Hope Defeats Hate.

Third Time Winner: Daniel Andrews’ Victorian victory is of a piece with the general failure of the American Right to achieve the gains it was expecting in the recent mid-term elections. Generally speaking, voters not already addicted to the Right’s ideological Kool-Aid find very little to like about candidates who manifest the odd and at times frightening behaviour of ideological zealots and outlandish conspiracy theorists. As Simon Holmes-A’Court’s teal candidates have proved in two elections on the trot, moderation + warmth is a winning combination. 

IF JACINDA ARDERN wasn’t congratulating Victorian Labor’s Dan Andrews on Saturday evening, then she bloody well should’ve been. With a third successive Labor victory under his belt, Andrews is set to become the state’s longest-serving Labor premier. In addition to offering her own, and her party’s, hearty congratulations, the New Zealand prime minister must have been sorely tempted to add: “How the hell did you do it!”

It’s a question the whole of the Australian Right will be asking themselves. They were so confident of winning Victoria that they simply failed to notice just how profoundly the politics of the Lucky Country have changed. It simply did not occur to them that a clear majority of the population saw Andrews as something other than a cruel and capricious Covid tyrant who had locked Victorians down for weeks – and months – on end. They could not conceive a Labor premier, whose actions had unleashed street battles between trade unionists and state police, possibly retaining the loyalty of Labor voters.

As far as the Australian Right was concerned, Andrews and the Victorian Labor Party were dog-tucker. Their man, the Liberal Party leader, Matthew Guy, couldn’t lose. Victoria was about to be prized out of Labor’s cold dead hands. (The party has governed the state for all but 4 of the last 27 years.)

Those who ventured onto Twitter to impart the heretical information that there were signs Labor might win, were greeted with scorn, and tweeted with contempt. “Just you wait ‘til Saturday,” crowed the over-confident Right, “then you’ll see!”

Well, quite. And what they saw was a slight slippage in Labor’s support – understandable after 8 years in office – and a reasonably strong performance by the Liberal’s coalition partner, the National Party. But, there was nothing like the Liberal surge needed to topple Andrews’ government. Quite the contrary, in fact. In the innermost of Melbourne’s inner suburbs it was the Greens who racked up gains – taking at least 1 seat from Labor. At the same time, moderate millionaire Simon Holmes-A’Court, author of the “Teal Revolution” which unseated a clutch of Liberal party grandees in the federal election, was claiming victory in two out of the four seats contested by his Climate 200 movement.

What the Liberal Party, and the Australian Right in general, have yet to register and accept is that Australia’s centre of political gravity has shifted sharply to the left. Crucial to this crippling perceptual failure is the performance of the Australian media, the Murdoch press in particular, where right-wing sentiment has become so deeply entrenched that its editors, journalists and columnists no longer even try to understand the other side of the political divide.

Those not dismissed by right-wing “shock jocks” as “woke”, are branded “cultural Marxists”, or “critical race theorists”. It has become almost impossible to persuade the Right that the number of people who actually merit these ideological labels is nowhere near large enough to swing an election. Even more dangerously, the assumption remains (no matter how meagre the evidence) that the overwhelming majority of “ordinary people” share the Right’s rampant prejudices. It is only after the votes have been counted that their misperceptions stand exposed.

On both sides of the Tasman this sort of “bubble thinking” is apt to steer the principal parties of the Right in the wrong direction. No matter how unanimous social-media appears at times, its ideological homogeneity is much more the product of IT engineers’ algorithms than it is of some broad cultural consensus. Such consensus as still exists in the Anglosphere, is far more likely to be found clustering around the shibboleths of the Left than the Right.

Gender Equality, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Cultural Diversity: hard though it may be for many on the Right to accept, these causes attract vastly more followers than Racism, Sexism, Homophobia and Climate Change Denialism. Not that Murdoch’s columnists, nor Australian Sky TV’s pundits, will ever concede an inch to such ideological heresies.

Andrews’ Victorian victory is of a piece with the general failure of the American Right to achieve the gains it was expecting in the recent mid-term elections. Generally speaking, voters not already addicted to the Right’s ideological Kool-Aid find very little to like about candidates who manifest the odd and at times frightening behaviour of ideological zealots and outlandish conspiracy theorists. As Holmes-A’Court’s “teal” candidates have proved in two elections on the trot, moderation + warmth is a winning combination – even in traditionally conservative electorates.

What, then, can New Zealand’s Labour leader, Jacinda Ardern, learn from the experience of her Victorian counterpart?

Almost certainly, the most important lesson to be drawn from Saturday’s Victorian result is that it is very wrong to give too much credence to the Right’s predictions of inevitable – and crushing – victory. The political-economy of the mainstream news media makes it considerably easier to shape right-wing than left-wing political narratives. In spite of numerous studies confirming that a majority of journalists lean to the left, it is rare to encounter mainstream journalists willing to cast the conduct of their employer’s principal advertisers in a consistently unfavourable light.

Equally unwise, is the ingrained habit of far too many political journalists to speak with unwarranted confidence about the attitudes of “ordinary” people. All too frequently, such commentary is based on nothing more than the crudest stereotypes. Among the Professional and Managerial Class, in particular, there is a pernicious view of “ordinary” people as repositories of all manner of “deplorable” prejudices and predilections – as if they weren’t discussing human-beings at all, but orcs.

Jacinda Ardern should draw reassurance from both the American and Australian elections that holding fast to a moderate progressivism is very far from being a losing strategy. Refusing to engage in the mud-wrestling so beloved of populist politicians is also unlikely to cost her votes. Nor being willing to engage in a little public humility. People who make mistakes every day of their lives are surprisingly willing to forgive those politicians who admit to being human, all-too-human.

Perhaps the most important lesson our Prime Minister could learn from the Victorian Premier, however, is the one he delivered to his fellow Victorians on election night. Quoting the former Labor prime-minister of Australia, Paul Keating, Andrews told his cheering followers: “Leadership isn’t about doing what’s popular, it’s about doing what’s right.” Alluding to the trials of the Covid-19 Pandemic, he praised his fellow Victorians for maintaining their “faith in science, and their faith in each other”.

It was that sense of kindness, he said, that sense of all being in this together, that carried Victoria through a one-in-one-hundred-year crisis. “Friends,” he reassured his fellow Victorians, “hope always defeats hate.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 November 2022.

Fanning The Flames.

F.Anning Discontent: Far-Right politicians like Fraser Anning (above right) are highly-skilled at exploiting racially charged narratives, such as Melbourne's "African Gangs" controversy, to broaden the appeal of Conservative Australia’s anti-immigrant crusade.

FRASER ANNING is one of those political figures who populate the periphery of politics in liberal-democratic states. Opportunistic, scornful of political norms, hard to frighten or shame, the Fraser Annings of this world are frighteningly well-adapted to the politics of cultural resentment and fear. Had the Independent Senator for Queensland been born in late-Nineteenth Century Italy or Germany – instead of mid-Twentieth Century Australia – he  would, almost certainly, have been drawn to Benito Mussolini’s Fascisti or Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

As it is, he has won notoriety as the sometime ally of leading right-wing Australian politicians Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter. It says something about the man that his current status as an “independent” is largely attributable to even these far-from-moderate parliamentarians finding Anning’s views too extreme – even for them. (Hardly surprising when, in his maiden speech to the Australian Senate, Anning talked about a “final solution” to Australia’s “immigration problem”!)

Anning’s latest provocation was to attend (at the Australian taxpayers’ expense) a United Patriots Front (UPF) rally held in the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda. The UPF is at the extreme end of an ongoing campaign by Australian conservatives (up to and including the ruling Liberal Party) to secure more rigorous policing of the so-called “African Gangs” said to be terrorising Melbourne citizens. The African “gangsters” singled out for particular condemnation by the Right are almost all refugees and/or the children of refugees from war-torn South Sudan.

United Patriots Front leader, Blair Cottrell, addresses anti-immigrant rally at St Kilda Beach, Melbourne, 5 January 2019.

The Right’s fixation on Victoria’s tiny Sudanese community is largely explicable in terms of the extraordinary lengths to which the state’s left-leaning government has gone to minimise the impact (or even the existence) of the “African Gang” problem.

Just how strongly the Left felt about the issue was demonstrated by the noisy protest which took place outside the offices and studios of Channel 7 Melbourne in July 2018. The protesters were incensed by Channel 7’s current affairs show, Sunday Night’s, alleged “race-baiting” coverage of the issue.

The item’s promo was certainly provocative:

“Barely a week goes by when they’re not in the news. African gangs running riot, terrorising, wreaking havoc. Police are hesitant to admit there’s even a problem. The latest attack was just days ago, so what can be done?”

The Left’s response played directly into the Australian Right’s deeply embedded narrative of a culturally-deracinated cosmopolitan elite hellbent on dissolving Australia’s European heritage in a multicultural melting-pot. So powerful is this “progressive” elite said to be that it has the power to suppress coverage of anything which runs counter to the multicultural ideal – even when this activity involves “African gangs running riot, terrorising, wreaking havoc”.

Far-Right politicians like Anning are highly-skilled at exploiting this narrative to broaden the appeal of Conservative Australia’s anti-immigrant crusade. Their job is made easier when even the Right’s bette noir, the publicly-owned (and allegedly left-wing) Australian Broadcasting Corporation, acknowledges that “the Sudanese offender rate is six times higher than their population share”.

Last weekend’s UPF St Kilda rally – itself inspired by the Victorian Police’s decision to prevent UPF leader, Blair Cottrell, from recording the activity of Sudanese youths on the beach – provided Anning with a brown-shirted opportunity to promote his anti-immigrant message by doing little more than simply turning-up.

Cottrell and Anning would have known that, from the moment it was announced on social media, the rally would attract large numbers of left-wing “anti-fascists”, journalists and police. Inevitably, the news media would make a bee-line for the right-wing Queensland Senator and, equally inevitably, he would be ready with a sound-bite:

“There was no racist rally,” Anning informed the news media. “There were decent Australian people who demonstrated their dislike for what the Australian government has done which has allowed these people to come into this country and then bash people at random on the beaches, in their homes.”

Inner-city Melburnians were suitably shocked at this eruption of right-wing extremism on their favourite beach. But, in small-town Australia, in the Bush, Anning’s words would have struck a very different note.

In this setting, Anning, scion of a Queensland farming family notorious for its bloody appropriations of Aboriginal land, could be confident of loud choruses of approval. It’s what the Left knows, but cannot understand. That racism is as Australian as Cricket at the MCG. As welcome as a cold tinny on an incendiary afternoon at St Kilda Beach.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 January 2019.

Australia's Dysfunctional Democracy.

"Don't think of it as a hand on your shoulder, Malcolm. Think of it as a knife in your back." The ultimate beneficiary of the Liberal Party meltdown, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

NEW ZEALANDERS WATCHED, with mounting incredulity, the meltdown of Australia’s Liberal-National coalition government. What unfolded appeared to be driven almost entirely by a toxic mixture of personal antipathies and oversized egos. Nowhere in the whole unedifying political saga did the interests of the Australian people appear to get a look in.

Mind you, the Australian people had made it easy for Malcolm Turnbull’s enemies. When questioned by the pollsters they had failed to draw a sufficiently clear distinction between the Prime Minister and his increasingly dysfunctional Party Room. Had they praised Malcolm Turnbull, and damned the Liberal Party, then the cause of governmental integrity and stability might have been strong enough to repel Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and their reckless co-conspirators.

As it was, the polls and a swag of dispiriting by-election results in Queensland and elsewhere across Australia provided Abbott and Dutton with the pretext they needed for a leadership spill. Never mind that the declining popularity of the Liberals was almost entirely attributable to the party’s conservative faction’s blank refusal to accept that most Australians wanted nothing to do with their reactionary ideas.

Not even the decisive result of the informal plebiscite on Gay Marriage was enough to convince them that they were out-of-touch with mainstream Australia. They clung to the demonstrably false notion that “Real Australians” were with them.

Though fantastical, this conservative conviction was constantly reinforced by reactionaries in the news media. The views of a decided minority of the Australian electorate were thus supplied with amplification out of all proportion to their true demographic weight. As Dr Goebbels discovered more than eighty years ago: a fantasy repeated often enough will, eventually, take on the colour of reality.

Poor Malcolm Turnbull was, therefore, dammed if he did attempt to reassert the liberalism implicit in his party’s name; and damned if he didn’t. The deeply conservative ideology of the Liberal PM, John Howard, has become practically ineradicable from Liberal Party ranks. Turnbull may have been able to oust Abbot from The Lodge, but he could never muster the numbers to oust the conservative faction’s racism, misogyny, homophobia and purblind climate change denialism.

The ultimate winner of the Liberal Party leadership, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

But, it is with these largely cosmetic considerations that the Australian political system’s willingness to be guided by the wishes of the electorate ends. The notion that the major political parties might still aggregate and organise the interests of clear and readily comprehensible chunks of the population: businessmen and professionals; shopkeepers and farmers; workers and intellectuals; has long since ceased to correspond to any recognisable description of political reality on either side of the Tasman.

To be fair, most of the voting public has enthusiastically reciprocated the politicians’ lack of interest. Over the course of the past 30-40 years membership of political parties in both New Zealand and Australia has plummeted. Most voters now draw little distinction between a Member of Parliament and any other variety of highly-paid public servant. The crucial democratic role which the people’s representatives are supposed to play is no longer generally appreciated. As the unedifying spectacle of Malcolm Turnbull’s deposition unfolded before their eyes over the third week in August, the response of most Aussies was to angrily instruct MPs to: “Do your f***ing job!”

But, if the people are no longer sovereign – then who is? It’s a tricky question. In the days of Robert Menzies or Rob Muldoon it was pretty clear to everyone who ran the show. Nowadays, however, respect for the party leader tends to last only as long as the polls remain favourable. But, when public support falters, the most treacherous and ambitious politicians look in the mirror and ask the oldest question is politics: “Why not me?”

The historical precedent, therefore, is not that of a powerful monarchy like England or France, but of Poland or Scotland. Weak kingdoms brought down by the unceasing intrigues and inveterate treachery of aristocrats who cared more for themselves than they did for their country.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 August 2018.

The Warning Bells Of Absurdity.

Noises Off: This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up. Painting by Otto Dix.

HOW CAN YOU TELL when a system is falling apart? That the load-bearing walls of everyday reality are beginning to weaken? The simple answer is absurdity. Words spoken and positions taken that simply make no sense. Behaviour that raises suspicion of complete madness. Sums that stubbornly refuse to add up.

Think about the extraordinary display put on by Australia’s governing party, the Liberal Party. What was that all about? For some time the party has been declining in the polls. So, what does it do? It convulses itself in a bloody and ultimately pointless bout of political fratricide. Hurling aside an urbane, accomplished and highly intelligent politician, Malcolm Turnbull, and replacing him with an intellectually stunted and morally vacuous religious zealot whose primary political accomplishments have been the persecution of refugees and the punishment of the poor. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Liberal’s primary vote has sunk to record lows.

Then there is the ongoing campaign by the United Kingdom’s liberal establishment to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Unable to counter the Labour leader’s policies: for fear of exposing their unshakeable allegiance to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon) that constitutes the actual government of the world; these ostensibly “progressive” politicians and journalists have embarked upon a barking-mad effort to paint Corbyn and his allies in the Labour Party as “antisemites”. By which they mean opponents of the State of Israel.

Now anyone who knows anything about Jeremy Corbyn (which includes the people who are levelling the charge of antisemitism against him) cannot possibly believe that he is prejudiced against Jews simply because they are Jews. Corbyn’s quarrel is with the ideology of Zionism, and with the unjust and often downright murderous actions of the Israeli state: a stance he has maintained with admirable consistency for more than thirty years.

Clearly, the prospect of such a man being just one general election away from No. 10 Downing Street is of profound concern to right-wing Israeli politicians and supporters of Zionism all around the world. That such people are attempting to undermine Corbyn is perfectly understandable. But, the campaign being waged against him on the pages of The Guardian isn’t about Israel – or Jewish people. It’s about something else; something all the more unnerving for being unspoken. It’s about who is entitled to govern the UK and who is not.

Corbyn constitutes an existential threat to the UK’s governing elites, whose formerly vice-like grip on the nation’s political and cultural institutions has been seriously weakened by a bottom-up political insurgency from the left of UK politics for which the veteran left-wing MP has acted as a lightning-rod. They are calling Corbyn an antisemite because they can’t plausibly call him a paedophile and because they are not yet desperate enough to call for his assassination.

That’s why it all sounds so mad. Like the accusations which Stalin levelled against the old Bolsheviks in the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s. They are lies – obvious and terrible lies – but with the power of the apparatus behind them they risk acquiring the character of Truth. So we go on reading the articles in The Guardian: noting the rising pitch of hysteria between every line; and the world lurches sideways under our feet.

And then we look at Donald Trump’s America, and Corbyn’s woes fade – overwhelmed by the dazzling image of the planet’s most powerful nation spontaneously combusting.

It’s all about race, of course. The whole history of the United States has been about race. About being white, or, more accurately about not being red, black, yellow or brown. The history of the United States of America is a series of evermore urgent reiterations of a consistent ruling-class strategy of making sure that the consciousness of class oppression is forever being displaced by the awareness of racial privilege.

The election of Barack Obama was the trigger. A black man in the White House was the ultimate symbol of white decline. From that moment on, a majority of white Americans were seized by a racial distemper that rotted their brains and inflamed their spleens. Though Trump has yet to speak or tweet the words explicitly, “Making America Great Again” has the ring of a genocidal call-to-arms. What else could it be? When demographic trends threaten to submerge white Americans in a diverse, multicultural morass?

When Trump talks about “draining the swamp” the assumption has always been that he is talking about cleaning up Washington DC. But what if he means draining away or diverting the waters that are lapping at the feet of white Americans? What if he intends to leave white America high and dry by simply getting rid of all those forces that are threatening to swamp it?

This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 August 2018.

Darkness At The End Of The Rainbow?

YES! Australians cheer the result of the postal plebiscite on Marriage Equality. This emphatic victory for social liberalism (61.6/38.4 percent) will hit conservative Australians hard. Liberal and National Party strategists may, however, attempt to exploit the fact that of the 17 federal electorates that voted "No", 11 are held by the Labor Party. Progressive Australians have won an important battle - but the culture war will go on.

WEDNESDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2017 will go down in Australian history as Marriage Equality Day. In an unprecedented national plebiscite, 61.6 percent of the 79.5 percent of voting-age Australians who returned their postal ballots voted YES to marriage equality. With this resounding vote in favour, Australia joined the rest of the world’s progressive nations in rejecting homophobia and discrimination.

But, Wednesday, 15 November 2017 will be remembered for something more than Australia’s endorsement of marriage equality. It will also be recorded by social historians and psephologists as the day conservative Australians were required to accept a forceful and irrefutable message confirming their minority status in Australian society.

Hostility towards homosexuality is one of the most reliable markers of the authoritarian personality. It will, therefore, come as a profound shock to people of this personality type that their attitudes are not shared by an overwhelming majority of the population. That nearly two-thirds of their fellow citizens see nothing untoward about same sex couples getting married will deliver a shattering blow to their perception of “normality”. They will be dismayed by how far the world has strayed from their “traditional values”.

For some, the events of 15 November 2017 will prompt a thorough-going reassessment of their moral and political expectations of themselves and their fellow Australians. If they are lucky, this reassessment will liberate them from the debilitating effects of conservative ideology, fundamentalist religious beliefs and authoritarian attitudes. For many others, perhaps a majority, however, the discovery that their hatreds and prejudices towards the LGBTI community is shared by just 38.4 percent of their fellow Australians will evoke a very different – and potentially dangerous – response.

For these conservatives, the plebiscite outcome will be interpreted as irrefutable proof of how sick and sinful their society has become. Religious conservatives, in particular, will have no difficulty accepting their minority status. After all, doesn’t Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, enjoin them to enter in by the strait gate? “[F]or wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat”? And doesn’t he also say that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

No, the Christian fundamentalists will not be in the least bit surprised to discover that 61.6 percent of their neighbours are going to Hell.

Political conservatives and authoritarian personalities will have a much harder time of it, however. For their brand of politics, 15 November 2017 can only have been a profoundly delegitimating experience. Electorally, it could very easily signal their imminent marginalisation. “Mainstream” politicians will now have to adjust to the fact that social liberalism, which they understood to be confined to the effete inhabitants of the inner-cities, is actually embraced by a much more extensive cross-section of the Australian population. For many, on both sides of the parliamentary aisle, it will rapidly become advisable to evince a more progressive and tolerant political persona.

For the diehards, however, it is not yet the time to lay down their arms and surrender to the bacchanalian throngs gyrating joyously in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne. They still have eleven cards left to play.

The more sharp-eyed and ruthless members of the Liberal and National party rooms will have noticed that of the 17 federal electorates which voted “No” to marriage equality, fully 11 of them are held by the Australian Labor Party. In the strategically vital “Western Suburbs” of Sydney, the seats of Greenway, Chifley, McMahon, Fowler, Warriwa, Blaxland, Watson, Barton and Parramatta – all of them held by Labor MPs – voted “No”. Some, like Greenway, only very narrowly. (53.6 percent) Others, like Blaxland, by a huge margin. (73.9 percent!) In socially-liberal (some would say, radical) Melbourne, the only electorates which rejected marriage equality were the Labor-held seats of Calwell and Bruce.

There is simply no way the Labor Party can defeat the Liberal-National Coalition if even a handful of these eleven safe seats slip from the Opposition’s grasp. And while, in normal times, any suggestion that a seat like Chifley might be lost to the Liberals would be greeted with full-strength Aussie derision, it remains an awkward fact that we are not living in normal times.

Prior to 8 November 2016, the very idea that the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania might be about to fall to Trump would have been met with loud American guffaws. But not after 8 November. Lashed and goaded in just the right way, the normally left-voting inhabitants of places like Michigan – or Chifley – can end up doing the strangest things.

For progressive Australians, 15 November 2017 will forever be bathed in all the vibrant colours of the rainbow. But, for the conservative ideologues, the religious fanatics and the authoritarian personalities trapped in their suffocating character armour, 15 November 2017 will be registered as nothing more than a temporary setback. The bigots might concede that, on this memorable day, they have lost a battle. But, for them, the war against a society grounded in gentleness, tolerance and love will go on.

This essay has been posted simultaneously on Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16 November 2017.

Governing For The Boardroom – From The Barroom.

Cheers, Tony! As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

THE ROLLING of Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, offers some interesting lessons in the conduct of right-wing politics. The multi-millionaire businessman and lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who instigated the “spill”, is generally identified as the candidate of Australia’s boardrooms – someone to finally make good on his predecessor’s promise that “Australia is open for business!” Abbott, on the other hand, might best be described as the candidate of the Australian barroom. A politician with whom the “little Aussie Battler”, and his mates, were more than happy to have a beer with.

 

Turnbull caught many Kiwis off-guard by holding up their own prime minister, John Key, as the very model of a modern conservative leader. Was Turnbull’s fulsome accolade inspired by the fact that Key (also a multi-millionaire) seemed to be as comfortable in the barrooms of New Zealand as he was in its boardrooms – maybe even more so? Acutely aware that in the Party Room he had just left, Boardroom and Barroom were at daggers drawn, and that he faced a Herculean task in drawing the patrician and plebeian Liberals back together, Turnbull can be forgiven for envying Key’s ability to keep a foot in both camps.

 

The prime minister John Key defeated, Helen Clark, had tried to do the same, but with only limited success. No matter how many times she speeded to an All Black test-match, or waved at the Warriors’ Rugby League fans, very few (if any) New Zealanders were fooled. Everyone knew that Clark was more comfortable at the Opera than the footy. And the blokes who drank beer never really saw themselves sipping Chardonnay with “Helen”.

 

On the face of it, this shouldn’t have mattered. Clark was, after all, a Labour Party leader. The loyalty of the blokes in the barroom was, supposedly, a political given. And, for a little while, it held. Clark’s gender, which, normally, would have counted against her in many barrooms, was neutralised by the fact that the Nats had also chosen a woman to lead them – and a pretty scary one at that! It did not take long, however, for the Barroom’s welcome to wear out.

 

No matter how hard she tried to signal her endorsement of the plebs’ pleasures, the conviction grew that it was all a little disingenuous. To the blokes in the barroom, Clark came across as someone who inhabited a different world. Not the boardroom, exactly, although she was doing everything she could to be accepted there, but another sort of room. They might have struggled to recall its proper name, but they knew exactly what sort of room Clark would feel most comfortable sitting in – a university common-room.

 

Key observed the steady alienation of Clark’s barroom allies and drew the appropriate lesson. Whatever else he did as New Zealand’s prime minister, he must never allow the blokes in the barroom to form even the faintest outline of a notion that he thought he was better than they were, or that he considered their views to be bigoted and ill-informed. If the Barroom listened to Newstalk-ZB, or Radio Sport, or The Edge – then he would talk to them from there. The listeners to Radio New Zealand’s “Morning Report” would just have to suck it up. The ones who voted National would forgive his nonappearances. The others didn’t matter.

 

John Key: Just one of the guys.

 

The Boardroom might have sniffed at this sort of pandering to the hoi-polloi, but Key knew better than to worry too much about the prejudices of the “1 Percent”. They may control an obscene percentage of the nation’s wealth, but their share of the nation’s votes would always and only be – 1 percent. Not that as a One-Percenter, himself, Key was in any way unsympathetic to the Boardroom’s needs – far from it. What he’d learned from Clark, however, is that, in a democracy, it pays to make haste slowly – always allowing time for the doubters to be persuaded.

 

As an opposition leader, Abbott made the Barroom his own, championing its prejudices and magnifying its fears. Upon becoming prime minister, however, he attempted to ram the Boardroom’s agenda down the Barroom’s throat. As a strategy it proved fatal. The Barroom turned decisively against him, driving his government underwater in the polls. It’s hard to help the Boardroom when you’re drowning.

 

If Malcolm Turnbull’s wise, he’ll cultivate John Key’s taste for beer.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 September 2015.

Where Loyalty No Longer Counts.

He's Behind You! Malcolm Turnbull rolls Tony Abbott with ruthless efficiency. Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

YOU CAN’T HELP ADMIRING the Aussies. There’s a raw energy about them that grabs, and holds, your attention. A brutal kind of honesty, too, which is equally compelling.

 

It was all there on display, on Monday night, as Malcolm Turnbull’s faction of the Liberal Party cut down Tony Abbott and his lieutenants with chilling efficiency. Watching Sky News Australia’s seven-hour, live-commentary marathon, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

The way Abbott’s loyal ministers were rotated through the Sky News studio, each one just a little more desperate than the last, seemingly unable to believe that they were in the middle of the very thing they had railed against when the hapless Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were hacking away at each other on prime time – a leadership spill involving a sitting Prime Minister.

 

“Good God! As a country we’re better than this!” Was Abbott’s anguished observation as the realisation that Turnbull was about to remove him from power finally beat its way past his emotional defences and made contact with the rational centre of his brain.

 

Paul Murray, a big, burly, bearded bloke, who makes his living telling Sky’s right-wing viewers “what’s really going on” spent the night acting as Abbott’s emotional proxy.

 

Right-wing Commentator, Paul Murray. Abbott's emotional proxy.

 

Alternately flailing his arms about in a balletic combination of anger and despair, and roaring defiance at a studio full of journalists and commentators who were clearly relishing the slow demise of the “Mad Monk” (as Abbott’s less charitable fellow citizens were wont to call him) Murray more and more came to resemble a baited bear. It seemed inevitable that the smooth young fellow seated well within range of Murray’s agitated paws would offer one acerbic taunt too many and end up smearing claret all over the studio floor.

 

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor joker. Especially when he blurted out the obviously painful question about whether it was any longer possible for conservative politicians like Tony Abbott to survive in the tolerant culture of twenty-first century Australia. You could read the anguish plainly on his bluff features as he internally answered his own question.

 

Because, of course, the answer is “No, Paul, it’s no longer possible.”

 

Not that his sort of Aussie is easy to convince. Not even when the Irish – yes, the Irish! – vote in favour of Marriage Equality. That’s right, Rome’s most dutiful daughter, snapping her fingers at the Clergy like she just didn’t care anymore about who did what, where, and to whom – just so long as love got a look in there somewhere.

 

Why couldn’t the Liberal Party Right see it? Why didn’t Abbott just declare a free vote on the Marriage Equality issue and save his rapidly diminishing supply of bullets for something that really mattered – like getting the deficit down and keeping all those tailored suits in the high towers of Sydney and Melbourne smiling their special, self-satisfied, squatocratic smiles.

 

Sacking the bloody useless Joe Hockey was the easiest way to do that, but Tony just wouldn’t. Loyal to a fault, poor fella. As Murray put it: “He was loyal in a game where loyalty no longer counts.” Honestly, I thought the guy was going to cry.

 

The other journos in the studio just shrugged. They knew it was all over for Abbott when reports from a weekend corporate shindig started filtering back to the Canberra press gallery. Turnbull had been present and, apparently, he had the more than 400 business leaders present eating out of his hand.

 

Secure in the knowledge that the mood of the boardroom was solidly behind a change at the top, the silver-haired millionaire locked and loaded his supporters for a leadership spill on Monday afternoon.

 

Ain’t it always the way? Politicians like Abbott and Hockey are invaluable in the ruck, kicking and gauging where the ref can’t see their infringements. But they’re not the sort of guys you send up to receive the cup from the Governor-General. Team captains have a certain look – and poor Tony Abbott never had it. Just a little too excitable. Too much the true believer. Unable to compromise. Not really clubbable.

 

Not that anybody’s ever going to say that about Malcolm Turnbull. Like that other Malcolm, the late Malcolm Fraser, he fits right in – a leader in the Menzies tradition.

 

Not a pair of Speedos in sight.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 September 2015.

What's Good For Them: Tony Abbott And The Australian Electorate

Tuning Out: Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his Chief-of-Staff, Peta Credlin, epitomise that faction of the political class which believes that popular consent is no longer essential to effective governance. The Australian electorate is fast disabusing them of this elitist political fantasy.

 

TONY ABBOTT, Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister, is just the latest (and nearest) casualty of a steadily widening rift within the international political class. Essentially, this class is split between those who believe that effective and efficient governance is possible without popular consent. (Which, they assert, can now be convincingly simulated without political risk). And those who continue to believe that a certain, irreducible, measure of popular consent remains indispensable to the maintenance of a government’s political legitimacy.

 

Abbott is a particularly vivid exemplar of the non-democratic mode of governance. The speed with which he jettisoned his electoral promises to the Australian electorate confirms his entirely instrumental view of the electoral process. In Abbott’s eyes, a party manifesto should never be construed as some form of contract with the electorate. This is because electoral promises are not promises in the conventional sense. They are, rather, to be understood as straightforward voter motivators: an important means to the ultimate end of amassing more votes than one’s opponents and winning power.

 

Abbott’s extraordinary practice of making “Captain’s calls” – decisions made without reference to either his cabinet colleagues or his own backbench – epitomises his view of governance as a series of top-down directives – to be implemented without question or delay. In pursuing this strategy, Abbott is strongly assisted by his controversial chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, who has repeatedly demonstrated her contempt for cabinet ministers and back-benchers alike. Working together, Abbott and Credlin have perfected an Australian variant of government-by-decree – a practice more usually associated with hard-pressed presidential regimes (most infamously with the ill-starred Weimar Republic).

 

That Abbott sees himself as some sort of presidential figure was made clear in his outraged reaction to the suggestion that his colleagues might be preparing to over-turn “the people’s choice” for prime-minister. In advancing this position (with considerable support from the right-wing news media) Abbott was, in effect, turning the whole Westminster System of parliamentary government on its head.

 

Between elections, he was saying, the Prime Minister must be invulnerable to challenge. A notion which directly contradicts the long-established convention that the Prime Minister holds office at the pleasure of Parliament, and that democratic accountability is traceable through the people’s representatives exclusively. It is Members of Parliament who determine, by majority vote, the composition of the government – and no one else.

 

The problem with this convention, at least as far as the non-democratic faction of the political class is concerned, is that it places far too much power in the hands of politicians who are, themselves, vulnerable to the electoral power of the voters. Inflict too much pain on the electorate and it just might decide to turf the government responsible out of office.

 

That this is much more than a theorem of political science was demonstrated to the Australian political class by the voters of Queensland, who, only last month, rounded savagely on their proudly non-democratic premier and his unmandated assault on the people of the sunshine state by emphatically reinstalling a thoroughly chastened Labor Party to office.

 

It was this demonstration of the voters’ power (which, itself, followed hard on the heels of a similar upset in the state of Victoria) that prompted a significant minority of Abbott’s back-benchers to call for a leadership ballot. That Abbott held them off was in large measure due to the formal loyalty of his Cabinet. But even inside the Cabinet Room, a restive and growing group of Liberal Party ministers are rapidly coming to terms with the practical political dangers of persisting with the fiction that Abbott is some sort of elected Kaiser and Peta Credlin his Iron Chancellor.

 

The neoliberal zealots who populate the think-tanks, employer lobbies and commentariat of the Australian Right may have convinced themselves that elections are mere charades to be managed by public-relations mavens, pollsters and spin-doctors; and that, as soon as these irritating democratic rituals have been safely concluded, the real business of “responsible” governance can resume – regardless of promises made and any naive voter expectations that those promises will be kept. Wiser heads within the political class know better.

 

Major economic and social changes, imposed without a clear electoral mandate, can only be preserved through an ever-increasing reliance on political distraction, demagoguery, and outright deceit. Inevitably, this sort of political chicanery, accompanied, as it so often is, by the imposition of unannounced and unfairly distributed pain, will be answered by the sort of emphatic electoral rejection so recently demonstrated in Victoria and Queensland.

 

As the moderate faction of the political class absorbs these fundamental democratic realities, and their unease is communicated to the Liberal Party’s wavering politicians, Abbott’s position will become increasingly untenable. Sooner or later (and most probably it will be sooner) he will be made to pay the price for ignoring the pragmatic examples set by his more durable predecessors.

 

The best Aussie barbeques are those where the guests get to eat the steaks and salads they’ve prepared themselves – not the ones where the host alone decides what’s good for them.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Saturday, 28 February 2015.

Firing Tony Abbott: Whose Job Is It To Make Or Break Australia’s Prime Minister?

"Awh, Come On, Cobbers - Give Us A Fair Old Suck Of The Sav!"  Tony Abbott’s assertion that he is the government and the government is him, and that the House of Representatives has no right to depose him, is not only absurdly narcissistic but dangerously unconstitutional and undemocratic.

TONY ABBOTT’S QUERULOUS CLAIM that the Australian people, alone, have the right to “fire” him, misrepresents his country’s entire political system. Even worse, it suggests that the Australian Prime Minister has begun to conflate his own narrow personal interests with the broader interests of the nation as a whole. That Australia’s political leader is so heedless of his proper constitutional function is the most vivid proof of that country’s intensifying political difficulties.

 

Abbott’s argument – backed, irresponsibly, by the Murdoch press – is that he has been “hired” by the Australian people on a three-year contract, and that he should, therefore, be protected from any and all leadership challenges until that contract expires at the next election.

 

In other words, Abbott is not really a prime minister at all, but a president. Or, perhaps, given his recent knighting of Prince Philip, a king? He is clearly of the view that effective executive authority in Australia resides not in the Cabinet, whose ministers are drawn from the two elected houses of the Australian parliament, but in his own person. As is actually the case with the USA’s Barack Obama and France’s Francois Hollande, Tony Abbott wrongly believes that the buck of ultimate political responsibility stops with him.

 

Quite where his view of things leaves Australia’s official Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, and her vice-regal proxy, the Governor-General, is anybody’s guess. The same place, one imagines, as Australia’s long history of representative democracy.

 

Central to that history, and, indeed, to the historical evolution of representative democracy throughout the Commonwealth, is the steady expansion of the constitutional authority of the elected parliamentary chamber: the House of Commons in England and Canada, the House of Representatives in Australia and New Zealand.

 

Nominally, the monarch exercises sovereignty over the realms of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Historically, however, the power of the monarchy has been steadily reduced to the point where the sovereign now reigns but does not rule. It is in the body of elected representatives that sovereignty, for all practical purposes, has come to reside.

 

In both Australia and New Zealand the day-to-day decisions of government are made by the Sovereign’s council of ministers, the Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister. But even this powerful organ of executive power is, ultimately, responsible to the elected representatives of the people. The Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers must be elected Members of Parliament, and remain in office only for so long as they enjoy the support of a majority of the House of Representatives.

 

The political dynamism of the Westminster system, as it has evolved over the past four hundred years, is located in the relationship between the relatively small fraction of the House that sits in Cabinet, and the much larger fraction that does not. This latter group is itself made up of those MPs who mostly vote in support of the Cabinet and those who range themselves in consistent opposition to its policies.

 

The survival of any “Ministry” – as the cabinet selected by the politician commanding a parliamentary majority (i.e. the Prime Minister) is rightly called – is thus dependent on that politician’s ability to retain the loyalty of the MPs who originally gave him or her the job. An effective prime minister, respected by his colleagues and warmly supported by the voting public will have little difficulty remaining in office. A prime minister who loses his colleagues’ respect and who finds him or herself despised by a majority of the electorate will (quite rightly) struggle to keep it.

 

Tony Abbott’s assertion that he is the government and the government is him, and that the House of Representatives has no right to depose him, is, therefore, not only absurdly narcissistic but dangerously unconstitutional and undemocratic.

 

It completely ignores the central reality of the Westminster system: that the Ministry must at all times enjoy the confidence of the House. If, by forfeiting the trust and support of his colleagues in the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott has called the solidity and reliability of his parliamentary majority into question, then his colleagues are perfectly entitled to depose him and install a leader with sufficient support to once again render all questions of confidence moot.

 

Or, as an Aussie Liberal MP might put it behind the closed doors of the Party Room:

 

“Tony, mate, if it was just a question of the punters hiring or firing you, we’d have no problem at all. But, as you well know, that’s not the case. If they want to fire you, sunshine, then, as things now stand, they’ll have to fire the Liberal-National Government as well. That’s us, mate! And, I’m sorry, but if you really expect us to go down with the good ship Tony Abbott, then you’re a bloody mug. With a new Prime Minister and a new Cabinet there’s every chance we can hold onto power well into the future. But, if we accept your version of the constitution, Tony, then this party has no future. So, sorry mate, but we think you ought to call it quits. For the good of the party, Tony. Piss off.”

 

The people don’t elect prime-ministers, parliamentarians do. But, that’s okay, because the  parliamentarians are chosen by the people. In the final analysis, it’s not about them, it’s about us.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 4 February 2015.

The Cruellest Cuts: Why Joe Hockey's Budget Will Almost Certainly Fare Worse Than Bill English's.

Budget Cutters: In the Anglophone economies it is becoming increasingly clear that the ruling classes' definition of the political nation (i.e. the people upon whom it is still legitimate to lavish taxpayers' money) is shrinking. Accordingly, there is a growing understanding among elite political managers that the electoral equation can only be made to work in their favour by ensuring that an increasingly large proportion of the electorate is dissuaded, for whatever reason, from casting a vote.

 

THE WORLD OWES a debt of gratitude to Scott Prouty, the Florida bartender who videoed Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent speech. It was during this speech that the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States told his $50,000 per person fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were dependent on government, saw themselves as victims and believed government had a responsibility to care for them. More than any other single factor, it was Prouty’s recording that derailed Romney’s campaign for the Presidency.

 

The potency of the tape lay in the insight it provided into the minds of the very wealthy men and women to whom Romney was addressing his remarks. Some commentators construed its message as demonstrating how out of touch Romney and his Republican donors were with the realities of American life – especially in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Inasmuch as it grossly overstated the level of dependency and fundamentally mischaracterised the expectations of ordinary Americans Romney’s speech did testify to his political ignorance. What it also demonstrated, however, and more importantly, was the open contempt in which America’s ruling class held nearly half of the American people.

 

Because, of course, that “47 percent” wasn’t a statistic – it was code. What Romney was signalling to his audience was that once you deducted the Blacks, the Hispanics and the Poor White Trash from the raw total of American citizens, 53 percent was all you had left. His comments were thus intended both as a reminder and a warning to his wealthy donors about just how tenuous their position was. If something wasn’t done – and soon – to stem this rising tide of outstretched hands, Romney was saying, then “Real America” – the 53 percent – would find themselves out-voted by the other America.

 

This equation of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and economically comfortable America with “Real America” is deeply embedded in the political psyche of the Republican Right. Interestingly, one of the most cogent statements of WASP prejudice comes in Eric Roth’s screenplay for The Good Shepherd – a movie about the foundation and early years of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halfway through the film Roth brings together the hero, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) a senior CIA officer, with Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci) a Mafioso chieftain.

 

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something ... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the Church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the Niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?

 

Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

 

This attitude remained deeply imbedded in the CIA. When the right-wing Republican, Ronald Reagan, became President in 1981, his appointee as CIA Director, William Casey, launched an unofficial purge of the Agency’s hyphenated Americans – especially those whose immigrant parents and grandparents hailed from suspect homelands in Eastern and Southern Europe.

 

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND are not, of course, the United States, but, like it or not, they (along with Anglophone Canada) remain strong outposts of the great Anglo-Saxon diaspora of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their ruling-classes, like the ruling-class of the United States, are also White, Anglo-Saxon (to which we can now append Celtic) and Christian (Protestants and Catholics having long ago joined forces against the rising tide of “Secular Humanism”) and in relation to their respective states both evince a deep proprietary awareness. They see it as their bounden duty to ensure that Australia and New Zealand continue to be governed by “the right people”.

 

In both countries there is a growing fear that the demographic structures of their populations are turning against them: that, as in the United States, the electoral equation can only be made to work in their favour by ensuring that an increasingly large proportion of the electorate is dissuaded, for whatever reason, from casting a vote.

 

The Australian ruling-class finds itself at a decided disadvantage on this score. The Commonwealth’s compulsory voting legislation means that the participation rate in Australian elections remains exceptionally high. It also means that when the Liberal Party finds itself in power, with its most aggressive ideologues calling the shots, its ability to implement the sort of far-Right programme demanded by it's billionaire backers tends to run into a series of demographic and democratic road-blocks.

 

Joe Hockey’s – the Liberal Party Treasurer’s – Budget is being trumpeted as a no-holds barred assault on the social-democratic reforms of the last 40 years. We shall see. The polls are already registering a gathering public rejection of the Liberal’s hard-line approach. If Hockey’s Budget is as bad as people fear, the Government of Tony Abbot may not see out the year. The precedent set by the Liberal-dominated Senate’s constitutionally objectionable refusal to pass the Budget of Gough Whitlam’s re-elected Labour Government in 1975 may well come back to haunt them.

 

The National Party-led government of John Key and Bill English in New Zealand has much more room to manoeuvre. Their ideological latitude is, paradoxically, attributable to the constitutional ramifications of National’s own attempt to do what Hockey hopes to do – unwind the welfare state and “put an end to the age of entitlement”. Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother Of All Budgets” (clearly an inspiration for Hockey) so deranged the New Zealand political order that, in 1993, the voters threw out the First-Past-The-Post electoral system and replaced it with a form of proportional representation.

 

The conditions of so-called “elected dictatorship”, which had made the whole neoliberal revolution in New Zealand possible, were reconfigured in such radical fashion that the pursuit of a hard-line, ideologically-driven programme became electorally unfeasible.

 

For the foreseeable future New Zealand seemed destined to be ruled by necessarily moderate coalition governments. The former Reserve Bank Governor, Don Brash’s, determination to test this proposition in the election of 2005 brought his radically right-wing National Party closer to victory than many pundits believed possible – but not far enough.

 

One of the (many) mispronouncements and campaigning gaffes that cause Brash to lose the election was a statement he made just 72 hours before the polling booths opened in which he conflated “mainstream New Zealanders” with National Party supporters. The similarities between Brash’s remark and Romney’s are remarkable. The willingness of both men to cast half of their respective nation’s citizens as “The Other” – persons somehow unworthy of either recognition or representation – exposes the enduring weakness of the Far-Right. Its apparent incapacity to practice the politics of inclusion.

 

The contrast between and ultimate fate of Joe Hockey’s and Bill English’s Budgets will be interesting to observe. The former’s, I suspect, will prove the downfall of Tony Abbott’s government. The latter’s, by being framed to include as many of the voting public as English deems ideologically defensible, will, at the very least, give John Key’s government a fighting chance.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 12 May 2014.

An Injury To One Australian Is The Business Of All Australians

Illegal Seizure In The Open Sea: Russian Federal Police illegally board and seize The Arctic Sunrise and her crew of 30 in the open sea. One of those held at gunpoint was an Australian citizen, Colin Russell. Rather than voice the strongest diplomatic protest, the Australian Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, is now suggesting that people like Russell be required to reimburse the Australian Government for the consular assistance they receive.

WHY IS IT that politicians, who owe everything to democracy, frequently display so little understanding of its values? Has the novelty and radicalism of democracy’s core proposition: that the “just powers” of government derive exclusively from the consent of the governed; simply worn off? Has the hard-won right to choose their own leaders been around for so long that voters simply take it for granted?

 

These are just some of the questions arising from Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s extraordinary suggestion that Australians travelling overseas, who find themselves in need of consular assistance, could be billed for the services provided.

 

Last Saturday, responding to questions about the amount of “taxpayers’ money” spent on Colin Russell, the Australian citizen imprisoned by the Russian Federation for attempting to draw the world’s attention to that country’s decision to allow oil drilling in the Arctic ecosystem, Ms Bishop declared:

 

“Of course the Australian government is going to support those in trouble but there are circumstances where questions are raised why taxpayers should foot the bill”.

 

The job of reviewing those “circumstances” has been given to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to Ms Bishop, the exercise is all about “reviewing the consular fee for those who make deliberate and purposeful actions which break the local law and who don’t take out comprehensive insurance and then require [consular] help at the taxpayer’s expense”.

 

Ms Bishop’s statement is not only an extremely misleading interpretation of the circumstances leading to Mr Russell’s detention by the Russian authorities, and of his consequent need for Australian consular assistance, but it is also a fundamental misreading of a consul’s purpose.

 

The term “consul” has its origins in the Roman Republic, but a modern-day consulate’s primary diplomatic function is to protect and facilitate the safe passage of its commissioning nation’s citizens. In classical times the simple statement “civis Romanus sum” – “I am a Roman Citizen” – was sufficient to give anyone within reach of Rome’s retribution pause. Likewise today, when the involvement of consular staff is usually enough to make the authorities of a foreign state behave themselves. It’s says: “Our state is watching you and will hold you responsible for the welfare of its citizen.”

 

In the case of Mr Russell (himself an Australian “taxpayer”) consular staff became involved when The Arctic Sunrise, the Dutch-registered vessel he was sailing on, was seized illegally in open waters by Russian federal police, who then proceeded to sail the ship and its crew to the territory of the Russian Federation. The 30 crew members, citizens of 16 nations, were then charged with “piracy”, denied bail, and incarcerated in conditions of considerable stress and discomfort.

 

The only “law” which Mr Russell and his fellow Greenpeace activists may possibly have fallen foul of is the international law pertaining to oil drilling platforms. One of these was non-violently and temporarily boarded by members of The Arctic Sunrise’s crew in order to display a large banner protesting oil exploration in the vulnerable Arctic environment. Any redress for this harmless symbolic gesture was a matter for international civil litigation – not the criminal code of the Russian Federation.

 

All of these facts would have been conveyed to the Australian Foreign Minister via consular staff on the ground in Murmansk and St Petersburg. Rather than contemplate charging Australian citizens a fee for the assistance they receive in such extraordinary circumstances, Ms Bishop should have demanded Mr Russell’s immediate release and repatriation and issued the strongest possible diplomatic protest at the illegal seizure of a vessel on the open sea and the abduction by force and unlawful imprisonment of an Australian citizen.

 

Mr Russell had every right to expect this reaction from his government because, as a citizen and as an elector, he is one of the 22 million human-beings who, together, constitute the Commonwealth of Australia. The injustice inflicted upon Mr Russell was not just against him it was against all Australians and the politicians elected to govern in their name were duty-bound to do everything they could to rescue and bring home an Australian son in distress.

 

Mr Russell’s treatment bears testimony to the Australian Liberal-National Government’s woeful indifference to basic democratic values. From the moment The Arctic Sunrise was seized, the sympathies of Ms Bishop and her colleagues appeared to lie, almost exclusively, with the oil drillers and the Russian government.

 

The hostility whipped up against Greenpeace by the Murdoch press proved to be a stronger goad to political action than the abduction and detention of an Australian citizen.

 

Mr Russell had a right to his government’s support because in a democracy that’s exactly what it is – his government.

 

Ms Bishop needs to be reminded that she serves at her people’s pleasure. The protection of Australian citizens abroad is not only her ministerial duty, it’s their democratic right.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 January 2014.

The Politics Of Negativity

The Wages of Timidity: A hung Australian Parliament has become the outward manifestation of Julia Gillard's (above) and Tony Abbott's negative approach to political leadership.

TONY ABBOTT’S rapturous reception by hundreds of delighted supporters last Sunday morning was more than merited. The leader of the Australian Liberal Party had done what only a few weeks ago the pundits were telling us was impossible: he’d stripped Julia Gillard’s Labor Government of its majority.

Eighteen Labor seats fell in last weekend’s Australian elections, nine of them in Queensland, home state of the man Ms Gillard deposed, Kevin Rudd. For the first time since 1931, a first-term government had been, if not quite thrown out, then at the very least firmly escorted to the front door.

The Australian election result has much to tell us about modern democratic politics.

The first and the most important lesson to be drawn from Labor’s debacle is the ominous power of negative politics.

The Australian Labor Government’s unique success in bringing the country through the global economic crisis virtually unscathed should have been enough to see it returned to office with an increased majority. Astonishingly, Mr Abbott was able to persuade the Australian electorate that – far from being a triumph – Labour’s handling of the economy had been an untidy and extravagant botch-up.

Mr Abbott also successfully re-ignited (and then ruthlessly re-exploited) the fears of many Australians that their country was being "over-run" by sea-borne refugees. With great skill he persuaded his countrymen that Labor had "gone soft" on these so-called "boat people" – a charge which slyly invited voters to question Labor’s membership of "Middle Australia".

The sudden "rolling" of Prime Minister Rudd in a brutal, faction-driven coup spectacularly confirmed Mr Abbott’s characterisation of Labor as a collection of reckless, ruthless and boorishly arrogant ambition-heads, who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if it jumped up and bit them on their over-upholstered rear-ends.

Unfortunately for Ms Gillard, Mr Abbott’s crude caricature of Labor as inept, disloyal and unprincipled had just enough truth in it to stick.

Less than three years ago, Mr Rudd was describing Climate Change as "the great moral issue of our time". One of his first actions as Australia’s new Prime Minister was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. With the enthusiastic support of most Australians he set about devising an Emissions Trading Scheme.

Absolutely predictably, the Labor Government’s Climate Change policies ran into a hailstorm of right-wing opposition. At that point, Mr Rudd’s job was to stand firm and make the case for change. This he did not do. Rather than face down his Climate Change-denying opponents, Mr Rudd cut and ran. Australians were appalled. Labor’s poll-ratings plummeted.

This sudden voter disaffection reflects another, deeply troubling aspect of negative politics. It’s not just about the unkind accusations an opposition levels against a government; it’s also about the unkind impressions a government leaves in the minds of its own supporters. The political dynamic to be avoided at all costs is the one that sees a government assailed with renewed energy by its enemies, even as it is being deserted by its friends.

Finding herself in this unenviable position, Ms Gillard’s winning strategy was clear: carry the fight to Mr Abbott and the Liberal-National Coalition; and rebuild trust and faith in Labor’s mission among her wavering and/or outright rebellious supporters.

This Ms Gillard did not do. Rather than repudiate Mr Rudd’s timidity, she endorsed it and, to the utter dismay of her followers, took it further.

"The great moral issue of our time" was unceremoniously booted into touch by the new prime-minister. Then, in a craven closed-door-deal, Mr Rudd’s one genuinely radical economic policy, taxing the super-profits of the mining companies, was watered down. Ms Gillard was even willing to resurrect the Coalition’s internationally decried "Pacific [or, in her case ‘Timor Sea’] Solution" to the sea-borne refugee "crisis". Anything, to thrust Mr Abbott’s attack-dogs back inside their kennels.

Of course the new prime minister’s strategy of appeasement instantly vitiated whatever moral justification Labor’s fractious barons may have advanced for deposing Mr Rudd.

Mr Abbott’s critique of Labour as an unprincipled band of ruthless opportunists had been vindicated. The Coalition, scenting blood, redoubled its attack. Left-wing voters, disgusted, struck-out for the Greens.

Taking stock of the 2010 Australian election I am reminded of the Muldoon-led National Party’s ruthless demolition of Bill Rowling’s Labour Government back in 1975. That, too, was a relentlessly negative campaign, conducted by a man the pundits insisted could not win, against a Labour Party curiously oblivious to the size and ferocity of the political monsters massing around it.

If, over the next few days, Ms Gillard succeeds in cobbling together a Labor-led minority government, it’s hard to see it representing anything other than the timidity, lack of principle and cynical opportunism which gave it birth.

Australians seem fated to endure either Mr Abbott’s passionate intensity, or Ms Gillard’s lack of conviction.

The politics of negativity come at a high price.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 August 2010.