Culture War Two: conservatives get high on their own supply

Extract from The Guardian

Jason Wilson

Culture war began as a cynical strategy but became a deeply held belief during the Howard years. Now it’s the only option for a government with no ideas

‘Culture war arrived in Australia as a wedge tactic borrowed from US Republicans.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

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Thursday 9 July 2015 15.12 AEST

Asia would think Australia “decadent” if the parliament votes to allow gay and lesbian marriages, according to Barnaby Joyce. But if there is any current in Australian life that might be ushering in national decline, it’s not same-sex couples who’d like to get hitched.
It’s the conservative elites – in politics and the media – who can’t think of anything better to do than wage an increasingly irrational culture war, typified by the latest cataclysmic “scandal” over Zaky Mallah’s appearance on Q&A a fortnight ago.

The dwindling band of obsessives who are on the frontlines see today’s culture war as unfinished business, the continuation of an agenda that’s been in play since the Howard years.
Culture war arrived in Australia as a wedge tactic borrowed from US Republicans. There, it was crafted in the late 1980s, as a way of shifting debate from the inequalities brought about by Reaganomics to the more advantageous terrain of morality and values. Culture war also allowed conservatives to substitute an internal enemy for the collapsed USSR.

In Australia, Howard used an adapted version to court the votes of blue collar conservatives – Howard’s battlers, who were promised “An Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things: about their history, about their present and the future”. The ABC “luvvies”, who had been tarnished by their association with Paul Keating, became the enemy.
What started as a cynical ploy has apparently become a deeply-held belief for some conservative politicians and pundits. The right are now high on their own supply, and some of them may never come down.
The current push against the ABC has been brewing since the Coalition lost the 2007 election, engendered by the bitter recriminations of conservatives after their defeat.
Gerard Henderson, for one, regretted that even though Howard stacked the ABC board, and authorised other adventures like dead-end inquiries into ABC “bias”, he did not sufficiently purge it, nor defund it, and therefore missed an historic opportunity.
“During Howard’s time there was considerable hype among the left about what were termed the culture wars,” Henderson wrote in 2008. “If such a cultural battle was ever engaged, Howard did not win it. His appointments to the ABC board did not change the national broadcaster’s prevailing leftist culture.”
The view that Howard squibbed it on the culture wars has since become received wisdom on the right, expressed in various ways by everyone from fringe-dwelling cartoonists to conservative law professors, junior IPA hacks to senior journalists. The view is that with Abbott in the saddle, now is the time to get square once and for all.
What they fail to consider is that perhaps Howard, in claiming victory back in 2006, understood some things that they don’t. That browbeating and starving the ABC could only be done within limits, lest it be seen as a wilful unravelling of the fabric of the nation. That the bloodlust of News Corporation pundits on that topic was partly informed by the commercial interests of their proprietor. That the prize in arbitrarily dismantling the arts could never be worth the ill-feeling which would ripple out through the community as a result.
A lot of people on the left have been worrying about the government’s increasingly destructive and authoritarian cast. But we should be attentive to the fact that the rebooting of old culture war obsessions is indicative of enormous weakness.
A prime minister who could articulate and defend his views under critical scrutiny would not avoid opportunities to communicate with the public. A confident conservative would not be whining to his party room about “lefty lynch mobs” on a TV show. Contrast Abbott’s behaviour with the footage of John Howard confronting David Hicks which has been doing the rounds.

David Hicks confronts John Howard on Q&A.

Indeed Joyce’s own non-appearance on Q&A, and the front bench “ban”, merely formalises what Abbott has been doing in practice for some time: avoiding the ABC.
In 2013, Abbott was trying to get elected, but he only appeared on 7.30 three times. In 2014, it was just the once. This year, he dragged himself on when his leadership was threatened.
He avoids these opportunities not just because of his own tendency to crack under pressure in interviews. (On this score, Katharine Murphy was right to point to the front bench ban as surreptitious media management – Abbott can’t rely on his ministers any more than he can himself.)
He avoids it because he’s out of ideas, just like the movement he leads. The most important elements of his slash and burn 2014 budget did not pass the Senate (if they had, universities would have copped it along with the other “elitists”). With the boats stopped and the carbon tax axed, what possible reason is left for Tony Abbott to be prime minister?

The switch has been flicked to culture war because there is nothing else there. It’s the only option for a government that has no reason for being, except the mere preservation and exercise of power.
Abbott keeps mashing the national security button, but the polls suggest he’s getting diminishing returns there too. And it’s possible he’s now undermining his own messages. After all, if the unprecedented hullaballoo about Q&A was really because Zaky Mallah is a threat to Australia, a reasonable observer may take one look at him – weed cap and all – and conclude that no genuine threat exists.
All the while, our most important problems are mishandled or ignored, from our relationships with our neighbours to the slow-motion catastrophe that is climate change.