The topic is cancer — the 2010 election and the collapse of political legitimacy
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So let’s recap … two months ago, several key factional (actually small, state-based gangs, formed, like the big C, around the most powerfully malignant cell) leaders in the ALP organised the deposition of a sitting Prime Minister who had beaten John Howard, because a series of polls suggested that their primary vote was too low to guarantee victory, especially in key outer-suburban seats. The sub-factional heavies acted swiftly, at least in part, to head off News Ltd’s obvious destabilisation campaign spruiking Julia Gillard — even though said heavies may have been leaking stuff to the papers to aid this campaign, because Kevin Rudd swore at them. Having replaced the leader of the country in a few hours of meetings in offices away from the public gaze, said heavies then went immediately into an election based on a selling point of stability through incumbency, made an obvious lie about their capitulation to the mining industry, then having failed to go on the offensive and put the Coalition on the back foot over WorkChoices, opposing the stimulus, and hungrily eyeing a carve-up of Medicare, spent the first two weeks losing ground to the Coalition, proposing disconnected gimmicks such as the citizens assembly on climate change (remember that? A week is a long time in politics) and then relaunching her campaign by saying that the real her hadn’t even been present since the poll was called. Now a fortnight later, with Tony Abbott having survived an appearance on Red Faces, an off-colour “no doesn’t mean no” reference, the leader of the Opposition is appearing next to so many babies that if he opened a petting zoo, the dingo standing beside him would have one in its mouth, and simultaneously selling a combination of the Pacific solution “from day one”, scaling back the stimulus without creating unemployment, and pushing a business-tax funded parental leave plan of near-Scandinavian generosity while rolling back the nanny state. At this point, Abbott refused to accept the challenge by Gillard of a second debate that she’d earlier refused to have, while the factional heavies got Kevin Rudd (a character killed off in an earlier chapter) back in to save the election, while simultaneously sorting out the numbers to decide the next leader of the Opposition. The fake Andrew Bolt, who does a satire blog in the Herald Sun, threatened legal action against the real Andrew Bolt, a twitterer, and, as far as I can tell, then removed that entry from his blog, after 30 “Andrew Bolt” twitter accounts flowered in a day. Then chorus of horror at what a vacuous anti-election this had become was then joined by of all people Paul Kelly saying — Paul effin Kelly saying — that the politics of the major parties were too sameish and devoid of ideas. Finally, Tony Abbott launched the Coalition campaign by claiming that having a family made you a conservative. Have I got that right? I mean have I got that right? Cos I don’t know how the election looks from over there, but from over here — at a cafe in the shadow of Seville Cathedral, admiring the Islamic tile work on the walls of the Alcazar palace, while sharing a half-bottle of amontillado with a young woman who has never seen Andalusia before — it looks like sh-t. Beyond sh-t. Meta-sh-t. M’esteemed colleague Dr Bahnisch asked why, given so many people think this election is boring, what with all the hi-jinks and pile in of ex-PMs (what a pity Billy McMahon couldn’t be persuaded to say a few words. Could son Julian McMahon be persuaded to deputise in his place? Again?). The answer is because boredom arises not from a lack of activity, but from a lack of meaningful activity. This election is boring in the way other people’s recounted dreams are boring — because the disconnect between a genuine public political process, and what is going on now, is so total that anything can now follow from anything, and none of it presents a real case about how we should organise things, how we should live our lives, which is what politics is meant to be about. How the hell did it get to this point? A point where everyone is throwing up their hands in exasperation at a farcical, self-parodic process, while simultaneously serving it at every moment? Was it the Labor Party? The factional leaders? The sub-factional sub-leaders? The media? The system? The establishment? The man? That woman? Or, as m’colleague Keane suggests, youse*? The answer, I think, is all of these and more, except youse, in some strict sense. From multiple separate sources, Australian democracy is in a pretty low state, but much of the breast-beating is a ritualised way of offering obeisance while continuing with business as usual, and short on analysis. It might be worth looking at the array of forces with a little more dispassion.
Australia entered this election campaign after the dumping of a centre-right Labor leader, busy applying a series of reforms in a fairly elitist, managerial top-down way. The reforms were overwhelmingly directed to tackling the increasing inequality that has become entrenched in Australia over past decades, and the systemic shift of public to private share of the economy. The Opposition that faced that government had been divided along moderate/hard-right lines burning through three leaders before hitting someone whom many in the party saw as a slightly demented religious neurotic. Prompted by bad polling, by destabilising reports of leadership contention, the factional leaders replaced the Prime Minister without a vote — and then went to an election with nothing. Zip. Bupkis. No narrative, no argument, no story to tell, nothing to project — save, of course, for the incumbency of a Prime Minister in the job for a month. The gap allowed the Opposition — which had no story, and less than a full slate of candidates — to cobble one together, and go on the attack, with some success. Labor responded with a series of disconnected initiatives that I hope to God were conceived in panic, because if they were planned then Labor is barely competent to drool. The press, led by a near-psychotically biased News Ltd stable fastened on these marginal pitches like cats playing with a bottle-top mobile, when they weren’t obsessing on Rudd, rivalry, and earlobes, at which point they were like dogs truffling their own scrotes. This bedlam is surrounded by a wider funk among the general public — a mix of dissatisfaction without an object, fear of specific groups, a desire for real action on some things such as climate change, with a simultaneous wariness of larger schemes, or anything out of the order of things, such as a financial stimulus. Institutionally, there is a comprehensive split between Australian political institutions and the more or less autonomous way they reproduce — two major parties, supported by taxpayers and exhaustive preferential voting, undergirded by compulsory voting — on the one hand, and the general public on the other. Living in an increasingly atomised society with a paucity of intermediary institutions that connect people to politics, they have more of a jaundiced attitude to politicians as a class than just about anywhere in the Western world, while the political class return the favour with a contemptuous attitude to them as a focus-grouped perennially polled lumpen-sample-tariat. Bad political systems can be overcome by passionate parties representing a public will, in the absence of a pluralist and active debate; and a society with a public connected to a vigorous pluralist debate can overcome sclerotic parties. Australia is in the invidious position of having all three — atomised social life is intersecting with a shallow and unreflective mainstream media (where it is not so biased and disinformational as to be malign), and both are intersecting with a set of political structures designed in the 1920s to set up both major parties as quasi-state apparatuses. Given that the process is a circle, one can start anywhere. But let’s start with the parties. There’s no real mystery as to why the only group that is operating like a genuine party is the Greens — with a large and active membership, a clear philosophy that generates a program with a meaningful set of priorities. Labor and Liberal used to be like that too. How did they drift away from anything resembling a core philosophy? For the Liberals, it was external factors — the Cold War held a contradictory philosophy of liberalism and conservatism together. As post-Cold War, globalised neoliberalism started in earnest, John Howard evolved a reasonably sophisticated version of this — a state-enforced social conservatism was necessary precisely because the forces of capitalism being unleashed were so atomising. The contradiction was the selling point. The trouble with this formula is that it doesn’t work for long, because the process just keeps on going — the GFC, climate change, cultural shifts. A liberal-conservative party in this period really needs to rethink what its position is on how the market interacts with wider social life. It hasn’t done that so instead it offers a grab-bag-chest-thumping xenophobia on boats, Swedish-style parental leave mixed with commitments to tax cuts and surplus. It doesn’t begin to make sense. But it just needs to give the impression that it can all be held together. Labor has a different problem. It abandoned its role of having a critical relationship to social process in the 1970s, and saw itself as managing the independent process of capitalism with a bit of re-direction in the Hawke/Keating years. What exchange there was between a wider world of ideas and programs (as opposed to mere policies) began to fall away in that period. This was the worst possible time for that to happen, not because of Labor’s failures, but because of its success. Having established itself a century earlier to achieve, among other things, a certain standard of living, it had to a degree by the 1990s achieved that, albeit in a fairly limited partial way. Unable to push those gains further as a majority program (creating Medibank/Medicare in the ’70s/’80s was for all Australians, helping the long-term unemployed uses the taxes of the minority for a majority), it simply stopped thinking about what a new and more expansive majority program might be. Having embraced the essentially anti-humanist ideal of neoliberalism — that people are nothing other than homo economicus — it lost touch with the more expansive ideal that undergirds any progressive party, the ideal that people are more than a labour supply, a working class, a consumer group, whatever. Had it retained that idea, Labor would have been talking more aggressively for years now, about quality of life in an expanded sense — in terms of a more flexible and varied relationship to work, of a wider variety of housing options, of transformed cities and the like. It would have presented Abbott’s parental leave scheme as its own years ago, and with a more expanded remit of leave and care options. It would be in the business of changing what Australians think of as what falls under the scope of being changeable, transformable, improvable. The licensed cynics on the Right could argue that this is “elitist”. The plain fact is that progressive parties are always in the position of being “elitist”, if by that we mean challenging their own base and the wider population to want a better sort of life in ways that cannot be achieved through the cash nexus. It challenges people to be dissatisfied with things as they are, to reconceptualise them as changeable, and to aim for more. Within the Labor Party, the Right tend to snort with contempt whenever any such suggestions are made. But quite aside from the actual point itself of making life better, there is the political point . When Labor stops doing this, when it stops taking on the big challenges, when it stops talking about society, life, etc, as projects to be grasped whole — then it simply runs out of things to talk about. With the exception of the brief interregnum of Mark Latham — who genuinely did have transformative ideas despite his manifold faults now flagrantly on display — Labor has had zero ideas for a decade, to such a degree that Kevin Rudd’s very mild program looked like the Great Leap Forward by comparison. And that’s the point we have reached — where every morning Labor hacks pull micro-policies out of their a-se, along with the gruffnuts, to placate nine Hillsongers in Gunnamatta. Why such a failure of ideas, especially on the Labor side? One could blame the sclerotic structures of Labor, the choking off any means other than lifelong sub-sub-factions or fronting Midnight Oil to make it to a position of some power, the creation of a monoculture of hacks? It’s partly that, but if there was a real groundswell of people with new ideas and demands, they would be banging at the door with such force that even the factional powers-that-be could not hold them down. In that respect, one has to look at the systematic and relentless narrowing of debate in the large-scale mainstream media — in News Ltd, simply by turning the organisation into a right-wing propaganda machine of immense obviousness and crudity, and at Fairfax by largely dispensing with any sort of space for bigger ideas altogether — save for the moral panics of the SMH’s enormous roster of right-wing columnists. With honourable exceptions, Fairfax has become a wasteland of blah economic comment within a narrow range of options, tedious political handicapping, and then a sprinkling of articles, in The Age primarily, that sound as if they came from a community services regional office social work newsletter. With the gradual shaving down, or closing down altogether, of sections that once had space for essays and longer pieces, with op-ed pages that never connect to a broader spectrum of intellectual and political history, the wider intellectual framework within which a more imaginative politics might evolve, is greatly diminished. There is also the lack of a mid-level political-intellectual hinterland — with no weeklies of the order such as The Nation or the National Review in the US, and the only large-scale monthly, The Monthly, having turned out to be a timid and trailing exercise in colour-supplement reportage, and rather foolish as it turned out, Ruddolatry. Some of this is simply a matter of economies of scale, but that excuse can be over used. These newspapers used to be better, both in quality, and, in News Ltd’s case, in terms of basic moral integrity. Australia used to have a range of mid-level publications — larger than the small magazines, smaller than the papers, that provided part of the conveyor-belt by which a continuous process of renovation was made possible. Paul Kelly’s lament is ridiculous because, he as much as anyone, has been a key driver in making Australian political debate a narrowly focused discussion of methods for a series of unquestioned and undebated ends, a society measured solely by growth, and with the common good defined largely by corporate interest. To suddenly turn around and complain about the wasteland he helped create is either supremely obtuse or a bit bloody rich. A lot of editors of such publications know this — they complain about proprietors, boards, and overwhelmingly of a lack of audience for such material. Fair enough. There’s some truth in that. But was that ever not so? Hasn’t it always been the case that a newspaper or magazine that believed itself to be doing something important, would try and push its readers to think more broadly, more widely, than political writing more appropriate to either covering the greyhounds, or Paris Hilton? One of the reasons that the famed Age editor Graeme Perkin is periodically feted with a praise so excessive that it approaches ancestor worship, is that everyone is doing the precise opposite of what he was trying to do with The Age — and paying obeisance to his shade is a way of assuaging the guilt about publishing the nine-hundredth piece about S-x and The City, or some obvious 2000-word analysis of what Albo said to Ludwig, according to blah blah. Has the liberal middle audience collapsed to such a degree that more intelligent writing about life and society can no longer be sustained? If it has, then it is because of the third part of the puzzle, the last element in the circle — the atomisation of public life, the alienation of anything resembling the political, from most people’s conception of their own lives. In the 1920s in Australia, a debate on control of banking between a socialist and a distributist could easily attract 500 people. In the 1940s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the NCC could sell in the tens of thousands. Into the ’70s and ’80s, the Nation Review and the National Times could push the envelope. Despite ever higher levels of education and literacy, that realm has substantially, though not totally, disappeared (indeed, this publication is one of its examples). Here we come back to Bernard Keane’s lament that blame for the sorry state of Australian politics lies with the public. I sympathise with his frustration, but when you start blaming the people (and demanding that they be deposed and a new people installed, so the Party will not be let down), then it’s a fair bet that you’re barking up the wrong decision-tree. Far better to try and analyse what has occurred, why at some point, a decisive gap developed between political process and mass social life — developed, and then became a yawning chasm. Twenty years ago, we — or the political elites — made a decision to shift the centre of gravity from public to private life, in a whole range of areas, from social expenditure, to pensions, to the question of work hours and wages, in every conceivable field. That is, of course, but of a larger global process — and one, to a degree beyond the control of individual governments — but we really ram-rodded it here, off a fairly collective base. The result has been a certain type of society in which both the space for public life, and the means by which people without much social power could project themselves into it, has been diminished. Where in the 1980s we were talking — briefly — of the 35-hour week, we are now heading towards the 48-hour week (and two salaries, to afford a house), performed by people living in spec-built suburbs with little amenity, in under-serviced cities, and in conditions of diminishing, not increasing, social mobility for themselves and their children. In these circumstances, the private choice — the cable TV, the McMansion, the retreat to the home space and to the defiant, antinomian cry (much heard in the UK election) “I don’t do politics” — becomes overdetermined, becomes the only real choice there is. Yet even as people pursue their lives in the wilderness of plasmas, they are privy to a never-ending cascade of information informing them that a) the current way of life is politically, economically, and ecologically unsustainable and b) the gap between their lives and the levers of power is so huge there’s bugger all they an do about it in the current framework. Those things that need a public sphere in order to exist — such as the res publica, and a genuinely pluralist media — lapse into a non-democratic condition, the res publica as the realm of a caste of political professionals, the media as driven by cynical and self-defeating idea of “content delivery”. The parties narrow down to a core of pollsters and heavies, the public is further alienated, they become less interested in anything in the media which might be a little more expansive, which means the media stops challenging the parties, who then become yet more … and round it goes. To blame the public for the changed conditions of their life, and the way that earlier decisions by an elite shaped their lives, is to finger the victim, not the culprit. A series of cave-ins, ducked battles, and soft options by the people who controlled parties, papers and powers, and a refusal to stand up to the genuinely malign, has brought us to this point. It seems distinctive in the world — there is a collapse of political legitimacy everywhere, but only in Australia have I seen this degree of total exasperation and frustration, combined with an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way. The topic is cancer, indeed. |
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39 Comments
I think you make some interesting arguments Guy but at the end of the day, surely nihilism is just the lazy man’s excuse to stay on his seat and reach for another drink. We can all make a difference big or little if we choose to make an effort , to take a risk of looking stupid or foolish.
In the past, people rioted and burned shit down when they got hungry and desperate and humiliated. We haven’t got close to reaching that point yet and until we do, history tells us we will be happy to winge about the ineffectiveness and venality of our leaders but do jackshit ourselves.
Me, I will be handing out election leaflets for the Greens this election day. Hopefully this is a sign that if someone as lazy as me can be motivated to do that, then all the cancerous crap you talk about is actually having an effect.
Good to have you back Guy.
This explains alot.
Keep up the good work.
I think Guy is right! I say I think, because I’m not sure but actually I don’t think it matters because the disenchantment he talks about is mine, and also many others. Most people I speak to say “A pox on both their houses”!
But can we do anything? If Guy is right it doesn’t matter where we start except that we can only start with ourselves. For the first time, ever, in the past year I have written to politicians, and surprisingly received replies from some; I have supported some campaigns I believed in through various channels, on line, by petition and by letter. I cannot say it has achieved anything but it helped reconnect me to feeling I should say what I thought was important. The task is Augean but picking up the shovel is a start.
If Guy is right there are lots of people like me who feel the same way. It is likely that our feelings of frustration, rage and disappointment at the level of discussion we are subjected will only be relieved by our action? If we all did some small things, contact our local members, parties, newspapers, suported our causes wouldn’t we make some difference?
I may be a naive aging hippy (at least according to my children!) but I am going to continue to take small steps because the alternative is sit on my hands, bury my head despair and that ain’t for me. I might get nowhere but I have my shovel in my hand.
If Guy is right it doesn’t matter where we start because it’s a circle so I’m heading for the bit next to me to start shoveling. Anyone coming?
Supercalifragelisticexpialadocious! He’s back!
Where ya bin, cob? (I did write and ask).
Now, the ne plus ultra of commentary teams is in place - Maloney, First Dog and Rundle, all dancing cheek-to-cheek. Who could ask for anything more?
Heaven. I’m in it.
This election is such a boring dead-zone that we need to see some clever dancing and inspirational moves from illustrious and witty commentators.
Wherever you are, Mr R, be assured that although assorted toe-rags ditched Our Kev, basically on the grounds that he was so much smarter they (and in the good, ol’ traditional Ozzie spirit - see also Turnbull: Malcolm) our very own Ms Julia is flourishing and showing that, like all good women, she’s the goods.
If it weren’t so patently sexist, I’d be tempted to add that she’s in, like Flynn.
Lovely, but depressing, piece. Thank you Guy. This election has become so farcical that surely it is time to say ‘Enough, no more’. But who would listen?
The only thing I would comment about Rundle’s damnation of the gang’s removal of Rudd, is that they replaced him with the wrong person — it should have been Lindsay Tanner (yes I know; quite apart from all the other reasons he would have refused on principle). The thing is “no action” would have meant more of Rudd and a more difficult job of trying to change leaders (since Rudd is incapable of change). And really, without justifying the likes of Arbib/Bitar, the fact is the entire party including most of cabinet was fed up with Rudd and his absurd way of trying to run the country. That, at least, is one thing that will change with a Gillard government (whether real Julia lives on or not).
GR wrote: “save for the moral panics of the SMH’s enormous roster of right-wing columnists.”
— — — Hey, didn’t you hear the good news? Miranda Devine has moved to her natural home, News Ltd. Now they have two Queen Bs (I assume Planet J is still there, I haven’t noticed for ages? Niki Savva is trying to muscle in as the third.)(Does this qualify as so bad , its good?)
I assume Guy will be taking the AVE super-fast train from Seville (or Cordoba, up the road ) back to Madrid; then maybe the AVE up to Barcelona? (Send a ePostcard to Keane, please.) From those trains one can also observe fields of wind turbines and solar arrays. Spain, ffs! Meanwhile, the dirtiest coal-fired power plant in the world (Hazelwood) actually increased its share of generation last year (data just out) and its owner want us the taxpayer to bribe it $2 billion to close it down “early” (apparently for coal generators >40 years old is the new 20? WTF).
GR wrote:”an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way”
— — — -Almost true, but one can at least vote Greens.
Death to the tea-leaf readers! Grattan, you’re first to the gallows!
I hereby nominate this as the best thing I’ve read all election.
I was wondering where Rundle was. Seville, indeed, home of the bitter oranges used to make marmalade. A reasonably tart summing up of what we already know. Why don’t you tells all about Spain, mate. At least we won’t have read it all before. Hopefully.
I think that you have elaborated on a feeling that is growing rapidly amongst a fairly broad group of people. You are right about the Greens, amazingly they seem to be the only party that is campaigning according to its beliefs, possibly because the two major parties no longer have beliefs.
The self contradictions that are the two major parties simply leave me wondering whether either of them will end up with any kind of coherent mandate. Both are driven by focus groups and in the case of the Liberals their “action plan” looks little more than a list of issues that a focus group in the outer suburbs came up with.
I put most of this down to the fact that most politicians have little real life experience and are products of political machines that have as their sole purpose staying in power. Our two alternate leaders are classic examples and follow a PM who had the very same problem. I am not very optimistic about the likely outcome of this election no matter who “wins”.
Meanwhile the real issues that will have greatest impact on our society are ignored, as they require thought, a strategy and a plan….and most significantly cannot be explained in terms that our media has any chance of understanding within their ever diminishing attention span.
So for the first time ever, I’m voting Green…..and hopefully a new middle of the road party with a clear philosophy that its prepared to run on appears soon.
It’s interesting to read this column in conjunction with Keene’s about debt/deficit hysteria.
An important part of the withering of a public sphere has been the demonising of the idea that government programs can do things effectively. The size of the budget surplus is a measure of all the things that government has not done. As the ability to use public funds to promote the public good vanishes, policy debate, except for anarcho-capitalist neoliberalism, necessarily vanishes as well, because there’s no way to apply good policy without paying for it. Looked at this way, it becomes clear that here as in the US, the right has successfully carried through a long term strategy of “Starving the beast”, and starved our social wellbeing in the process.
There are a whole lot of changes going on in our society. Of the ones I am aware of that are damaging our future, it is the increasing trend towards specialization of policy. That is a narrowing of the range of possibilities allowed for policy, narrowing of the technically possible, exclusion of the public and more generally educated from debate, and the careful skirting of taboo areas. We more easily accept the pronouncements of experts on economic, financial, environment and foriegn policy topics, and debate much less the value choices involved that have already been pre-selected. Frameworks are chosen for thought and policy explanation that are overly simplistic. But the most important things are not in simple models, especially market economic ones.
With maturation and ossification of our institutions, becoming ever more adapted to the status quo, there is more tinkering to make things fit the patterns of the past. As everything is so much bigger in numbers of people, complexity of organisations, established capital infrastructure, and established political parties and their increasing ties to industry, the capacity for real change in values and design has diminished because we are spending more time on maintaining the complexities of our current systems.
So we have increasing size and rigidity of institutions, insfrastructure and ideas, in both Labor and Liberal - Coalition parties. That means reluctance to change course on almost any issue. The most pressing core issues that will affect our future are rarely discussed directly and publicly by political figure-heads, except in a way that would close off any new approaches. We are now leaving the era of cheap oil, and free carbon pollution, and having room left for global population expansion. Surely this means that widespread changes require government policy adaptions. But the changes in policy we get just tinker in the mainstream of current ideas and institutions, and worst of all, show no evidence of adaption to the future. We behave as if permantly stuck in being a resource extraction-led and fossil fuel based economy. Julia Gillaird cannot have a sustainable economy without changing most of the economy, and there are no policy details that suggest she can change anything, because she wants it to be a strong economy. Great platitudes, appealling to different constituencies, that cancel each other out, equals no change at all.
The most interesting ideas and movements come from outside the mainstream politics. Candidates for the major parties are chosen for conformity. Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan will be launched at the Sydney Town Hall on Thursday August 12. Their vision states shows that political and social will are the only obstacles standing in the way of a 100 per cent renewable, zero emissions electricity supply system being implemented in Australia and that this can be achieved in a decade. Where are the Labor and Liberal policies on this? Note that Malcolm Turnball will be one of the speakers.
Ahoy there, Guy, welcome back. Great to read today’s analysis and your insights into our political malaise. My particular favourite:
“The press, led by a near-psychotically biased News Ltd stable fastened on these marginal pitches like cats playing with a bottle-top mobile, when they weren’t obsessing on Rudd, rivalry, and earlobes, at which point they were like dogs truffling their own scrotes.”
Perfect! Should I ever be unfortunate enough to read a News Ltd publication I shall keep this image in mind, it may help me through.
I missed Guy.
What I thought was interesting was the talk about the atomisation of the public life. Is it fair to imply from this that politics has effectively been privatised and participation has been put out of reach of the regular punter? I guess so. Greens being the exception right now, but if they take root as an incumbent mainstream party there isn’t much stopping some sort of dissociation…
The other thought I had was that the internet probably hasn’t helped either. Anyone with an opinion or an idea (i’m young so this may be wrong) probably used to get published in some kind of newspaper or journal which was readily available when perusing the shelves of the local newsagent. These days these people write blogs. But how does joe public find them unless they are a total wonk seeking out bloggers like this? I guess in the states you have Huffington Post as an aggregation site for bloggers, but there’s nothing like that here that i’m aware of.
cheers
Undergirded? Hard to focus after I hit that one, otherwise great rant….fairly spot on-ish…
Which Paul Kelly was that? Will there be a song?
Funny you should say that Joel Brooks but yes both my partner and I signed up as members of the Greens today and volunteered to hand out how to vote cards on election day. Frankly I got sick of being more disheartened every day and decided to do something about it rather than be apathetic and disengage totally from the political process. Having lived for many years in dysfunctional Italy I can’t tell you how appalling it is to see the integrity being sucked out of our system of governance. I will not sit down and see the capitulation to big business and populism at the expense of my children’s future.
Every time we have an election this issue comes up ( ie our democracy sucks)and then disappears into oblivion. Its been going on since at least 1982 and probably long before that. Bring on the republic debate and we might get some meaningful suggestions, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Thanks for reminding us Guy.
I tried to enrol to vote for this election before the cut-off date and found the online method just didn’t exist. I don’t wish to appear uncomplicated, but fuck that shit, we don’t have a democracy, or we have a democracy that has devolved over time into a shadow of what it never was.
In a country where voting is compulsory, in a time where the online world is an important part of the real world, I took the discovery that online voting is impossible as the last straw.
That’s not nihilism, that’s me taking my energy out of this situation and hanging onto it for other ways to run this place, and I guess people all over the joint are doing the same thing whether they’ve found some groovy jargon to explain their position or not. When you run out of options it’s time to sit down.
Why is my email in my username dealio? Baffling.
I feel like cutting this out and putting it up on the wall.
You got your fake and real Andrew Bolts mixed up, Guy, it was the real Andrew Bolt threatening to sue the fake one. Other than that, its difficult to argue against such a polemic unless you’re part of the process/problem. And you can’t argue that we deserve the government we get if all we get are cardboard cutouts and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to democracy. There is a great deal of fear and greed underlying this: fear because noone can afford a life unless they sell it to a bank beforehand, greed because its easier than caring. Making the choice of government about economic management when economics refuses to accept the environment as part of the equation shows up a reducto ad absurdum difficult to escape, an unthinking ideology that saves the problem for another generation.
I have just been reading Bill McKibben’s books “The End Of Nature” and “Eaarth” and found them a pretty scary read. However, I think this post is not far behind ! We hear that, policy-wise, the Greens are a bit divided between the hard-line environmental activists and the centre-left, which may create a few policy problems down the track. Nevertheless, we must get as many of them and any independents into the Senate and make it absolutely clear to them that, over and above their own policy fetishes, their first duty is to make sure that any bills that the government (whoever it is) put up for approval derives from a real policy focus and not from special interest groups, personal prejudices and a general sense that “We are the only Real People That Matter”.
I once opined that John Howard divided the population into three groups; Real People, Battlers, who are candidates to be Real People and The Rest who will never be Real People. The last-named, of course, exist to serve the interests of Real People. I was not aware that some in the ALP thought that too (though their definitions might vary slightly).
Wonderful Rundle! And thank you for telling it to the once proud “Age” like it is.
“”With honourable exceptions, Fairfax has become a wasteland of blah economic comment within a narrow range of options, tedious political handicapping, and then a sprinkling of articles, in The Age primarily, that sound as if they came from a community services regional office social work newsletter.”“
I wish I could argue with your hypothesis re the cultural morass which is Oz, but I can’t. Suffice it to say that whoever wins the Oz public will end up forking out yet more money for a collective hive of yobbos, monarchists and mind-numbing mediocrities who will be so bad, they will not be able to even get it wrong.
Regress Australia, where?
Way to miss the Bolt joke, Sean.
Its all very well to be an elegant smartar-e commenting in Oz or from The wilds
of a Seville cafe. We have had truckloads of same from all and sundry demonstrating
ad infinitum how shallow, cowardly, foolish and generally base the political classes are. Mostly from those whose greatest responsibility in life is to crank a keyboard &
PC to life each morning.
However what we are actually attempting to do with this election is choose a group of people who will successfully govern us for three years. It is always easier to find fault, the more savagely the better, that make a constructive contribution to policy
debate.
We will get what we deserve in this election, god help us though if it is the Monk and his happy band of pall bearers.
While I don’t agree with every bit of Guy’s piece, it is one of the best I have seen on this topic. I think of the current election campaign (with the exception of the marginal but important role of my former party, The Greens) as proof that under a neoliberal regime the actual policy and political program are implemented *behind the back* of any democratic process.
Underneath this postmodern facade that calls itself politics but actually functions as a distraction from politics, there remain the real interests of real social groups in conflict. Maybe we would even call these social groups “classes” if the unfashionability of that word hadn’t somehow magically made classes vanish.
Of course we cannot analyse them with some 1960s Stalinoid invocation of an industrial proletariat, but what has really changed in terms of the power structures of our society? That’s the irony of the present period: the more unequal, stratified and micro-managed from above we become as a society, the more our elites and their intellectual hangers-on tell us that such analyses are irrelevant.
That’s the dark structural reason politics has become such a sick and painful joke.
I’ve written more about it here: http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2010/07/flight-from-centre.html … And here: http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2010/08/welcome-to-desert-of-real-early-requiem.html
Benjamin Constant, 19th century French liberal politician, thought that representative democracy could help to create a new elective elite that would appropriate political power by depoliticizing large sections of the population. He said that the citizens absorbed in the enjoyment of their private lives and in the pursuit of their own interests would surrender rights too easily, especially when the holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage them to do so. Those elites would be ready to spare them all sort of troubles, except those of paying and obeying.
Hmmm.
Some people say the influence of the media - owning the “bill-boards” - is over-rated. But look what happens when that tabloid media gets someone between them and their self-interest. When an individual or party gets between them and “the trough” - as Simon Overland - when they’re running one of their egocentric crusades and their “influence” is on the line.
Not as bad as you suggest Guy. We are engaged in a different kind of election where we have had to examine the role of the media in influencing events as never before. Channel Nine and the News group have made sure of that. Channel Nine made itself a player in a way that was news. At the same time it made Julia Gillard look like the leader she is because she was not intimidated by the disrespectful bullying Mark Latham. We, the public, must share the blame because we are drawn to look at and watch this kind of soap opera playing out as a result of media intrusion into the story. Laurie Oakes has done the same thing. The journalists at the Australian have misrepresented information for months and worked hard to bring Kevin Rudd down and eventually brought that about.
If you are bored Guy then you need to get closer to the action. We have a male commentariat who are discomforted by a female leader. Tony Abbott is definitely rocked to his core at the thought of being beaten by a woman as The 7pm Project showed this evening. He is nothing if not the political child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop. When he refers to Bronwyn Bishop as being popular with the elderly I think kerosene.
After Julia’s performance on Q&A last evening the straightjacket is off. She is performing strongly whereas he is sounding like a parrot that doesn’t understand the modern world.
Honestly, perspective, anybody? When has there been an election campaign in the electronic media era that hasn’t been universally decried as shallow, vapid, and pandering to the prejudices of the swinging (read: what’s in it for me) voter? The only thing that’s changed in the last decade is that the mainstream media has become much more inclined to bang on about itself in an effort to differentiate, so we get this endless, turgid, self-serving meta-analysis about the coverage of the election and politics rather than the policy and politics itself. The media’s gotten to this sad state of affairs because it’s business model is fucked and nobody knows what to do except say “hey, we’re better than the other guy”, or worse, “we really really know what you think and we’re better at that than the politicians”, the latter being an utter crock. And the media will always bang on that an election is closer than it is as a racket to extract more advertising fees, and carping on about the uselessness of all concerned serves the same purpose.
This election campaign is no different than any other where there isn’t an “it’s time” factor (1972, 1983, 1996 and 2007).
Long live intelligence, imagery and passion.
Long live Crikey and Guy Rundle.
Nice to have you back Mr Rundle.
For all those depressed by Rundle’s reflections go to
http://morethanluck.cpd.org.au/more-than-luck-ebook/introduction/ for a way to approach the future with more optimism
One of the most thoughtful observations on this election. Thank you, Guy.
Is it merely the decades in between that no-one appears to recall that Labor’s decline/rot began in the early 80s, culminating in Hawke’s win. After that, local party groups protested in vain at the direction the long awaited Mesiah was heading (remember the MX missile tests, the acceptance of a used car salesman as ambassador from the new best Great Friend, the colluding with the Libs on preferences in 1984 to exclude the NDP party, headed by..a rock singer, bald headed bloke, used to be a radical..)?
I despair when even Crikey readers don’t seem to understand PR & STP -viz various comments about wasted votes for Greens or Indepenents.
However, I doubt that modern society could have gone any other way, given the failure of the 60/70s radicals who found it all to hard and boring and retired to trustfunds & careers. When any organisdation grows beyond a certain size, more & more of its resources go to maintaining the structure rather than fulfilling its aims.
“I hereby nominate this as the best thing I’ve read all election.”
I second this nomination and join the chorus of others celebrating your return to the fray Guy. Now how the hell do I get this inserted into as many minds as possible…to start generating real debate about what, why and where to next…because currently we are not moving forward to anything worth getting to….
AR: “When any organisation grows beyond a certain size, more & more of its resources go to maintaining the structure rather than fulfilling its aims.”
Exactly so. Just like our taxes at work.
I notice you are into a little detail re the Labour Party and its faults.
Do you have some detailed reasoning for supporting the Liberal Party? Oh, and the running dog socialist rural Party aka the Nationals?
Venise - ..reasoning for supporting the Liberal Party? Oh, and the running dog socialist rural Party aka the Nationals?” MOI? Or was that just a syntax error?
I wouldn’t piss on either of the majors were they ablaze. A pox, fire & brimstone on all their houses & works.
Just watched the returns, the least bad of a bad result. Andrew Wilkie, 3 TRUE independents and a Green in the Reps, a significant increase in the number (as yet unknown) of Greens in the Senate though unfortunately they don’t sit until June 2011.
What can be done to educate the electorate on the power they have with PR & STV? Clearly many understand but, until the majority do - and vote accordingly - the present dominance of the machines will grind on.