>What can unite Walmart workers, university professors, the
>unemployed, retired workers, central-city youth, 'illegal' immigrants,
>miners, IT consultants, loan officers, automotive engineers, airline
>pilots, clerical workers. . . .?
Have said it before, will say it again. Economic insecurity is the obvious answer...
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
What the media missed
Melbourne Age 23/5/07
What political commentators declare to be prosperity can still seem like economic insecurity to voters, writes Tim Battin.
A GULF between the Government and the public in how each perceives a government's performance is one thing, but a gulf between media commentators and the public is quite another. The present perplexity of the fourth estate over the Labor Party's continued electoral buoyancy makes for an interesting study.
It was hardly surprising to see The Australian's screaming headlines about Labor's industrial relations platform following the ALP national conference. We have come to expect that from the Murdoch broadsheet. More revealing was the widely and oft-expressed view that Labor would take a hammering once the budget was brought down. When this situation failed to eventuate, at least one managing director of a polling company, commenting on his own company's research, was reduced to saying that the people will eventually get it right. Last Sunday's Insiders program on the ABC is another example of general (and seemingly genuine) puzzlement in our commentariat at what is going on.
So why does this gulf exist? Part of the explanation is that it has always been there, and has become more apparent once again. It was there in the three years or so after John Howard's - and Pauline Hanson's - victory in 1996 when senior journalists, along with other opinion makers (such as many in my own profession), simply didn't get what was fuelling the Hanson momentum. Among journalists, Margo Kingston was a notable exception.
Economic insecurity was the real issue. After trashing the Keating Government, the public was again given angst by the first and second Costello budgets. The commentariat was very slow to catch on to this and there was rarely any admission that material issues were of prime concern, partly because the late '90s was a period when the culture wars entered a new phase.
In other words, the Howard Government understood what was needed: some strategic backdowns on globalisation, a lot of money thrown at rural Australia, and fomenting cultural division in Australian society in the hope that attention could be diverted from the material, economic issues of state, over which division necessarily occurs. Labor assisted by blurring much of the difference it might otherwise have had with the Government, in both policy and rhetorical terms.
Meantime, the preoccupation of Liberal politicians was with establishing the Government's economic credentials. We might even allow ourselves to think that some of them believed that once the economic standing of the Government was established by sustained prosperity, they could come to rely less on the racism and other prejudices of the culture wars.
The trouble with this approach is that the Government has been too drawn in by its own party line (as ageing governments often are). It has come to believe its own propaganda about how good things are. The scandal is that many of the media's senior commentators have also swallowed the propaganda of prosperity hook, line and sinker.
The unemployment rate of 4.4 per cent owes itself almost completely to the rate of casualisation, which has near doubled in 25 years and now stands at a staggering 30 per cent of the workforce.
If most mortgagees don't know that real interest rates in Australia are among the highest in the world, they certainly know that nominal rates have increased. In a country that is supposedly so prosperous, the public has begun to ask: why is it that we struggle to educate our children, and why can't we bequeath a better physical environment than the one we inherited? These are matters that the media would normally refer to as sleeper issues.
Most tellingly of all, economic insecurity has resurfaced in the public's response to an industrial system of Howard's making. Already vulnerable to the relentless increase of overwork and unpaid overtime, Australians see that Howard's new system will exacerbate the problem. Collective bargaining rights are meaningless in a system that is prearranged to make collective bargaining ineffective. Despite their present disinclination to join a union - a trend that has now bottomed out - Australians generally express a gladness that unions are around.
And they know there is something nasty about Australian Workplace Agreements. Senior commentators don't or won't ask why we would need a special kind of individual contract to do what other individual contracts have done, but the public suspects there is something wrong with an arrangement that removes so many conditions of employment.
It is difficult to say how much of the commentariat's present stance is due to ignorance about the industrial legislation and how much it is due to the inability of contracted, individualistic and well-paid commentators, from the distance of their own orbit, to recognise the way the real world works.
It is expected that, sooner or later, governments will be sucked in by their own nonsense, but we should continue to demand that our commentators remain disinterested public intellectuals.
Tim Battin is senior lecturer in politics at the University of New England.