Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 10:37:50 +0930 From: David McInerney <borderlands at optusnet.com.au> To: aut-op-sy at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Hi Thiago
Living through much the same thing here in South Australia. It seems that the Family First Party (Australia's answer to the Taliban) did well here in the northern suburbs seats of Wakefield and Makin, enough to give the Libs victory in those seats, and also did well in Kingston, although a shift towards Labor and Greens enabled Labor to hold the seat. You say: "Australians are fuckheads" - well, I think it's just that they are becoming more like Americans, if we only consider the Evangelical vote, but outside of that, it seems that Howard was very clever in encouraging Australians, especially the younger 18-25 age group, to go into mortgages with the first home buyer's grants. We have a much more indebted electorate than under Keating. When the interest rates rise, as they soon will, I predict Howard to say "Peter Costello, it's your time now" and to leave Costello to deal with the anxieties of a fear-stricken electorate.
Interesting (but not unexpected) was the continuing decline of One Nation as fascism has been mainstreamed by Liberal-National Coalition govt. They are effectively dead, as their racist policies have been stolen by Howard and Family First has taken the homophobe vote. This is all very depressing for what it says about the success of neoliberalism as a 'governmentality' (in Foucault's sense).
David
Thiago Oppermann wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>The conservatives have just been re-elected with a swing of 3% in their
>favour, which delivers them a majority of 20 seats, a landslide. They have
>probably taken control of the senate. There is little good news for
>reformists: the Greens performed strongly, but were outpolled in several
>places by evangelical rightwingers, and overall they may have ended up with
>a solitary extra senate seat. Turn out in the compulsory election was high,
>and the donkey vote low.
>
>Right about now, I could really do with being told off for caring about
>this. People in the US should probably be concerned about it also, except
>that Howard has 'sound economic management,' unlike Bush. It is ominous that
>a government which has been implicated in a collection of scandals to rival
>Washington should have been reelected so convincingly.
>
>I suspect three things happened. One is that there is a compact of interest
>rate votes, which joins business on the one hand, which cuts wages, demands
>lower taxes, fewer services in the name of lower interest rates, and
>indebted workers on the other, who receive the lower wages and lose
>services, but in the absence of any political party arguing for increased
>taxation or higher wages, see that their only option for retaining some
>social product is to leave interest rates low. Add to this the fact that
>when Labor was in power real wages declined and interest rates shot up, and
>these heavily indebted workers, who began working in the late 80s to mid
>90s, make a rational, if short-sighted choice for the Liberal party. To
>this you can add the low cunning of the Liberal government's effort to
>engineer a housing price bubble.
>
>It's not really a case of backlash politics; that's never had much traction
>in Australia. Rather, large sections of the working class are thinking like
>bond traders, for material reasons. These people must either not understand
>what wise economic 'stewardship' means - ie. hacking services to pieces,
>putting a lid on growth - or, they believe what they have been told by the
>ALP and the Government, that the alternative is lower wages and tougher
>interest rates.
>Some commentators are already bemoaning the death of the fair go and the
>rise of self-interested 'fuck society' voters. This is naive. The interest
>rate thing works particularly well in a country with a strong nationalist
>egalitarian ethos and ideological commitment to property. The home owner,
>with debt, who works, and has children is shouldering his or her 'fair
>share' - or maybe even a little more than that - so it is only right that
>government services to layabouts be decimated. Egalitarianism has always
>been in fact an ideology of social differences. As for the repulsion to
>unions, the ALP is largely to blame for having coopted or destroyed the more
>militant ones, and as I said, the record of ALP-trades hall corporativism in
>the 1980s was a very dismal one for the working class.
>
>The second effect is that John Howard's politics have come to appeal
>strongly to the ultra-right, which had abandoned the party in the two
>previous elections for racist oppositionists. The swing of 3.3% in
>Queensland to Howard is almost identical to the swing of 3.1% against the
>One Nation Party. That effectively rendered a ALP victory impossible. The
>striking thing is that he recuperated this vote without losing the 'wet' or
>socially liberal portion of his vote. This takes some explaining, which
>brings me to the third factor
>
>The antiwar movement and the politics of conscience more generally simply
>failed to register. That is surprising if one remembers that 18 month ago,
>half a million people took to the streets in Sydney, and rallies of ten
>thousand people were happening every week in Australia. Opposition to
>government policy regarding the war, immigration and Aboriginal
>reconciliation (says it all, really) is in fact solid. Most people in
>Australia believe they have been repeatedly lied to by the government,
>regarding very serious issues. Yet they believe the patent lies about
>interest rates (there is no reason why the ALP policy would increase rates
>now more than the Liberals, and it is virtually certain that rates will
>increase no matter what.). Short of calling Australians fuckheads, which I
>have done a few times this morning already and leaves me just as confused, I
>think that what can be proposed is a variation on what Angela said last year
>about the big antiwar marches.
>
>Effectively, the organization of these marches served to demobilize
>Australian activists, and funnel their energies into the cul-de-sac that is
>'anti-imperialism'. The operation of parties attempting to harvest votes
>from mass dissent is essentially to railroad discontent towards the
>politically most neutral issues - dislike of the 'rat' John Howar, his
>lying, his nastiness, his lack of 'compassion', etc... - all of which puts a
>lid on the radical challenge posed by anti-war politics such as it may have
>been. Faced with the apparent weakness of Howard and surging popular
>discontent, the left of the ALP - the faction which alone was in a position
>to ring the bell on the interest rate issue - moves towards popular front
>politics (together with miscellaneous leftists), and target the racism,
>nastyness, etc.... But outrage is blinding. Without articulating how
>detention centres imprison those outside, for instance, refugee politics has
>about as much political traction as World Vision fundraisers. To make those
>links, however, would be highly damaging to the ALP, however.
>
>After all the work railroading dissent into easily handled forms, the ALP
>did what the ALP has always done, and mothballed its own lukewarm opposition
>to the war and objections to refugee policy. Vast amounts of work by a lot
>of very good comrades was thus simply squandered. This has been a manifest
>lesson in the pointlessness of popular frontism.
>
>I don't care one iota for the ALP - a party of racism, corporativism,
>opposed to working class organization and led by brainless third-wayers and
>neoliberals. But I do care for what this vote indicates, both in terms of
>the abysmal attitudes of the majority of Australians, and also in terms of
>the force of the material conditions underlying Australian conservatism.
>It's terrible news, and relatively important too.
>
>At least I get to see this madness taken to its logical conclusion. There is
>something satisfying about that, grim though the end may be.
>
>Thiago
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