Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Australia's election will be fought — as it has been on all but one occasion — between two ageing white guys. (ABC News)
Elections are always promoted as crucial turning points by anyone with a vested interest in making them sound more compelling.
I mean, have you ever heard a politician on the stump (or a political journo with election copy to flog, or an industry group with a log to roll) say: "This election takes place at what historians will years from now recognise to have been one of this nation's less consequential junctures"?
Of course you haven't. So do please season what follows with salt, to taste.
But the elections this year in the two nations from which we borrowed to design our "Washminster" system of national government (from Britain we nicked the parliamentary system and prime minister, and from the US we borrowed the ideas of having an obstructive Senate and state governments with which the national one could incessantly bicker) both are proving to be significant flex points, and that has consequences for us.
The United Kingdom overthrew 14 years of Tory rule last month. And in November, the United States faces a choice between two paths of national identity so dramatically forked that barely anyone's bothering with policy announcements of any kind.
Demographers project that in about 2045, white, non-Hispanic Americans will no longer constitute the majority of the population.
The resignation of President Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris means the forthcoming poll is unavoidably suffused with questions of identity. The choice is literally between a white billionaire in his late 70s, and a biracial woman who was raised by a single mother and bussed to school as a child in the age of racial desegregation.
The forthcoming US election is unavoidably suffused with questions of identity. (Reuters: Stephanie Scarbrough (pool)/David Swanson)
There are policy questions, but many of them are kind of nested into this "forwards or backwards" question that Harris has quickly adopted as her campaign theme. Does the US paddle back towards a whiter population by expelling millions of immigrants as Trump wishes? To a protectionist, America-first foreign policy? To a regulatory stance in which the state reserves to itself the power to intervene in women's bodies? Or does it move forward to a candidate who looks like the American population increasingly does, even though that candidate has effectively bypassed what is normally an exacting democratic process to secure her party's nomination?
Obama, Biden throw support behind Harris at Democratic convention (Jade Macmillan)
Here in Australia, the identity question is far less dramatic. Our election will be fought — as it has been on all but one of the 47 occasions since Federation that Australians have voted to form a government in the House of Representatives — between two aging white guys.
But we are labouring through our own set of wrenching transitions.
The world we live in is changing, rapidly and confusingly
We are converting our energy system from fossil fuels to renewables. Our democracy is changing. Our Parliament has already stopped being a white male preserve, and is looking more every election like the population it represents. We're also gathering speed in the transition from a two-party system to… whatever this is.
Last month, Labor's Fatima Payman quit her party after crossing the floor during a vote concerning the status of Palestine. This week, the LNP's Queensland senator Gerard Rennick also headed for the crossbench, having failed to secure the number three spot on the party's forthcoming Senate ticket. He is suing everyone involved, but in the interim has set about registering his own party. It's to be called the Gerard Rennick People First Party, which no doubt has a nicer ring to its founder than the Gerard Rennick People Not Even Third mission of his previous gang.
The Senate now has 25 government senators, 30 Coalition senators, and a record crossbench of 21.
The inside story of why Senator Fatima Payman broke ranks with the Labor Party . (Producers Olivia Rousset, Robyn Powell and Kirstin Murray)
Our workforce is changing. The big growth areas are in the service and "care" sectors. This has involved paying for things we didn't previously assign a particular value. The NDIS, for instance, is often characterised as a new and ballooning national expense. Actually, the care of and support for Australians living with disability has always been costly; it's just that before the NDIS, much of this work was done for free, mainly by women, and not counted towards any government's bottom line.
And the world we live in is changing hugely, rapidly, confusingly. Conflicts abound. Tyrants proliferate. Certain global companies function more like nation states than commercial entities; they are based nowhere, and cannot be held accountable even though they reach directly into our lives and those of our children. COVID has taught governments around the world that they can't expect to rely on international supply lines of anything; recent years have brought an international wave of protectionism and populism, not assisted by the decline of the World Trade Organisation, once the global enforcer of free trade and now not much more than a suggestion box.
All of this is a lot of upheaval to handle at once. And in Australia, it's led to some counterintuitive political behaviour, which presumably contributes to the demonstrable loss of faith in mainstream politics. Labor — the party that opened the Australian economy to the world — doling out tax breaks to big business to accelerate green energy? The Coalition — the party of small government — fancying a crack at building publicly owned nuclear reactors?
Michelle Obama's speech shows how values can be co-opted
The only way political leaders can get people through pinch points like this is by articulating their values, communicating those values powerfully, and making decisions that are consistent with them.
If you're any good at this, you can survive even hectic periods of upheaval as a leader. And sometimes, the inattention of your adversary can even allow you to colonise one of the values traditionally thought to be "theirs".
Michelle Obama's speech espoused values that wouldn't have seemed out of place in a speech by George W Bush. (Reuters: Elizabeth Frantz)
This happens regularly, because inattention is rife in politics. How else did freedom of speech stop being the property of the left and start being the property of the right, to take one example? How did blue-collar workers drift from their traditional Labor roots to the Coalition? How did the Liberal Party — which formed under Menzies in the 1940s with the explicit and well-before-time involvement of powerful women's groups and a quota of party positions for women — wind up as the worst-performing party in the Parliament on women's representation?
Have a look at Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention for a truly masterful demonstration of values-snaffling. Ms Obama isn't a politician, and she doesn't give too many speeches. But her 20-minute speech to the DNC achieved about five very smart things.
She talked about her own parents through the frame of self-sacrifice and community:
"She [my mother] and my father did not aspire to be wealthy. In fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed."
She cited Kamala Harris's mother and her now-famous exhortation: "Don't sit around and complain. Do something!"
She employed the language of the Bible, citing "the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbour, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren."
She used humour instead of outrage to deflate the threat of Donald Trump: "I want to know… who's going to tell him? Who's going to tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be … one of those Black jobs?"
And in conclusion, she pivoted and took a pre-emptive bite out of her own side of politics:
"We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right … Don't complain if no-one from the campaign has specifically reached out to you to ask you for your support. There is simply no time for that kind of foolishness. You know what you need to do. So consider this to be your official ask. Michelle Obama is asking you — no, I'm telling y'all — to do something."
In those 20 minutes, this non-politician – whose inordinate degree of political power probably derives directly from the fact that she's never offered herself as a candidate and uses her words sparingly – pounced at and colonised the traditionally Republican values that Donald Trump has left unattended while off seeking vengeance and complaining about the disappearance of Joe Biden as an adversary.
In her speech, Michelle Obama referenced Donald Trump's 'Black jobs' line.
The lesson? You snooze, you lose. Amazing to think that Michelle Obama — demonised as an angry black woman when her husband first ran for office in 2008, and who religiously straightened her hair and grew vegetables in the White House until the nation got used to her presence — could take the stage 16 years later and effortlessly co-opt the kind of conservative values that would have sounded absolutely unremarkable in a speech by George W Bush.
Clear values: the only workable response to chaos
In Australia, it's all kind of up for grabs still. It's messy. The Opposition professes that its number one priority is ordinary Australians' cost of living, but it spends its time at the dispatch box pursuing the government over visas for Palestinians, giving Treasurer Jim Chalmers in his Curtin Lecture this week the opportunity to suggest, silkily, that Mr Dutton was more interested in the Middle East than middle Australia.
And while the Prime Minister — in this unbelievably awkward video, in which amid brain-bleed-inducing parliamentary bells he receives a walking "briefing" from assistant social services minister Justine Elliott on family violence — insists at the video's all-too-welcome conclusion that there is "nothing more important" than ending violence against women… well.
Is there? Really nothing more important? Why not get the briefing in a quiet place, then? Or not nickel-and-dime your own specialist advisory group on this very subject to defend commercial TV and sporting codes' profits against the welfare of women who pay the price of problem gambling?
Values, and their clear and consistent expression. It's the only workable response to chaos.
No comments:
Post a Comment