Hi-Viz Vengeance On Melbourne’s Streets.

Fuck The Jab! Are all these protesting Melbourne construction workers right? No, of course not. Covid-19 is not a figment of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ imagination. Nor can one help speculating, just a little, that mixed-in with all this working-class fury there might also be a pretty large dose of toxic Aussie masculinity. What is absolutely indisputable, however, is that the ignorance and aggression on display in Melbourne has not materialised overnight, out of thin air.

THE LAST PLACE a young, well-educated, socially-liberal, mask-wearing Melburnian should be found today (22/9/21) is on the streets of downtown Melbourne. All morning, squads of increasingly angry and frustrated riot police have been clashing with groups of even angrier and more frustrated young men – most of them construction workers – protesting furiously against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination, and Labor Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews’ decision to shut down Melbourne’s construction sites for a further two weeks. Anyone looking like a supporter of mandatory vaccination, Andrews, or even the “sell out” CFMEU (the construction workers’ union) who fell into these protesters’ hands would be in for a very hard time indeed.

It is most unlikely that Andrews and his advisers anticipated the explosion of anger that has followed their decision to make vaccination mandatory for construction workers. Pandemic decision-making is driven by the data – which showed a very low vaccination rate among this group of workers. Superficially, their reasoning was sound. By making the jab mandatory, unvaccinated tradies, desperate to get back to work, would be quick to comply. Where was the advantage in resistance?

Unfortunately, reason had nothing to do with it.

In the minds of an alarming number of the young, fit, Aussie males who dominate the Victorian construction industry, the so-called “Covid-19 Pandemic” was a crock of shit: nothing but a smokescreen laid down by the “elites”, whose unholy intention has always been to crush the spirit of hard-working working-class men by robbing them of their freedom. Why else did these high-viz demonstrators make a bee-line for the CFMEU’s headquarters as the protests kicked-off? Because if there’s one institution guaranteed to stand up for a working man’s freedom, then it’s his union. Right?

Wrong.

The CFMEU bosses, also acting reasonably, wanted to get their guys back to work as soon as possible. The building sites had been far too quiet for far too long. The members were running out of money. If the price of getting the construction industry up-and-running again was not objecting to a compulsory jab for all the lazy bastards who’d failed to get one during the weeks of lockdown, then the CFMEU would keep its mouth firmly shut. After all, which freedom was more important? The freedom to be a bloody idiot? Or, the freedom to get out and get earning again? It shouldn’t have been that hard a choice to make!

But it was.

And by the time the union bosses realised that way more blokes than they ever expected were not only refusing to get jabbed, but also blaming the union for not defending their right to say No, it was too late. There were hundreds of them right outside their front door. In vain did they demand the right to be heard. These anti-vax unionists were in no mood for explanations. First they hurled insults, then bottles, then rocks. Pretty soon all the CFMEU officials could hear was the chant every union boss dreads: “You sold us out! You sold us out! You sold us out!”

Sensibly, they retreated. This was something for the cops to sort out.

Well, yeah, usually. But these guys are very different from the middle-class sons and daughters that Melbourne’s finest are usually called upon to police during protests. Very few of those kids are willing to mix it up with the coppers – even if they were capable of such non-verbal communication. Young construction workers on the other hand: blokes who know how to handle themselves; they are a whole different story. What’s more, they’re Australians. Mixing it up with the coppers is as old as Ned Kelly – and practically an obligation. No red-blooded, working-class Aussie is going to run away from the Police – until the shooting starts.

And that’s the problem – isn’t it? The last thing Premier Andrews needs right now are half-a-dozen young construction workers bleeding-out on Flinders Street. What’s more, the protesters know it. The Riot Squad can squirt all the pepper spray, and fire all the rubber bullets it likes, but so long as their numbers hold-up, these protesters aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’ve even drawn up a batshit crazy list of demands – just like the miners at the Eureka Stockade. And if the cops actually do start shooting? Well, who’s for an irrational revolution?

So, where the bloody hell does that leave the political leadership of Victoria and Australia? Where has all this batshit craziness come from? Best guess? It’s come from nearly forty years of working-class blokes being looked straight through – as if they weren’t there. It’s been born out of the yawning chasm between the people who get the respectful nods, and the people on the receiving end of the contemptuous sneers. Between the classy types who talk knowledgably about good wine and boutique breweries, and the guys who drink the same brand of beer as their dads’. If you shove a whole class out of sight, and make it crystal clear that nobody who matters gives a rat’s arse what they think about anything, then winning their trust when it really, really matters, is bound to be a struggle.

After all, the bosses have been telling them for forty years that all these bad things that keep happening to them cannot be helped. Yes they may be painful, but they are also necessary. And besides, there are no alternatives. That was shit forty years ago, and it’s still shit. So, when the working-class hears the people in charge spewing out the same old rhetoric about painful but necessary adjustments – for the good of all – is it any wonder that the first response of a fair old chunk of them is scepticism?

Especially when there are YouTube videos and Facebook posts telling them that this whole Covid thing is a hoax – just another trick by billionaire vampires to deprive them of what little freedom they have left.

Especially when the “nice” people get to work from home on full pay, while the gates to the city’s building sites remain firmly padlocked.

Are all these protesting construction workers right, then? No, of course not. Covid-19 is not a figment of Daniel Andrews’ imagination. Nor can one help speculating, just a little, that mixed-in with all this working-class fury there might also be a pretty large dose of toxic Aussie masculinity. What is absolutely indisputable, however, is that the ignorance and aggression on display on the streets of Melbourne has not materialised overnight, out of thin air.

As W.H. Auden wrote on the eve of the Second World War:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 September 2021.

No Place For White, Middle-Class Men?

But, Honestly, I had No Idea! Was Rohan Lord being serious last week on RNZ's "Morning Report"? Was he actually asking us to accept that being male and middle-class is an impediment to advancing through Labour’s ranks? That, in a party where all of the key decision-making positions are currently occupied by men, being a bloke will limit your future prospects?

 

DISCRIMINATION on the basis of race, gender and social class. Gosh! Imagine that! Should be a law against it!

 

And, of course, there is – sort of. It is, indeed, illegal to discriminate against one’s fellow citizens on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, and even their personal political beliefs. But the Bill of Rights Act has absolutely nothing to say about discrimination based on social class.

 

This is hardly surprising. A Bill of Rights Act that outlawed discrimination based on social class would be utterly revolutionary – both in intent and effect. It would outlaw capitalism. It would undermine hierarchy. It would – not to put too fine a point upon it – change the world.

 

Which is why the Bill of Rights Act will, until the final victory of the Revolution, remain deathly silent on the subject of class. Our economic system is quite capable of coping with the abolition of sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, religious intolerance and political witch-hunting. What it cannot abolish, however, is social class: that “homicidal bitchin’/ that goes down in every kitchen/ to determine who shall serve and who shall eat.” (Leonard Cohen) Because, as another great Jewish writer explained: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

 

All of which is by way of contextualising the comments of Rohan Lord, former Labour Party candidate for the seat of East Coast Bays and erstwhile holder of the seventy-second slot on Labour’s Party List.

 

On Tuesday morning Rohan told Radio New Zealand that while he was very appreciative of Labour’s consideration, and although he fully supported the party’s policy platform, his list-ranking had led him to the conclusion that he wasn’t really the sort of candidate they were looking for.

 

“Wrapping it all up really, there’s probably limited future prospects’, he told RNZ’s Morning Report. “I’m white, middle class, male, I couldn’t really see a long term future.”

 

Seriously, Rohan? You’re actually asking us to accept that being middle-class is an impediment to advancing through Labour’s ranks? That, in a party where all of the key decision-making positions are currently occupied by men, being a bloke will limit your future prospects?

 

Mate, if you’re sincere in these observations, then you haven’t been paying attention – for about thirty years!

 

Oh yes, I know, the party was dominated by Helen Clark for fifteen of those thirty years. But, in neither the Labour Party, nor in New Zealand society generally, has gender been the primary determinant of our recent history.

 

The crucial change of the past thirty years has been the destruction of working-class power. The crippling of the trade union movement offers the most glaring confirmation of that historic defeat. If the political wing of the labour movement had not already been taken over by lawyers, university teachers and civil servants, however, then driving the working-class from the national stage would not have been so easy. The middle-class capture of the Labour Party in the early 1980s was crucial to the demobilisation of the labour movement as a decisive economic, social and political force in the 1990s.

 

So, Rohan, it was neither your gender nor your class origins that limited your future prospects, it was your ignorance of the way things are done – not just in Labour, but in all political parties.

 

To rise in any political organisation it is necessary to prove that you have what it takes to be a politician. Can you organise yourself into a safe seat – like Helen Clark and John Key? Can you keep your mouth shut in the interests of party discipline? Can you be relied upon to remain staunch in the face of disappointment and defeat? Can your comrades trust you not to publicly spit the dummy when the decisions of the party bosses don’t go the way you expected?

 

Well, Rohan, I think you know the answers to all those questions. And, I agree, when it comes to the people in charge of the Labour Party – middle-class to a man – you are most definitely, “probably not for them”.

 

Don’t feel too bad about it though. Be comforted by the fact that Kris Faafoi, Labour’s Shadow Minister of Tourism, when called upon to condemn the thoroughly bourgeois practice of tipping (a no-brainer for any genuine socialist!) happily pleaded guilty to tipping the odd worker himself.

 

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, 26 May 2017.

A Lucky Escape?

Keeping Nope Alive: Tens-of-thousands of mostly young American protesters poured onto the streets of the major US cities in the hours following the shock election of Donald Trump as America's 45th President. It remains to be seen whether, in the days and weeks to come, middle-class Millennial hope is any match for white working-class resentment and rage.

 

ALL YEAR, NEW ZEALANDERS have quietly congratulated themselves on not being Americans. Like so many others around the world, we have looked on with mounting disbelief as the [Dis]united States of America plumbed new depths of malevolent ignorance. If it’s been said once, it’s been said 100 million times: “Thank God we’re not like that!”

 

But why aren’t we like the United States? What is it that we, as a people, did – or did not do – that has kept our political system from veering so suddenly, and dangerously, off course.

 

The most obvious and plausible answer is that we, along with many other Western nations, have maintained a reasonably comprehensive welfare state. More specifically, we have preserved a public health system.

 

It is easy to overlook the role a functioning public health service plays in preserving even a modest level of social equality. By far the most common reason for so many middle-aged Americans declaring bankruptcy is the crippling cost of medical treatment and pharmaceuticals. In just a few weeks, serious injury and/or chronic illness can swallow up every last cent of an ordinary family’s life savings. There are tens-of-thousands of American workers whose entire pay check gets spent on ruinously expensive medication.

 

It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 US presidential elections that Donald Trump’s supporters have been so vehement in their opposition to “Obamacare”. Granted, the Affordable Health Care Act has its flaws, but, surely, it is also a small step in the direction of universal, publicly-funded, health care?

 

“Hell, no!”, cry the Trumpites. “Obamacare is the thin edge of the wedge of socialism!” And you’d better believe that this verdict is delivered through bared teeth. As though, for people in their desperate economic circumstances, socialism is a bad thing.

 

We chuckle at the ideological incongruity of poor, white, working-class Americans voting for a man like Donald Trump. “Why can’t they see that they’re voting directly against their own interests?”, we ask. “How can they be so blind?”

 

For an explanation we must turn to American history, and the myths with which it disguises itself. The most enduring of these cultural illusions is that every American has a shot at success. That the path from shoeshine boy to billionaire is real. That it’s open to all. That it’s possible.

 

Persuading Americans that their much-vaunted equality of opportunity is a mirage is extremely difficult. But, convincing them that they are the prisoners of a class system every bit as pernicious as Britain’s is practically impossible.

 

But it’s true. As Nancy Isenberg demonstrates so conclusively in her recent book, White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, the enterprises (and that word is used advisedly) which eventually grew into the United States were predicated on the most ruthless exploitation of indentured labourers and servants. Before America was a slave society, it was a society into which the English aristocracy and their entrepreneurial hangers-on decanted the poorest and most powerless of the English people.

 

That these readily disposable servants of the American ruling-class have, for more than 300 years, been regarded as more despicable than dangerous is largely attributable to two key factors. The first is the poor whites’ sullen awareness of their own worthlessness in the eyes of their social superiors. And the second is the consoling knowledge that below them on the American totem-pole there exists an even more wretched and put-upon social strata: Non-Whites.

 

This is the vicious political alchemy which has fuelled every outbreak of white racist populism from the Civil War to the rise of Donald Trump. A crude compound of resentment and rage, it may be directed, with equal success, upwards: against the One Percent and the disdainful middle classes (in whose eyes poor whites are indeed little more than “deplorable” human “trash”) and downwards: against the descendants of slaves, and that floodtide of immigrants whose descendants threaten to strip these “crackers” of what little White privilege remains to them.

 

And, before we congratulate ourselves too fulsomely on our lucky escape from America’s political and cultural degradation, we should, perhaps, recall our own national origins. New Zealand, too, grew out of British “enterprise”. We, too, deceive ourselves with the mythology of egalitarianism and classlessness.

 

There, but for the grace of God – and a still socialist public health system – go we.

 

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, 11 November 2016.

Here's To You Mrs Robinson

Under Scrutiny: Imagine if the same expectations of "responsibility" underpinning Paula Bennet's new "social obligations" policy were applied to members of the upper-middle-class as well as Domestic Purposes Beneficiaries.

THE OFFICERS of the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Unit knocked on Charlotte’s front door as she was preparing breakfast. She always tried to send her children off to school with something hot and nutritious – not always successfully. Justin and Katherine were both teenagers and did not appear to believe in eating anything at all. Most mornings they simply opened the refrigerator, grabbed the orange juice, took a swig, and then, offering their mother a desultory wave, disappeared for the rest of the day. Charlotte would be left with more French toast, pancakes and scrambled eggs than she could possibly eat. Usually she ended up scraping most of it into the re-cycling bin.

In fact, she was just on the point of throwing out her offspring’s untouched breakfasts when the SORU came a-knocking.

“Mrs Robinson?” The young woman who spoke was thin and angular with a set of teeth that appeared to have been borrowed from a horse. Her colleague, as round as she was straight, wore rimless glasses and resembled an extremely well-fed and intelligent domestic cat.

“That’s me!” Charlotte replied brightly. “Can I help you?”

“By authority of the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Act (2015)”, droned the young woman, reading from a small card, “I am empowered to conduct a mandatory interview and inspection of the domicile of you, Mrs Charlotte Elizabeth Robinson. Failure to fully co-operate with officers performing their duties under the Act is a criminal offense punishable by a $25,000 fine or six months imprisonment, or both. Do you understand?”

The young woman pushed past Charlotte and began inspecting the large, well-appointed property room by room, making notes on a digital clipboard.

“What’s this all about?” Charlotte asked the young woman’s rotund sidekick.

“Complaints have been laid about your excessive energy consumption, your failure to conserve and recycle, your unsound childrearing practices, alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity – we’re here to help.”

“Now just a minute!” Charlotte snapped. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but these accusations are outrageous. Who the hell told you all this?”

“I’m afraid I cannot tell you that”, the young man said primly, “the identity of complainants is privileged.”

The young woman strode into the kitchen and spotted the duo of as yet unscraped breakfast plates.

“Are we to understand that you were about to throw this food away, Mrs Robinson?”

“I was, yes.” Charlotte murmured, carefully examining the toes of her slippers.

“And are we to further understand that you have allowed your children to depart for their classes without an adequate breakfast?”

Charlotte nodded as the young woman tapped away furiously on her digital clipboard.

The young woman flicked the screen with her fingers and reviewed her notes.

“In this private dwelling I have detected five flat-screen televisions and four personal computers – a number well above the recommended maximum quantity of domestic electronic devices. In your bedside table, Mrs Robinson, there are a large number of prescription drugs – prima facie evidence of an unhealthy dependence on mood-altering medication. In your recycling bin there are a ridiculously large number of wine and gin bottles – prima facie evidence of a serious alcohol addiction. And, as my colleague noted upon entering the property, there is a large sports utility vehicle parked, in blatant contravention of the new regulations on automotive maximums, in your excessively large garage.”

“We’re selling the SUV”, Charlotte protested.

The young woman shot her a disbelieving glance.

“Our complainants also report that your children have been seen imbibing alcopops illegally in the local park, and that your daughter, though under the age of consent, has been engaging in lascivious behaviour with the 18 year old son of one of your neighbours.”

“For God’s sake!” wailed Charlotte, “They’re teenagers!”

“Under the Social Obligations and Responsibilities Act (2015) Mrs Robinson, you have a duty to raise your children according to the generally accepted social norms. Simply because you are a member of the upper-middle-class you are not exempted from those responsibilities and obligations.”

“In fact,” purred the corpulent young man, “it could be argued that the enjoyment of such obvious privileges carries with it an even greater obligation to behave responsibly. People like yourself should take care to offer the less fortunate members of society – beneficiaries for example – a positive role model.”

“Which brings us to the affair you’re currently conducting with Mr Benjamin Braddock.” The young woman touched her keypad and an extremely embarrassing image flashed up on the screen. “Does this sort of behaviour reflect a proper understanding of a wife and mother’s social obligations and responsibilities, Mrs Robinson?”

Charlotte blushed bright red.

“I will be recommending to my superiors that your husband’s taxes be doubled, Mrs Robinson. You’ll be attending drug rehabilitation and parenting classes. Your children will receive counselling. The SUV will, of course, be confiscated.”

This short-story was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 July 2012.