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It's almost six months since the federal Coalition,
much to its own surprise, was returned to office after winning one more
seat than it did in the 2016 election. Yes, time flies when you are
having fun.
Though just how much fun the Government is having is a
moot point. It's all going pretty well at one level, particularly since
Labor is still licking its wounds.
But there are problems within the Nationals, and
between the Nationals and the Liberals. And, well, not everybody has a lot to do.
On election night, Scott Morrison said the election was a great victory for the "Quiet Australians".
"A
fair go for those who have a go," for those who make a contribution and
don't just seek to take, as historian Judith Brett observed.
Writing in
The Monthly recently, Brett ruminated on the similarities between Morrison's Quiet Australians, Howard's battlers and Menzies' Forgotten People.
"This
question is about rhetoric as much as demography," she wrote, "about
how Liberal leaders project their followers and the symbolic resources
they draw on.
"Each is implicitly contrasted with noisy minorities who get all the attention."
But
the very idea of Quiet Australians and noisy minorities does raise some
interesting questions — and sends some disturbing signals — about the
virtues of being quiet, and just who represents a "noisy minority" and
who represents a legitimate community view.
Staying quiet absolves the community of responsibility
On Friday, for example, the Prime Minister promised a
crackdown on environmental groups which campaign against businesses that provide goods and services to mining companies. Too noisy!
GetUp! is another group who are clearly too noisy as far as the Government is concerned.
But
tied up somewhere in the message about Quiet Australians is a message
that not getting involved in politics, and just getting on with your
life, is fine.
But that absolves a large part of the community from feeling any responsibility for what might be being done in its name.
And
it creates disconnects when politicians talk about ideas in the broad,
and as they relate specifically to particular communities.
Implicit
in the conservative hostility to the 2017 Uluru statement from the
Heart, calling for an Indigenous "voice to the Parliament" is the idea
that Indigenous people would get some sort of special treatment that
wasn't available to everyone else. An example of a "noisy minority"
getting rewarded
The Morrison Government has progressively downgraded what "The Voice" might potentially be.
This week Indigenous Affairs Minister
Ken Wyatt set out a process for providing a legislated voice for Indigenous people to local, state and federal governments.
The co-chair of the panel to "co-design" this process is Professor Marcia Langton.
She
observed to the ABC this week that there are about a million Indigenous
people in Australia, possibly a third or living in remote and rural
Australia, "and most of them have very poor relationships with
government".
"By abolishing [the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commission], the only architecture for people to
represent their views was abolished", she said.
"It's gone. That happened over 10 years ago and we've had nothing since."
Pleas fall on deaf ears
While
issues about onstitutional recognition and the grander ambitions of the
Uluru statement will continue to be fought over, this is the problem
for Indigenous people right now.
The Scotdesco Aboriginal
community in South Australia has run out of water: the thing which
threatens to happen to larger towns and cities if the drought continues,
has already happened in this small community on the edge of the
Nullarbor Plain.
It can truck in water, but because it sits 15
kilometres beyond a boundary for subsidised water cartage, it has to pay
$1400 a load for water, four times what residents within the boundary
pay.
The chief executive of the community corporation, Robert
Larking, says the cost is crippling but repeated urgent calls to state
and federal government for assistance — just to extend the boundary —
have fallen on deaf ears, despite the support of the local state MP.
"We are now in a desperate situation," he says. "There is no main potable water source here for the community."
It
is hard not to wonder whether something would have happened for this
community months ago if it had a way of being more effectively heard; if
they were farmers, rather than a tiny community trying to be
self-supporting through selling saltbush.
How good is Australia?
The
interim report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care was also released this week with its "shocking tale of neglect" in the system.
The sector says it needs an extra $1.3 billion this year to guarantee service quality.
Asked on Melbourne radio on Friday how he could say
"how good is Australia?" in light of the Commission's findings — and a
Productivity Commission report highlighting terrible problems in the
mental health field — Scott Morrison, said "well look, Australia is
always a great country".
Australia was a good country "because we're prepared to acknowledge where we get things wrong, not buck pass".
But,
as is the case with drought funding, when pressed about whether the
Government would actually move to spend money quickly to start fixing
the problem, you could almost hear the subtext of the Prime Minister's
message: "not if it endangers the surplus in the next few months".
Pressed further, he agreed the Government would act, in some way, before Christmas.
The
depressing thing for anyone who has reported on aged care for any
period of time is that there is nothing new about this chronic lack of
funding.
This should hardly have come as a shock to Government.
And it is, after all, the current government has been in office for six
years, no matter how many prime ministers it may have had.
There are two groups who aren't being quiet at all
Aged
care facilities form the backbone of many communities, including one in
the small town of Murchison, in Victoria, south west of Shepparton.
This
week, the community run DP Jones Nursing Home, was placed in
administration. Its expenses last year were $3.5 million, its income
$3.1 million.
There are signs that it is just one of many
small regional nursing homes in equally desperate straights and, in
towns already suffering from the drought, their closure doesn't just
mean the communities' elderly being moved further away, but the loss of
jobs which are helping to sustain the drought-ravaged economy.
The
difference with Murchison though, is that they have been kicking up a
big stink, pressuring their local member Damien Drum, and ultimately
forcing a pledge from deputy prime minister Michael McCormack when he
visited Shepparton late in the week.
So there are Quiet Australians, and not so Quiet Australians.
Here are two groups who aren't being quiet at all.
Both
of them represent stories about the crossover between the big national
political fights, and the impact on people on the ground.
And whether it is at the local level, or the national policy debate, government — and politics — are failing them.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
