Abbott Budget and the Other Side of Christmas

Do Values Matter in Public Life?

It has been a trend in OECD nations for some time to see politics as a largely a-political exercise in budget management and fiscal policy settings. The only real policy debates are about Keynesianism versus free market, and how to divide up the goods delivered by the market. The rest is the nuance of social policy. This week’s budget blew that out of the water. Stripped back to bones it is a statement about the sort of society the corporate right want – essentially a first step in the march back to the social conditions and class relations of the nineteenth century. Values are back on the agenda.

How significant is this? Consider the following photograph. It is perhaps the most extreme example of what the values held by a ruling elite can do to a country. Taken by a NASA satellite at night, it shows the bright lights of South Korea and the bright lights of China. The dark gap in the middle isn’t water, it’s North Korea.

 

Photo sourced from Huffington Post

North Korea is one of only two remaining Communist monarchies, the other being Cuba. South Korea is a thriving industrial democracy in which approximately a third of the population identify as being born again Christians. China is a State directed capitalist economy with a unitary government. North Korea is, well, North Korea. There are an estimated 80,000 -100,000 Christians in concentration camps there who refuse to worship the revered leader. Go figure. In short, values determine policy, and policy determines whether the lights stay on or the lights go out. In many more ways than one, North Korea is in darkness.

In Australia we like to elect governments we think will give us the most consumer goods – Christmas goodies if you will. In all the marketing hype it is easy to forget that we give presents at Christmas to celebrate God giving his son so that we could be forgiven. The message of Christmas, apart from chocolate, is that it is better to love unconditionally, walk in forgiveness and live a generous life. Folk with a religious or (Western) traditional bent will be familiar with the nativity.

However there is another side to the Christmas story that is never publicly acknowledged and seldom referred to even in church; and that is the massacre of innocents. After the Eastern Maggi (they are the dudes on the camels with the frankincense and gold) visited the local provincial Roman dictator and told him they were seeking the Jewish boy king in response to the celestial signs and Jewish prophesies, things got a bit messy. Herod didn’t want prophetic Jewish kings rising up on his watch so he ordered the massacre of all boys three years and under in Israel. History relates the event but not the death toll because no one was counting. What we can reasonably infer is that Roman soldiers kicked down everyone’s door, tore toddlers from their mother’s arms, and murdered them. This atrocity failed in its object. Jesus and his family were already refugees in Egypt. The Bible records “A voice is heard in Ramah, Rachael weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because her children are no more.”

Herod continued to live into old age. This massacre could happen without censure because the Roman Empire didn’t exist to benefit its people. After-all, the majority of people were slaves. Only citizens had any rights at all, and only a very small percentage of people were citizens. In the later Roman Empire it was possible to buy citizenship, but it was prohibitively expensive. Rights and freedoms were things you bought with money or inherited based on your social class. The Empire existed for the fame, wealth and dignity, of probably less than one per cent of the population. Is any of this sounding familiar?

This budget has taken a step away from the message of Christmas. If goods are not shared, if opportunity is not shared, if freedom is not universal, if a society stops being about benefiting its members and starts being about the fame, wealth and dignity of the elite, bad things happen.

Some social systems are demonstrably worse than others. North Korea probably takes the prize for general lunacy. It really doesn’t matter though whether a country is a communist dictatorship, a fascist dictatorship, or a democracy in which the elite own the media, the education system, the health system, the phone system, the electricity system, the water supply, and dictate social policy. If society is about those at the top, that society will be in darkness.

Let’s remember Christmas and shed some more light.

Election 2013 - is there Life Under Abbott?

Why Labor and the Left Lost the Unlosable Election

Labor and the Left lost.

World heritage areas and national parks are no longer safe, marine reserves may be repealed, environmental protections will be gutted, renewable energy will be targeted in favour of coal, climate science has been junked, the Great Barrier Reef is in jeopardy; chainsaws are revving up for a final assault on Tasmania’s forest strongholds. Environmentalists and other truth speakers will be purged from the civil service.

Election night - Abbott wins the election for the Tories

This should have been the unlosable election for progressives. Under a Labor government Australia weathered the GFC better than any other nation in the OECD. We kept a AAA credit rating. We tackled carbon and the sky didn’t fall in, costs didn’t skyrocket and our industries didn’t close. In fact lots of people got jobs in renewable energy and our superfunds invested in them. True, Labor was taking water over 'boat people' but then Labor Prime Minister Kevin, in a tactically brilliant move, pulled the rug out from under Abbott and sent them all the PNG. So why did Abott win?

 

The talking heads have dissected every tactical error in the Labor campaign but ignored the deeper issues. As someone whose social circle includes political candidates for both the Greens and Family First; my lesbian neighbours, the politically correct, Liberal voting business men, and conservative evangelicals, I would like to offer an explanation.

Basically, Australian’s don’t like Wowsers. In the early days of settlement (OK invasion for those on the Left), we had Wowsers. They were usually religious people who harboured a great personal horror at the thought that someone somewhere might be having a good time. They preached against drinking, whoring and gambling, and exhorted husbands to be faithful. In short, they were regarded as a pain the arse.

No one listens to religious people much in Australia any more but nature abhors a vacuum and the Left has rushed to fill it. Let me put it this way:

What if urban working class blue collar red neck Australia doesn’t want multiculturalism - or at least object to the wholesale taking over of suburbs by defined ethnic groups? What if many Australians don’t want gay marriage? What if people actually want the freedom to speak their mind without being reported on, fined, reprimanded, or sacked? What if people don’t want homosexuality promoted as a life style choice through the school system? What if most people deep down would prefer Caucasions to remain a statistical majority? What if people wanted recidivist sex offenders jailed for life or shot? What if most Australians just don’t want more refugees or other migrants flooding into the poorer parts of crowded cities? What if some migrants' cultural values (wife burning and clitorectomy for example) are not in-fact compatible with our values? What if some people think that being a mother is as valid as being an employee? What if we all did become human at some time prior to passing through the birth canal? Is it OK to encourage mothers to have their babies instead of aborting them? What if closing down an entire industry in the top-end and pissing off a well-armed and hungry nation of more than 200 million people to satisfy some animal rights activists wasn’t very smart?  What if some people are really worried about their teenage kids if drugs are legalised? Are people who hold those views bad people?

According to the Left they are. And that’s why the Left lost.

It’s not so much that the educated middle classes have a different set of values from most Aussies. It is that they are utterly condescending and disparaging in the way they put their values forward. Forget dialogue. Forget respect. Having received an electoral thumping the Greens have just discovered that being ‘right’ doesn’t get you elected, being popular does. Forgot to listen - whoops!

The majority of Australians would relate to most if not all of what I just wrote. To them it’s common sense. For them there is a real sense that we are losing our country, losing our morals, and losing our way. Who is ‘right’ and whether these things are objectively true is beside the point.

To make the divide greater those who implement policy seldom have to live with the consequences of it. Blue collar workers have no choice but to live with, or be pushed out by, migrants with whom they compete for jobs. The latte set don’t have to put up with ethnic gangs, are safe in their suburbs, and would never send their kids to public schools filled with ethnic students. When the Northern Territory cattle industry was decimated no-one in the Australian Public Service lost their job.

This divide climaxed recently with the proposal by human rights lawyer and refugee advocate Julian Burnside that Australia’s entire refugee intake should be housed in the Island State of Tasmania. He reasoned that Tasmania started out as one big penal colony so why not send all of Australia’s refugee boat arrivals there? We are talking anywhere up to fifty thousand traumatised people in a State of half a million centred around two large towns. Having dropped that bomb shell Julian flew home to his wealthy urban life. Hmmm. Didn’t seem to have occurred to him that Tasmanians may not want to become again another vast penal colony, or that the social fabric is already stretched, or that we would need to build a whole new hospital, or that we might have spent a hundred years trying to break free from the past.

Tamania is home to many refugees from many places, as well as economic migrants like my parents who emigrated from the UK. Migrants are a welcome and valuable part of our community. There are practical limits though to any society's capacity to absorb large numbers of people from other cultures. Julian is entitled to his views – it’s just that he doesn’t live here and he didn’t ask anyone.  See here.

Not to be outdone local Greens leader Nick McKim then rushed off to his Party to endorse Julian’s suggestion as party policy. That’s OK, it’s just that he is a member of Cabinet and a leader in a coalition government that is ‘on the nose’ and, um, he didn’t consult with the community first.

So where to from here? If we want to build a civil society, whether from the left or the right we need to stop lecturing and start building bridges. We need to care as much about boorish beer swilling blue collar working people as we do about refugees. It’s going to be tough. The Green movement is going to have to abandon the Greens and their social agenda and campaign again as a-political patriotic Australians for the environment. The Left are going to have to BBQ some sacred cows and the right are going to have to grow up and realise that the 'market' isn't going to solve our problems on its own. The market is after all about maximising private profit which is not a benevolent activity.

The Greens can represent the far far left if they want to, but in so doing they need to accept the reality that eighty per cent of Australians will never vote for them. However eighty per cent of Australians still care about the environment and about climate change. Right now Australia needs a movement for the environment from across the political spectrum, not just a manifestation of the social left which is today's environmental movement.

Tag line: Julian Burnside Tasmanian refugee proposal, asylum seeker policy, Christine Milne election, Tony Abbott climate change, Labor election 2013, secondary boycott laws, SLAPP, Greens human rights, gay marriage, marriage equality,