[lbo-talk] comments on Australia

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Sun Oct 10 16:27:21 PDT 2004



>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>[more on the Australian election from aut-op-sy]
>
>Thiago Oppermann wrote:
>
>>... 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. ...

Hmm, Attention Deficit Disorder, the leading public health menace in world politics today.

Carl ******************************************************

The country was pretty much divided down the middle on the war, just as it was on the election. Howard got less than 50% of the vote. His National friends got some more to add to the Coalition. That Family First Party is a worry. They're basically the tip of the Christian fundamentalist iceberg coming to the organized surface.

The ideological bottomline was that people down here voted for Howard because they see him as a strong leader who has gotten Australia on the radar of the world. Some people down here worry about that. There was the Australians don't "cut and run" rhetoric which got a lot of Ozaryians in a macho-nationalist tizzy, as Latham's Labor Party was going to withdraw Aussie troops from Iraq before X-mas.

Then of course, there was the economic bottomline. The Liberals kept hitting Latham with the "interest rates will rise!" club--even though Labor trotted out its own experts to say that that there wouldn't be any diff between the parties being elected vis a vis interest rates.

Still, fear and loathing of change--as usual--brought the conservative out in majority --not that much of a majority--of Aussie "souls".

Regards, Mike B)

------------------------------

===== "In the shadow of its own incomplete emancipation the bourgeois consciousness must fear to be annulled by a more advanced consciousness; not being the whole freedom, it senses that it can produce only a caricature of freedom-- hence its theoretical expansion of its autonomy into a system similar to its own coercive mechanisms."

Adorno, NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

_______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list