number of smaller parties with representation in the Senate and independent candidates. And if there are enough of them, they can what’s called hold the balance of power, which means that the government can not necessarily get its legislative agenda through the Senate if it’s a wicked legislative agenda, because the smaller parties and the independents may well band together to vote it down, it has to pass both houses as legislation does in America.

The interesting thing of light is that the Labor Party, which is supposed to be the equivalent of your Democrats, has gone so far to the right that the government will get its legislative agenda through the Senate because the Labor Party or what we call the opposition, the so-called opposition, votes with it. So, we have this strange situation where people are now calling – I think this is not only in Australia – they’re calling something like an alternative autocracy. You can pick one of two identical parties.

[00:16:56.710] – Keen

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.

[00:16:58.370] – Kline

Yeah. You’re going to have an authoritarian system. You’re going to have a neoliberal authoritarian system and you get a choice between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. So people have become absolutely jaded by the Australian political system. They’ve turned off.

They stop watching their television. And what you’ve got is this cozy little duopoly, as we call it, two parties doing same thing, voting with one another. Can you imagine in America if the Republicans and the Democrats – I mean, you talk about them not cooperating in America, and you see that as a problem – but imagine if they cooperated so well that every piece of legislation got 100% vote from both parties, you’d start to think, is this a democracy at all?

So people have got terribly jaded. And the upshot is that they are searching for something else. And the reason we’ve got so much traction in such a short space of time is because we’re offering them real alternatives. Honest government, a party that isn’t beholden to the fossil fuel industry or the big corporate donors.

A party that’s going to kick Murdock out of Australia, and a party that’s going to pull what we call a federal ICAC, an independent commission against corruption, because the corruption in Australia – you’re probably not aware of this in America – has got to a state where we’re starting to look like what one of our prime ministers once called a banana republic, we’re starting to look like one of those South American dictatorships at its worst.

We have a group in Australia, a comedic team called The Chasers. And they’re comedians. But they’re very high intellectual comedians, and they’re all very well educated. And they took the trouble of putting together a list of unethical and improper behavior and straight out illegality on the part of this current Liberal government over the last eight years.

And they amassed in excess of 900 examples. So I could pick one of hundreds for you. But the one that I find that illustrates it best is this government has proprietized water in a desert country like Australia. You can sell water on the open market, which means our water is being sold to China and Canadian corporations. And whatever wants to buy our water, and the farmers have no water like it’s just insane.

So you’ve got one government Minister. We have a cabinet system here where the top parliamentarians in the governing party become the executive, the equivalent of a President. So it’s multi-faceted, a Prime Minister and a number of ministers with areas of responsibility. So what you have is one government Minister buying water on the open market on behalf of the government from another government Minister and paying him twice the market price.

Now, if you would understand, this would be the same in America and everywhere around the civilized world. If you’re running a company and you’re a director of a company and you decide to acquire supplies on behalf of that company, and you acquire them from another director of the company, and you pay twice the market price. Not only will you be sacked from the company, but you’ll be prosecuted and go to jail.

But if the government ministers do the same thing, it’s the honorable Mr. Smith, the honorable Mr. Jones. So, what we’re doing is we’re actually proposing a corruption commission that will be able to investigate and prosecute these people – and retrospectively too, which is a very significant step for us to take but we see it as a necessity – and what we call in the Australian vernacular, put the bastards behind bars.

So when we get into government, these people will go to jail. And we think this is essential because, as I say, the Australian people have so lost faith in democracy that any amount of clucking and clicking and soft talking on our part, is not going to restore that. They need to see that they vote for us. We get in, we put the bastards behind bars and they can say to themselves, Well, my vote mattered. My vote caused this to happen. My vote caused us to retrieve our democracy. So that’s quite a long winded way, I’m sorry, of telling you where we’re trying to go.

[00:21:17.150] – Keen

Okay, he took a bathroom break in the meantime.

[00:21:20.280] – Kline

[Laughs] How many acres did you mow while I was on?

[00:21:23.550] – Grumbine

No, no, no. I mowed no lawns I promise. [laughter] I will tell you this. Listen, I do another podcast that is somewhat related to this. It’s called The New Untouchables. And we are focused on bringing about what we call a new Pecora hearing. Ferdinand Pecora, who was the hellhound of Wall Street back in the days of FDR.

He absolutely took it to Wall Street. He brought the big boys to the brink. And that’s how we got some of the financial regulations that kept us out of harm’s way for a long time before brother Bill Clinton decided to remove Glass-Steagall. But that said, we’re watching the housing market go crazy right now and states are elevating the appraisal values and there’s a huge sellers market.

And there was lack of production during the pandemic. We’re coming out of that now and I suspect prices will eventually bottom out again. But the corruption, the extreme control fraud at the top of these organizations, the banking system, the rotating door between public sector and private sector, people in high places in government.

[00:22:35.100] – Kline

Same here.

[00:22:35.850] – Grumbine

It’s ridiculous. So it’s what I was going to say there is so much in common and one of the things that I want to touch on – and I’d like, Steve, for you to touch on this, after I finish this statement – is in the United States our Republicans and our Democrats fight over five inches. They forget the other 9 million miles of opportunity. [laughter]

[00:22:57.500] – Keen

That’s a very good analogy.

[00:22:58.805] – Kline

Really beautiful, yeah.

[00:23:00.020] – Grumbine

You got this tiny little speck of dirt that they’re going to fight over. You guys gave us the TINA version. The “there is no alternative” version of the world. Without even being an expert I can see at least 5 million different opportunities here, you guys tell us that’s all we have to fight over? And when you describe yours, it’s the same thing.

[00:23:21.430] – Keen

It is the same thing. One of the reasons I’m particularly enamored of what Victor started is that the leader of the Labor Party, which is like equivalent of Democrats, labor is Democrats and Liberal is Republicans. And that’s the easy way for Americans to understand our political system.

And the leader of the Labor Party now has studied political economy at Sydney University and actually was involved in some of the student occupations of the officers of the professors and vice chancellors to fight for political economy. Now political economy is an economics department that, frankly, I caused to come into being. I was the leading student rebel in 1973 that led to the formation of the Department of Political Economy.

There were others, but there were probably three at the top, and I was one of the three and the only one of those three to continue on to an academic career. Now, political economy should have taught Anthony Albanese some progressive economics out of that. But what does he do? The same sort of stupid thing.

He comes out and says, look at this terrible debt the government’s run up. And we’ll get the debt under control. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I don’t know whether Anthony actually understands that he’s talking bullshit, but it’s partly because as career politicians, they’re trying to get into power, and they think they’ve got to appeal to what the majority of the population currently thinks, and because the majority still make that household analogy about government spending and so on.

And if the household gets into debt, that’s a serious problem, blah blah, blah, for the householder, they think the same thing for the government. And even though the leader should have done in the university education that exposed him to the reason there are fallacies behind that mouths the same stuff the other side does. And you think you’re never going to get through.

And even worse than that – I have some history of the Labor Party. I was a member for a very brief period before I realized what a waste of time it was to be a member of a party and a local electorate. But I got involved in writing what’s called the Accord, which was the document put together by the Hawk and Keating governments before they became the government about how to reform the Australian economy along pretty much Swedish social democratic lines.

And then it was turned by the economic bureaucrats inside the government administration into wage restraint. Anyway, I remember debating with them saying, “look, what you’re doing is saying we’re going to take good social policies and bind them with good economics and show you’re better economic managers than the conservatives are.” But what you’re defining as good economic management is doing what you were told in the first University economics textbook and it’s bullshit.

It’s garbage. It’s nonsense. It won’t work. And they said, “oh, no, we’ve got to do that. This is the right way to go about it.” Well, over time they’ve become just another page in the neoclassical textbook. And what you get is the Liberals or the Republicans, implement the policies there with glee, tight budgets, cut spending on the poor, privatize everything, and the Labor Party implements and apologizes. That’s about the difference.

[00:26:18.530] – Kline

That’s true. Oh god, that’s true.

[00:26:57.830] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:27:23.870] – Grumbine

So let’s get down to brass tacks. When I look at people running for office in the United States, which is obviously what I’m keying off of, they always come out with “this is what we’re going to do, and that’s what we’re going to do.” But in reality, when you’re a representative from your district, you’re not really necessarily the one doing it. You’re part of a team.

Maybe you propose policy. I’m curious. How would a Steve Keen, Victor Kline platform be enacted? I know you have to work with a lot of people. So is it something that you would become the bill sponsor? Would you be the one that would propose the policy? How does it work? How does something come to be?

[00:28:04.430] – Kline

It depends where we sit in the next Parliament. Now, the chances of us getting government in the next Parliament are slim, despite the groundswell in our favor, we’ve only been around 18 months, but we may hold the balance of power as I described before. And if you hold the balance of power, you’re in a kind of position to blackmail the government.

So the government wants to introduce piece of legislation X, and you say, sure, we’ll support that. But in exchange, we want you to take this action on climate change, or we want you to introduce our corruption commission along the lines of our model. Or we want you to take some proactive investment action in the green economy.

Or we want you to do something about the 3 million people below the poverty line in accordance with something approximating our job guarantee scheme. And then they’ve got a choice. They can either succumb to that beautiful blackmail or if they don’t, their government can fall and they have to go to another election. And they’re not going to want that to happen because they’ve said we’re not going to adopt action on climate change.

We’re going to go to an election instead because the people will be very happy with us not taking action on climate change, or the people will be very happy with us leaving the 3 million below the poverty line. So we can put a bit of a pincer movement on them in terms of when we eventually hopefully get into government. I think the important thing to understand here is that none of us is a professional politician.

Steve and I, for example, we’re in our late sixties. We’re not the career politician that you see in America or Australia, who studies political science at university and joins the party as a kind of gopher  and then turns into a staffer and then turns into a candidate for a seat. None of us would have dreamt of going into politics, except we saw what we thought was our democracy disappearing down the drain.

So, we’re not worried about trying to make a career for ourselves in politics. We’re going to do what we believe is right. We’re going to take action on climate change, we’re going to introduce a job guarantee scheme. We’re going to bring in an independent commission against corruption. We’re going to take the poor refugees that have been thrown into jail just because they’re refugees and let them out.

We’re going to do all those things. And if some people like that, they’ll continue to vote for us. If they don’t, we go back to our day jobs. But we’re not going to make that kind of horrible compromise where we sell our principles and half the population down the river in order to hang on to power.

[00:30:47.200] – Grumbine

That’s… Well, here [applauds] There’s the applause button. [laughter] I want to ask you, Steve, you and I have talked about this several times, and one of the most compelling interviews I’ve ever done with you was about climate disaster coming. And we’re way beyond platitudes, at this point. You’ve documented Nordhouse’s absolute horrific malfeasance.

And I’m curious, how do you take that kind of knowledge? It’s not general knowledge. It’s specific knowledge. How do you take that and say, guys, I’m not your average dude coming out of the bar talking about this. I actually have insane amounts of information. And I’m telling you, we got to take action. How do you take that with the authority that you should have because you are an expert? How do you take this to them?

[00:31:41.260] – Keen

Well, that’s going to be difficult for the simple reason that I don’t think any political system would agree to what I think is necessary until after its catastrophically obvious that there’s no choice to do otherwise. So in this sense, like the analogy I’ve got is that Winston Churchill didn’t get elected before the Second World War. People like Chamberlain where they’re saying “peace in our time.”

And Winston was saying, “this guy’s a madman, we’ve got to break the Nazis,” etcetera, etcetera. And then only once the Nazis began the war did the rhetoric change the other way. And “this is the battle for survival and we will fight them on the beaches, we will never withdraw” etcetera, etcetera. So a similar thing here.

And with that realization, I don’t believe it’s possible. I think if we can do things like so we’ve got to massively increase our efforts on renewable technology. We have to consider – and this is going to annoy some people – nuclear. Again, I’m advised by my engineer colleagues on new developments in nuclear power. I mean, it’s a lot cheaper.

Got a higher energy return on energy invested than old stations, much, much safer, etcetera, etcetera. We all need part of that as well. But also, we wouldn’t have to consider cutting back our consumption levels dramatically. And like, I know there’s no chance of selling that to an electorate.

So what I would be doing is putting in things which I think can work, which would be getting rid of the Australian government’s emphasis on coal and oil and gas, which is a sign of how both parties are owned by the fossil fuel lobby in Australia, which is huge because we are probably the world’s major exporter of fossil fuels, coal plus oil.

We import oil or you export a massive amount of coal. So in that sense, we’re even more beholden to fossil fuel interests than the American parties are. So turn that away. We’re going to go for renewable and nuclear rather than coal and oil and gas. That we can push forward and put policies for that while we’re both a minority party, and if we ever get into government.

But at the other side, I want to prepare us for what I think is going to happen inevitably, which is we’re going to be forced to drastically cut back the level of consumption that humans do on the planet. And we’re going to need carbon rationing as an initial part of that. And to do that, we would need a way of distributing ration rights for carbon.

And that is a scheme that I’ve been developing with a guy in England called Adam Hardy and the idea is to have universal carbon credits distributed through a central bank digital currency. So that’s the long winded statement. But one thing I’d be demanding we get one of our little “you’ve got to agree this or else” pieces of blackmail for the government, and the powers we want the bank of Australia to establish a central bank digital currency account for every Australian over 16.

And that would be sitting there as a technology that could be used at a later point when we find we have to ration carbon. So those sorts of schemes. It’s not going to be easy. No way do I think it’s going to be easy.

[00:34:31.000] – Grumbine

I had the pleasure of talking with Doctor Jason Hickel of South Africa. He’s largely known for degrowth and so in my mind, I’m naturally marrying the things you’ve told me and the things he told me and things Fadhel has told me. And the global north has made the global south its slave. To put it bluntly. It has extracted and coerced the global south for as long as empire has been around.

And here we are at a point where the global north consumes so much more and so much more flippant in their way of consumption that we have to look at reparations for the south. I’m curious, what are your thoughts in terms of Australia’s position on degrowth and reparations for the global south?

[00:35:24.450] – Keen

Funnily enough, I think we tend to believe that climate change is going to hit the South worse than the north. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to turn out to be wrong because the global south happens to be the global equator more than anything else. Where we talk about the south is really between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.

That’s what the global south is. It’s south and north, and it’s tropical regions. They already have to cope with high temperatures. There are going to be catastrophic outcomes there as well. It’s quite feasible to have unsurvivable [inaudible 00:35:55] temperatures courtesy of climate change as it’s happening. And that countries like Indonesia are particularly exposed on that front.

However, where the extreme changes in temperature and climate are going to come are more likely to be the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. That’s where I could see the greatest volatility. So the destruction that climate change is going to cause may first manifest itself in the northern hemisphere, as we saw with Canada recently, what happened to the town wiped off the map by fire the day after it set a record temperature for Canada of what, 49.6 degrees Celsius, which is what, 120 Fahrenheit or thereabouts.

So reparations aren’t going to be part of it is going to be survival. And in that situation again, the north has farther to cut back than the south does. When you’re over-consuming, you’ve got more to cope with when you’re forced to consume less. Whereas if you’re already relatively under consuming you may not even cut back at all. And the distance that you are from the start of the food chain is much shorter in the third world than it is in the advanced countries.

So if the food chain breaks down and we’re seeing that in the UK right now because ironically, they can’t produce enough carbon dioxide, because they can’t afford the cost of the fuel that’s used to generate the methane that’s used to generate the carbon dioxide. So the food production system is breaking down in the UK.

So the breakdowns and the shortages may first hit the north rather than the south. And in that expectation, I don’t think reparations are the thing. I think it’s there has to be a drastic cut in consumption, and of course, that’s going to hit the north far more than it hits the south.

[00:37:34.460] – Grumbine

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess this comes to, when are these elections?

[00:37:39.670] – Kline

That’s the question [laughs]

[00:37:41.890] – Grumbine

Yes. When is the election? And I’m very interested in what a campaign in Australia looks like because I know what it looks like in the US, and I wish I didn’t. What does it look like down there?

[00:37:52.990] – Kline

First of all, you don’t have fixed election dates in Australia. You have a constitutional requirement that a Parliament will run for three years. But the Prime Minister has a very wide discretion to call that election up to sometimes nine months ahead of the last possible date.

And first of all, it’s absurd we’ve got such a short election period of three years anyway, but I think the average government in Australia runs for two and a quarter years or two and a half years at the most, because what happens is that the governing party waits for the time that they’re looking the best in the polls, and then they will call a snap election.

And of course, they know when they’re going to call it, so they buy up all the advertising space in advance, etc. And the opposition party or parties have to try and catch up. In this case, the latest the Prime Minister can call an election is May of next year, and that will probably be what happens, because at the moment, the governing party is terribly unpopular, not because of all the corrupt and horrendous things they do, but because they failed to roll out the COVID vaccine properly.

And people have been locked down in Australia for months and months, and we have outbreak after outbreak every time they open up because not enough people are vaccinated and people are very cranky. So the Prime Minister is going to wait till he’s got the vaccinations properly done and then say, “Look, I’m a hero. I got it done. Forget all the rest, vote for us.”

So probably March to May of next year. The campaign in Australia is much the same as in America, I think, as somebody once said, you get the democracy you can afford to buy. So these are small numbers in American terms. But the two major parties will each bring about a hundred million dollars to the campaign. That’s officially. So it’s probably a lot more under the counter.

And that will be funded by international corporations who give the money to make sure that they don’t have to pay tax. And of course, the fossil fuel industry. Small emerging parties like ourselves have to do a bit of an Obama. We rely on five and ten and $100 donations from thousands and thousands of people. And it’s really beautiful.

We have one woman, she’s unemployed and she’s got very, very little money and three kids. But whenever she can, she sends us $5. And when I announced that I was going to take the risk of running for the Lower House of Representative seat of North Sydney, she sent us six, so that’s the kind of support we’re having.

[00:40:35.100] – Keen

And we don’t have a two year campaign. We don’t have primaries. So we watch your stuff and Jesus,  it’s Barnum & Bailey. I mean, it’s lion tamer nonsense. Such a circus. But in Australia, whoever is your Prime Minister, the one who runs, you don’t have to choose a candidate for President like you guys – interminably – in America.

So we know it’s going to be Scott Morrison, who’s going to be on one side, and Anthony Albanese on the other. The party gets elected, not the President independent of the party. So whichever party gets a majority of seats in the House of Representatives is the government. It’s also possible that you can have a minority government, because again, if you vote for the Greens in America, you waste a vote that could have gone to the Democrats.

We know that’s one reason that Al Gore didn’t become President back in 2000 because of votes for the Green candidate in Florida. And that doesn’t happen here. If you vote for the Greens and they don’t get up, then the vote you gave for the Greens, you give your next preference to the Labor Party and the Labor Party gets up.

So consequently, it’s possible you get a few representatives who are like a Victor gets up. He’ll be a New Liberals representative in a House of Representatives with mainly Labor and mainly Liberal, maybe one or two independents there as well. So it’s possible that the independents plus one of the other parties has more votes than the party that forms the government.

And that’s a [inaudible 00:41:56]  we intend exploiting. And then in the Senate even more so because minority parties can get up very easily because there’s six electors per state and there’s six states and two territories. It’s quite possible that there could be up to six representatives out of the 72. I think…

[00:42:13.640] – Kline

It’s 76.

[00:42:14.850] – Keen

76 reps. There’d be up to six of them – even more, in fact, can be non-main party wing. So it’s possible for smaller groups to have power in the Australian system in a way that simply is not possible in the American. A final thing I’ll say, we have an electoral commission for all its hassle and its weaknesses.

We’ve been seeing that recently because the Liberal party has been dominating appointments to it for some time. It’s a bunch of bureaucrats who decide what size and what shape electorates have. And there are laws restraining that no more than a 20% margin either way in the size of electorates.

So the gerrymandering you guys get in the States we have pretty close to have gotten rid of that. So in fact, in that sense, the votes more closely represent the numbers in Parliament than you get in America or that the Brits get in the UK.

[00:43:00.990] – Grumbine

Very interesting. This whole thing is upside down.

[00:43:04.570] – Keen

That’s where we are.

[00:43:07.170] – Grumbine

It sounds fun on one level. On another level it would absolutely baffle me. Wait, when’s the election? [laughter] That would probably just make me go nuts.

[00:43:18.240] – Keen

One of the fun things there you would have seen recently that Australia decided to buy nuclear subs off the Americans. Did you see that?

[00:43:24.270] – Grumbine

I did. And there’s somebody complaining. Fancy that.

[00:43:27.530] – Keen

Load of nonsense in my point of view. The subs won’t be delivered until 2040. So they’re ready for a war we expect with China in 2025. It’s just crazy stuff.

[00:43:35.800] – Grumbine

Isn’t it?

[00:43:36.420] – Keen

One thing we thought might happen as Morrison is stupid enough. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison is known by various nicknames in the country, such as “Scotty from Marketing” because he’s been a Liberal Party apparatchik way from the very early days. I think he was New South Wales, State Director of the Liberal Party.

Then he became a tourism executive in New Zealand, of all things. He got sacked from that job, became tourism director in Australia, got sacked from that job. Okay? And then finally was the deputy Prime Minister with allegedly progressive Liberal Party person called Malcolm Turnbull.

Gnashed Malcolm and got the job as Prime Minister – as we call him, “the accidental Prime Minister, Scottie from Marketing.” Blah blah blah. He’s not held in high regard, even by his own side. It’s possible Scotty from Marketing thought that by selling off this, “we’re getting nuclear submarines” that we’re joining the Americans.

He might have thought that was good enough to get a boost in the polls. And if you got the boost in the polls then called a snap election over security. And that’s still a possibility. So we could find they’ve made the announcement about the nuclear subs, pissed off the French completely and that we’re going to get a good bounce in the polls.

They’re in the lead over Labor. Let’s run a six week campaign on security and keeping our borders safe. We decide who comes to this country and the condition to which they come. That’s a quote from previous Liberal Party Prime Minister. And then we win the election and bang, we’ve knocked out the rivals and we can keep on doing the same old shit. So that’s a possibility.

But I think the polls are going to say a strange thought. You think buying nuclear subs that are going to turn up in 2040 is an election winner? You’re even more of a turkey than we thought you were and they’ll have to hang out for May, because given that they can wait until May and they’re on the nose, the longer they wait, the more there’s a chance for the Labor Party to do something or a refugee boat to turn up on the border and they can rough up the refugees and get a vote on a right wing basis. That’s what we think they’re going to do. And that still leads the bias to think somewhere between March and May.

[00:45:34.640] – Grumbine

There’s an activist group out there called GetUp.

[00:45:38.220] – Keen

Oh, yeah.

[00:45:38.980] – Grumbine

Where do they fit into this?

[00:45:41.010] – Keen

One of their founders is now a member of our party and our advisor on health. Do you want to do the details there, Victor? Simon.

[00:45:48.850] – Kline

Simon Chapman. Yeah. I didn’t even know.

[00:45:51.340] – Keen

Didn’t you know?

[00:45:52.460] – Kline

No.

[00:45:53.110] – Keen

Ah no, its Simon. Well, not so much GetUp. GetUp is a grassroots political campaign system, which has been very effective in Australia. Yes, but Get Up. Simon may well have had a role in there, but Simon Chapman has recently come on board. We’re attracting really intelligent people as advisors for the party.

I’m not just beating my own drum. There’s a range of people who have been first class intellects, very influential, but on the periphery of politics for a long time who are now coming on board. And one of them is Simon Chapman. Simon’s an old mate. I knew him 30 years ago in my social circle in Sydney. But Simon is a professor of medicine and epidemiology, I think.

And Simon devised two things in his youth. One was an advertising campaign against smoking. And rather than saying it’s bad for you, it’ll give you bad breath, cancer, blah, blah, blah, the campaign slogan was, and I quote, kiss a nonsmoker. Enjoy the difference. Now, that was the most effective anti-smoking campaign in the history of campaigns against smoking.

So, it was Simon’s number one piece there. And then he also formed a group called Bugaa Up and Bugaa Up stands for Billboard Utilizing Graffiti Artists Against Unhealthy Promotions. And they would go around at a dark at night with a spray can and deface or actually improve billboards for cigarettes, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s the sort of caliber of both intellect and activists that are now becoming part of the New Liberals.

[00:47:22.160] – Kline

Yeah. And just on the GetUp question, what happened? Because this duopoly, as we call it, has emerged where both of the major parties are, as I said, indistinguishable neoliberal slaves to Rupert Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry, a grassroots organization called GetUp, which never intended to run for office but intended to be a voice outside the parliamentary system for rationality and logic and green energy and all the things we know should be happening in the world.

They started up and have been spectacularly successful because they were the only outlet for good sense that Australians could find. And as I say, they were outside the political system. But they grew very rapidly and they had and still do have a huge following. There was a minor, tragic moment when I used to donate to them.

And when we formed this party, I said, “Look, I’m really sorry. I love what you do. I’ve been donating to you for years. I’m going to need the money to help run this party.” And they said, “That’s great. We understand.” So I think what’s going to happen over time is that we will become the political voice and they will become the non-political voice, but often the political voice standing outside the Parliament. But we will be and are, I think, very much on the same page.

[00:48:58.390] – Grumbine

Yeah. Ed Miller, he is the founder of that. And he is an MMTer.

[00:49:04.430] – Keen

Oh, good.

[00:49:05.080] – Grumbine

So you guys may have some kindreds there that you can find a way to that’s really good. So let me give you guys both an opportunity to close out because I’d love to hear your pitch both for the House and for the Senate and close us out with the good word.

[00:49:21.650] – Kline

I think what we want to say to the Australian people is that we are a grassroots party. We are drawing people from every form of political persuasion. We are not career politicians. We are actually there to try and do something for our country. In a way, we are a populist movement. That term has been debased by being associated with the right wing of politics.

But all a populist movement really is is a group of people who appeal to the populace rather than to the political machine. And we want to replace the careerist politicians. We want to reintroduce democracy back into Australia, and we want to try and give Australians the sort of life that they knew when we were often called the lucky country because of our prosperity and our egalitarian approach and our multicultural approach to our society.

That has been crushed by the neoliberal economic juggernaut and by politicians living in the pockets of fossil fuel and major corporations. We’re going to reverse that. And we’re going to reverse that with people power. That’s our approach. And that’s what we hope will succeed.

[00:50:41.010] – Keen

And if I can go on from the phrase that Victor used, the Lucky Country, that was actually a term of satire in a book called “The Lucky Country,” written by a wonderful Australian called Donald Horn. And he said, “Australia is a lucky country governed by second-rate people who share its luck.”

In other words, the county’s relied upon luck to go forward, and it’s had that luck because of the mineral discoveries and so on. But it’s neglected what used to be an approach to building a nation. And another one of the many progressive voices I know personally, is a guy called Michael Pusey, who wrote a book called “Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind.”

And what he showed was that the infusion of mainstream economics-trained bureaucrats into Canberra turned around the country, which used to focus upon building its industrial capacity, and turned into one which was just focusing upon the neoclassical idea of comparative advantage, specialize in minerals and rural products, and import the manufactured goods from the rest of the world.

And whatever government’s been in power, that’s been the underlying objective of the economists who run the bureaucracy and the political parties themselves in many ways, which is why they were so easily captured by the fossil lobby. Now that program has meant that Australia, in terms of its industrial capabilities, is now ranked below Senegal on the list of capacity of countries to produce complex goods.

We are number 86 in the ranking of about 150 countries that are ranked by the Atlas of Economic Complexity, which Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also Harvard University maintain. So we’ve been de-industrialized and de-skilled. And now, of course, we’re seeing the consequences of that because we couldn’t even make masks and ventilators and so on when COVID struck.

We couldn’t make vaccines because what was once called Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, was literally formed to make vaccines, I think in 1916, has been privatized and no longer makes vaccines, doesn’t research them. So this de-industrialization and de-skilling is something we intend reversing and it’s going to be a long slog. And of course, with the impact of Covid and what climate change are going to do as well disrupting global supply chains, that’s vital.

And it’s something that neither major party is prepared for. So we’re going to come in and make those cases in hopefully both houses of Parliament, initially being an irritant, but using the leverage by having hopefully the balance of power to make those policy noises while also making sure we get a genuine commission against corruption to take on the corruption that has characterized Australian politics for the last pretty much 20 years.

[00:53:21.350] – Grumbine

Wow. Okay, gentlemen, this has been one of my favorite interviews because I knew nothing about Australian politics and I learned so much. And the fact that a good friend – you, Professor Keen – are running is exciting. And a new friend, Victor, your explanation of the party is so powerful.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me, and I look forward to talking to you in the future. I really want to keep my finger on the pulse on this one because this is new for me. I’m quite intrigued by the whole process, so I hope you’ll come back again. And if we do a follow up as we see how things progress.

[00:54:00.620] – Kline

Absolutely. I would love to do that.

[00:54:02.540] – Keen

And everything that the MMT community globally can do to push us forward would be most beneficial because this interview will be available to be listened to by a few Australians. We’re talking with a Malaysian group in a couple of days time as well. All this stuff internationally will feed back to the domestic audience and give us a chance to be heard because we’re not going to get published by the Murdoch Press.  We know that for a fact.

[00:54:24.990] – Grumbine

Well, for the audience – I will tell you, it’s interesting to see the way the demographics of our podcast go, but we have a lot of listeners in Australia, I think between Bill Mitchell and Stephen Hail and Phil Lawn and Jengis Osman, some of the other people that have helped us throughout time.

We have a lot of friends down there, so we do get listened to occasionally down there, which is nice. So hopefully all of our MMT friends will definitely line up because we need guys like you in office. Anyway, I’m really glad you guys join me tonight.

[00:54:55.470] – Kline

Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure, and I’m glad that I’ve had the dubious honor of introducing you to a broader knowledge of Australian politics. I’m not sure you need it, but anyway, it’s been great fun. Thank you so much for having us on.

[00:55:10.190] – Grumbine

You got it. All right. This is Steve Grumbine, Victor Kline, Steve Keen, Macro N Cheese we’re out of here.

[00:55:53.700] – Ending Credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

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