Ross Gittins, David Burchell, Kevin Andrews, and do gooderism

You can imagine the shock and awe. Monday is Paul Sheehan day, always has been, always will be, always should be.

Except there's no Paul Sheehan. As a result, when we consulted our loon pond thermometer - available on line from specialist suppliers of quality products for genteel guardians of sundry ponds - it recorded a most temperate temperature for the first day of autumn.

Oh that there should be such peace and quiet and bliss and absence of squawking as the world turns into the seasonal sere, the yellow leaf.

As a result, we ended up reading Ross Gittins giving libertarians a sound thrashing in Libertarians silent on insulation bungle.

Gittins flails away at the libertarians and their think tanks, and their stance on global warming, and who can argue about that. Come to that, who can argue with his central thesis that libertarians are always squawking for the government to go away, until in the absence of government, naughty people do naughty things, and then they blame the absent government for not providing sufficient sturdy supervision and regulation.

But when it comes to the insulation batts fracas, Gittins goes a little batty.

The government's critics in the opposition, the media and the industry haven't attacked its decision to offer the subsidy, but rather its failure to implement adequate training, licensing requirements, codes of conduct and inspection of work done. Their implicit and sometimes explicit assumption has been: any fool could have known the private sector isn't to be trusted. So the government has been asked to bear all the responsibility for the shoddy work, fires and deaths.

Blame it all on Nanny, who was asleep on the job.

Well there's libertarians and there's Tony Abbott, and then this very day there's David Burchell, who reminds us that all is well in loon pond with A humble philosophy is worth more than a fair shake of the sauce.

In his usual verbose, florid, portentous way, Burchell spends most of his column berating Chairman Rudd - you know, the human comedy, the peculiar furrow, the splendidly oblivious, the elemental defects in our capacities, the attentive onlooker, the New York minute, the universal comic discrepancy, the unexpected pathetic edge, the pas de deux with the rudiments of official English, the obscure anxiety, the routine vocabulary, the repertoire of ceremonial responses, the frailty of the mortal frame, a flurry of electronic pulses, the worm of doubt in the soul, a growing and disabling discomfiture, the exotic flora of the cleverest minds in the country, bright-eyed commentators, the economic deluge as heavenly opportunity, and the famous Monthly essay. And so on.

But in the end Burchell rambles, ambles, berates, cudgels and strolls towards his key point. If the government does anything much, he's agin it:

Any government can spend money fast with the best of intentions: that, so far as social democratic governance goes, is the idiot's philosophy.

A Labor government that hopes to prosper needs a humbler economic philosophy that generates and recognises limits: one that understands the domain and the limits of the knowledge of government, and the respects in which public expenditure is effective or otherwise.

Hell no, we don't want your pink batts.

And if Chairman Rudd fails to recognise that government action mostly ends up as middle-class welfare, in ways that seem to have escaped Chairman Howard?

This is an intimation of mortality that should, if he ponders it, heighten the present anxieties in Rudd's soul.

Trust Burchell to leave Gittin's thesis looking a little ragged at the edges. When you're a strident stentorian rhetorician with a Shakespearean bent (when not Homeric in aspiration), then all government is barely to be tolerated.

Back to Gittins' thesis:

But all this is the opposite of what libertarians believe. They believe the private sector is always to be trusted; that rational firms always do a good job, that competition will soon drive the odd cowboy out of the industry and that government regulation of industries almost always does more harm than good.

The government says one good thing to emerge from the disaster is that the insulation installation industry is now tightly regulated. It reminds us that deaths occurred in the industry before the subsidy was introduced, that employers had the usual duty of care to their workers and that the industry is covered by state occupational health and safety legislation.

But libertarians have never been enthusiastic about occupational safety laws and have long disapproved of licensing arrangements, which they believe are used by the industry to restrict supply.

And whatever happened to individuals accepting responsibility for their own affairs? What happened to caveat emptor and civil remedies? Isn't any of the blame to be shared by cowboy businessmen?

Surely it's a reasonable thesis, and after Burchell's disappointing predica=tability, surely there's at least one loon on the pond this day who can substantiate it?

Thank the lord there's Kevin Andrews scribbling Putting do-gooder politics ahead of helping people.

In just a couple of short breaths, there he is quoting Peter Sutton, and lashing out at do-goodism, and then for the next half dozen or so pars he's lashing Chairman Rudd's government for wanting to exclude certain indigenous people from income management. And insisting that the world will collapse if there's a single exception to income management for indigenous people within the Northern Territory. Because do gooder income management has done so much good, unlike other kinds of do gooderism.

It's as perfect a demonstration of the incoherence of do-gooder Liberal politicians as Gittins might have wished for in a month of Mondays, absent Paul Sheehan.

Yep, do goodism is bad, except when it applies to a one size fits all territory wide form of income management, and then Andrews produces the cheekiest flourish of all:

This success is placed at risk by Labor’s ideological fixation on a legal crusade rather than practical outcomes for the most vulnerable indigenous Australians.

Yep, the Labor government is inflexible and fixated on a legal crusade, unlike Andrews, who is fixated on an ideological crusade for the legalistic paternalistic notion that a one size fits all income management policy is tremendously successful do gooderism.

Kevin Andrews was one of the most comprehensive failures of the Howard government, and every time he opens his mouth, or scribbles a piece for The Punch for free, he earns a place on the pond.

And surely Gittins must be happy, because never has a paternalistic do gooder so handsomely decried paternalistic do goodism, all in the name of embracing personal responsibility, except in the case of personal responsibility, when universal income management is such a better strategy when it comes to respecting the rights of individuals. Provided you're black.

To paraphrase Gittins, it's always interesting to hear libertarians on the matter of the NT intervention, and why they've said so little on an issue so close to their core beliefs, possibly because they've not wanted to be seen supporting interventionist Liberal and Labor governments, or now an interventionist Liberal opposition when the Labor government tries to loosen a few of the screws binding black citizens.

That's how Kevin Andrews can be shocked to the core at all this idle chit chat about how the Racial Discrimination Act might apply to income management in the Northern Territory. Not when the paternalistic do gooderism is doing such a tremendous blanket job! Teaching personal responsibility by removing it!

Talk about ducking hard cases. It's what keeps the pond alive, and the road to hell paved with do gooderism that just so happens not to be do gooderism in certain particular cases ...