It is hard to remember a federal election which offered less hope for change, less political ambition, and a less inspiring pair of leaders for the major parties.
It’s going to be a long five weeks but let’s start with my top five disgraceful, depressing, worrying and just plain weird things the election campaign has thrown up so far.
Top of the list is the fact that our politics have reached a point where the promise to sack 40,000 workers (that is, 40,000 actual people with families) can be presented as an election sweetener. Not just anybody, mind you, but public servants (as in, those employed to serve the public rather than themselves). This from the party which is prepared to sacrifice the planet in order to protect the jobs of the 30,000 folk directly employed by the mining sector. Trump-lite, it is not hard to see where this comes from. Fortunately, Australia doesn’t suffer from the longstanding ideological opposition to government that fuels Trump’s initiatives. Quite the opposite, in fact. The 40,000 workers Dutton plans to sack include those employed in order to correct a decade of cuts to the capacity of government and the running down of services in aged care, child care, health, disaster relief, social welfare and more. You could certainly claim that the acknowledged need for this corrective action was a key factor in Morrison’s defeat in the 2022 election.
Next, even though both parties have framed this as the ‘cost-of-living-election’, there hasn’t been a peep about JobSeeker. Despite the widespread expectation that a newly elected Labor government would increase the JobSeeker rate in 2022, and notwithstanding their promise to ‘review’ it over the first year of their term, there has been no significant change to the JobSeeker payment over their full term, and no indication of any improvement if they were to be re-elected. Both parties parrot their concern for ‘those doing it tough’, and protecting ‘the most “vun-rable” in our community’, but neither has found the courage (or, indeed, the decency) to challenge the longstanding bullshit about the unemployed being undeserving, or dole-bludgers, or simply making a ‘lifestyle choice’.
Third is the ‘war on woke’. Just how did we get to this? Firstly, how many of those politicians who like to spray this word around would have a clue about what the word actually means, where it comes from, and why it achieved its initial currency? Secondly, how did a word built on a history of tolerance and acceptance come to be such an effective weapon for socio-cultural and political abuse? Thirdly, why have the political media allowed the political class to deploy that word in such a transparently cynical manner — as an all-purpose means of dismissing the need for analysis, explanation or debate. For the politicians, it has all become so easy. Hear a proposal you don’t like, label it as woke, and your job is done. Finally, and probably a criticism that is less happily accepted, is the manner in which the ‘progressives’ have played into the hands of that kind of conservative stereotyping by the manner in which they have prioritized (or not) the concerns requiring attention and political action.
Lumbering in at Number Four, there is Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots! Words fail me here (as indeed they did for Palmer when he misspoke at their launch event and introduced them as The Trumpet of Parrots — you can’t make this stuff up). I’ll leave it to the reader to do this for me.
And finally, at Number Five, we have the spectre of Donald Trump, silently looming behind just about every policy announcement. George Megalogenis has framed this as the ‘Trump election’ in his April essay for The Monthly, and it is hard to disagree with this assessment. While the Australian electorate is apparently unimpressed by Trump personally, his politics are not without some domestic resonance. And his actions will clearly have consequences for us. The geo-political problem he represents is especially tricky. How, and indeed whether, Australia should respond to him is not all that clear. That isn’t helped by the fact that our politicians have been incrementally shorn of their courage as their ambition and vision has shrunk over these last two decades. Australia is not going to stand up to Trump like Canada has done. Initially, the government seemed to believe that if they stood really still Trump wouldn’t notice them. They have modified their approach a little since then. As for Dutton, he appears to have decided that the best thing to do is to go along with the playground bully for the moment (‘yeah, right, like he said’), but with some occasional reservations. We will see how that works out if he gets elected.
In the end, what Trump is doing to his country constitutes a deliberate attack on the norms of democratic government. Sooner or later Australian political leaders must directly, strenuously, and unequivocally express their opposition to this objective if they are not to embolden those who might launch a similar attack here. Even within the diminished politics of our day, you would have to hope there are some lines we won’t cross. A federal election offers a good opportunity to make that clear.
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