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Posts Tagged Liberal Party
I want so desperately not to care. I wish I could look at politics and feel “this doesn’t affect me” like so many other normal people.
I care who wins the election. I care about health policy. I care about education policy. I care about environmental policy and transport policy. I care that millions of Australians – mostly Indigenous – live in poverty. I care that there are children who can’t read. I care that commited couples who want to get married can’t.
But what angers me the most is that each passing day of this election campaign I seem to care less and less.
With each day that goes by I feel more anger, that passes into dispair that passes into apathy. My disillusionment with politics is almost complete, my apathy almost final. Election campaign 2010 was the culprit; the final nail in the coffin of my passion for politics.
I guess it was naive of me, and I should have listened to the people who were much older than me when they tried to warn me. But I genuinely believed that government could be a force for the betterment of society. I believed that passionate people could show leadership and inspire a country to make itself better. Use the tools of government to make life for all people in Australia fairer and more equitable. My optimism shown to be completely foolish by the 2010 election campaign.
It was pretty tragic to see a sitting Prime Minister outed by his own party before the end of his first term. Rudd had lost his ability to sell, and there was no doubt that was causing problems. But I suspect Rudd was being frustrated from within: bad advice and wavering internal support for his policy positions would have made his job very difficult. The whole affair was made all the more tragic when he went public earlier this week to defend his achievements. Kevin Rudd made the most concise and convincing attack on Tony Abbott that has been made for the entire campaign. His appearance on Late Night Live filled me with something akin to joy. Finally someone from the ALP was articulating what needed to be said.
But it was short lived. The media turned his appearance into a soap opera. A will they/won’t they saga between Gillard and Rudd designed to play out in prime time news bulletins.
And all once again seemed hopelessly lost.
The media. To the pack of journalists (sic) who get paid to follow the candidates around, it’s not about you. It was never about you. The tax payers fund your junket. Politicians might occasionally not answer your questions. Sometimes they might run a little late, change their plans at the last minute and sometimes you might not get a policy document in advance. This may inconvenience you a little bit, you may have to work a little bit harder before filing. You may even get tired from standing up all day. Deal with it. Politicians aren’t there to make your job easy. They are trying to get reelected and sometimes journalistic scrutiny isn’t what they want.
So when you do get to ask them questions, you should scrutinize their policy. The tax-payer doesn’t fund your Australia wide travel so you can ask questions about why Tim isn’t campaigning with Julia, your there to ask questions of their policy, after all one of these people will be the leader of the country.
When Tony Abbott says. “Stop the taxes” you ask “What taxes? How will you recover the money?” when he says “Stop the waste,” you ask “To what waste are your referring, Tony? How much money is being ‘wasted’ and how do you propose we stop it?” and when he says “Stop the boats” you ask him “How do we stop the boats and why should we stop them?”
When they announce a policy you don’t ask them why their boyfriend isn’t there, you ask them about the policy.
Don’t complain about how this campaign has been dominated by distractions then report only on the distractions. You shouldn’t be making it harder for politicians to talk about issues. You should make it harder for them to be distracted from the issues.
Mark Latham is not an issue. Tim Mathieson is not an issue. Cabinet discussions are not an issue. The calluses on your feet are not an issue. Your boredom with the campaign is not an issue. Julia Gillard’s earlobes are not an issue and nor is what the Internet thinks of them.
Journalists of the press pack, editors, news directors and media moguls: political discourse in this country is broken and it’s all your fault.
So yes, Gillard is pretty uninspiring. Yes, Tony Abbott just scares me. The ALP and the Liberal Party look more and more alike. But that’s not it.
I think I lost faith in politics because of the media. Because ultimately, if anyone was in a position to raise political discoure in this country, it is the media. The media asks the questions. The media reports the news. All political discourse is mediated, the media can raise the level of this discourse.
I want to make this country better. I want those who are disadvantaged to be helped. I want those who do not have rights given rights. I want preserve the planet on which I live. But it’s all starting to feel a little hopeless. The whole system just isn’t working.
I’m not really angry, I’m not even surprised anymore. I’m just disappointed. I thought it could be different.
In a former job as a feature writer, I got to interview George Negus. It was an awesome gig, Negus was a hero to me who partly prompted my move into journalism in my late 20s. He was hosting an excellent program called George Negus Tonight (GNT) at the time, which aired before the ABC News and was inexplicably pulled despite giving the ABC its best ratings for that timeslot since Bellbird.
The timing of the work on that story couldn’t have been better. It coincided with Negus interviewing Malcolm Fraser, who Negus claims had him sacked from his job at the ABC in the 1970s (he later thanked Fraser for that because that led to his plum job on 60 Minutes). I had the pleasure of sitting in the studio watching these two great foes of Australian media and politics come together for a very enlighning chat.
News that Fraser quit the Liberal Party last December would come as no surprise to anyone who saw that May 2004 interview, in which Fraser outlined his discontent with the direction of the Liberal Party, particularly over asylum seekers and the Iraq War.
There are some interesting insights in this the interview about Fraser’s idea of what the Liberal Party should stand for and why he became a Liberal - the full transcript can be read her, but here’s a a few grabs. Be awesome if someone can find the video of it.
GEORGE NEGUS: Why… why a Liberal?
MALCOLM FRASER: Probably because I was at university in the late ’40s, up to 1951. I saw what the Labour Party was doing to Britain. I saw the nationalisation of British industry. And I really believed that they weren’t advancing Britain as they could, as they should’ve. I liked the idea of Menzies’s Liberal Party, a party where big business couldn’t tell the party what to do, where he quite deliberately divorced those who might provide funds from policy making.
GEORGE NEGUS: ‘Cause it was quite deliberately called the Liberal Party, wasn’t it? Not the Conservative Party.
MALCOLM FRASER: Well, Liberal because we’re willing to make experiments, we are determined to be a progressive, forward-looking party, in no way reactionary, in no way conservative.
… We were the first Western government to start saying, “Governments can spend too much money. We’ve got to spend less.” We established the Galbally Inquiry into post-arrival services for migrants, which, if you like, was the real substantive beginning of a multicultural Australia. This is a large country. We do have boundless plains, which our national anthem says we should share. And four or five thousand boat people a year would have been easily accommodated. The policies we put in place in relation to refugees from Vietnam I believe should still be in place. They’re not. There’s a much tougher attitude.
It’s very easy to scratch the redneck nerve in people. It’s easy to frighten ordinary people about something they don’t know.
GEORGE NEGUS: Many people listening to you talk now would be amazed. That this isn’t the Malcolm Fraser they thought was prime minister of Australia. Why do people think that you wouldn’t say these sort of things?
MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I know we had a party room debate…
GEORGE NEGUS: You’re flying in the face of your own party, flying in the face of John Howard…
MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I was flying in the face of my own party perhaps when I made sure that we opposed apartheid. From the very first moment I came into office, there was a party room debate and I saw a few people getting up, “Why are we not supporting our white cousins in South Africa?” And I was totally offended by the idea that a white minority should keep a very, very large black majority in a position of political impotence.
GEORGE NEGUS: Have you always been an antiracist, or have you become one?
MALCOLM FRASER: I think I have, but, you know, in my early days I probably wasn’t aware of racist issues. Um… at Oxford, you start to be aware of them. I don’t think I was aware in Melbourne.
Self-indulgent Postscript – I made an arse of myself at the ABC studios that day. When I met Negus, one of my few idols, he immediately greeted me by name without anyone introducing us. My delight in him knowing who I was turned to horror when I realised I was wearing a name tag from a PR lunch I attended earlier that day, which said David Bonnici Melbourne Weekly.
Later, after Malcolm Fraser finished the interview I followed him to get a quick quote about Negus from him. As we were walking and talking West Wing style I thought we were heading back to the makeup department only to follow him straight to the toilet urinal.
So, Rudd is struggling in the polls? This is hardly surprising considering he was elected on a platform of not being the other guy. We didn’t really know what he stood for then, we don’t really know what he stands for now. Once the Coalition got their shit together, they were always going to gain ground.
We know he stands for action on climate change … kinda. Only enough so as to not piss anyone off. We know he stands for a more humane asylum seeker policy. Sorta. As long as that more humane policy doesn’t appear to be ‘weak’ on ‘border protection’. (How the right keep framing the debates so well will never cease to amaze me.)
And in being so careful not to step on anyone’s toes he has alienated everyone. And for what? The people he tries so hard not to offend were likely never to support him anyway. Instead he comes across as gutless, do nothing, and direction-less.
We know he hasn’t had the easiest Senate to deal with. Working with the Coalition would seem a lot easier than trying to get Family First and The Greens to agree to agree with each other, let alone the ALP. But it’s weak. It waters down their policy and closes the gap between the ALP and The Coalition even further, when there really wasn’t a lot of margin there to play with. Rudd has acted in government like he acted in a campaign. He has had three years to govern and he doesn’t really seem like he has done much of it.
The ALP loses credibility when discussing the issues and looks weak when discussing the process.
That said, I hope Labor gets a second term and an easier Senate to negotiate. The Greens holding the balance of power in their own right would bring the debate back towards the left, and I don’t think that’s at all a bad thing for the country or for the government.
With more certainty in the Senate, perhaps Rudd won’t fold so easily. A stronger ETS policy, more ‘revolution’ in their education and health policy, a genuinely humane approach to asylum seekers and real action on closing the gap with indigenous Australians.
If Rudd wants to win this election, he now has an uphill battle to fight. He needs to sell a vision, he needs to stop playing so ’safe’ and sell a vision of Australia. Stop being so process driven, and chase after the policy and sell it to Australia. Of course, this assumes he has a vision that he’s struggling to sell. Which I am not totally convinced he has.
But if you’re running out of reasons why he deserves another chance and a second term, remember: he’s not the other guy. Worked for him last time.
But just quietly, I’m kinda hoping Julia books her ticket to Mars.
On the plus side, voting in this year’s federal election just got a little easier.
AN Abbott government would buy three unmanned spy planes to use as weapons in its pledge to turn around illegal boat arrivals.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft – costing between $40 million and $100 million each – would provide early detection of asylum seekers.
Because that is the rational thing to do. Spend $300 million on planes to catch leaky boats. In fact why stop at planes? I think we need surveillance satellites, the full resources of the navy and the air-force and the army and while we’re at it LET’S BUILD A GIANT WALL!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: What happened to political discourse in this country where refugees are talked about like pests?
This year will be the first federal election where I will be able to exercise my democratic right to decide if I’d rather a turd sandwich and a giant douche, and I feel like it is a really bad election to pop my voting cherry with. I would have liked the 2007 election. Government change, revolution, excitement. Howard lost his seat after almost 12 years. Sure, the man we replaced him with turned out to be a giant douche, but we didn’t know that for sure at the time.
But this year, we have Rudd vs Abbott. We have seen them both in government before and they both stink. Hooray for democracy!
Also in that same story: Abbott can’t think of any reason not to sell uranium to India.
Yesterday, Tony Abbott crossed a line where he’s now offering policies that actually sound like the premises of dystopian sci-fi movies.
This has the makings of a great elevator pitch to James Cameron:
TONY Abbott has proposed banning the dole for people under 30 in a bid to entice the unemployed to head west and fill massive skill shortages in the booming resources sector.
Imagine, Jim: Australia, 2012 – everyone under 30 has been enslaved and sent to underground mines in the desert. Only one man (Colin Farrell) has the courage to take on the system and live.
Next, I’d like to hear Tony proposing that we convert old people into a sinister but nutritious food product for an overcrowded world.
Anyways, which chilling vision of the future do you think the coalition should the Coalition should incorporate in their next policy announcement?
I started reading a Liberal Party press release this afternoon, impressed that the party machinery would comment so quickly on an international tragedy of which most Australians are probably unaware:
The Coalition is concerned by reports of a severe tropical storm that has devastated parts of India and Bangladesh.
Reports that more than 100 people have been killed and more than 100,000 homes destroyed indicate the severity of the storm, which will cause severe hardship for the people in the region.
The Coalition extends its sympathy to those affected by the storm and to any Australians with family or friends in the area affected by the storm.
Wow. Top stuff, Libs. But then I made the mistake of reading the next paragraph:
The Opposition urges the Rudd Government to offer its support and to provide any necessary assistance to family members living in Australia who have relatives in the storm zone.
Never let an opportunity pass to take a swipe at the government, even if that opportunity presents itself in the form of death and destruction; get in first with the compassion so you can implicitly charge the others with having less. Stay classy, Libs.
Perhaps members of the Liberal party should talk to each other before they open their mouths about refugee, immigration or population policy.
Here’s opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison saying the other day that the number of family reunions will be reduced if he has anything to do with it:
Tony Abbott’s Coalition will cut net migration levels if it wins government, in a bid to stop Australia’s population reaching its predicted size of almost 36 million in 2050.
[...]
[Scott] Morrison said the Coalition would support skilled migrants coming, but was likely to cut other elements of the program, including family reunion.
And here’s opposition citizenship spokesman Gary Humphries attacking the government for reducing the number of family reunions:
Concern is rising about the effect of the escalating number of unauthorised boat arrivals on family reunion programmes for refugees already in Australia.
[...]
“The greater the number of boat arrivals visas, the smaller the number ofvisas available to the family members of refugees and other humanitarian arrivals,” Opposition citizenship spokesman Gary Humphries said today.
Just like the population smokescreen, it suits the Libs to talk about boat arrivals in terms of lovely-sounding families and togetherness rather than in terms of the plight of the people on those boats and whether we do or don’t want to help them. Now all they need to do is say the same things when opening their mouths.
@TurnbullMalcolm: I have announced I will not recontest Wentworth at the election this year
People like Malcolm Turnbull, no matter their political leaning, have an awful lot to offer Australian politics: intelligence, experience, drive, passion, and a genuine desire to make this country a better place. If more people like Malcolm Turnbull stood up and gave it half the crack he did, this nation would be greater for it.
However, people like Malcolm Turnbull, no matter their political leaning, also display behaviours that prevent them from working effectively within the political system: impatience, ego, excessive individuality, hastiness, hot-headedness.
Maybe the two sets of traits are intrinsically linked — impatience and ego generate drive and passion which in turn generate hastiness and hot-headedness. Perhaps people like Malcolm Turnbull are simply unsuited to working within the world of party politics. Such ferocious alpha individuals as Turnbull are born leaders and Turnbull was determined to lead and settle for nothing less. Thing is, the characteristics that make him such a great leader in the non-political sector are exactly the same characteristics that brought about his undoing in the political world.
And that’s a shame because people like Malcolm Turnbull are sorely needed in Australian politics whether they’re leading a major political party or plugging away studiously on the back bench.
A common complaint of the Australian parliamentary game is that it’s merely a case of Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, a contest between two parties who largely resemble one another in both policies and methods. Certainly, this has been the case for federal politics in recent years – Rudd was at pains to present himself as a ‘fiscal conservative’, and emphasise his religiousity and populism (see his comments re: the Bill Henderson sage, for instance). On the other side, Brendan Nelson and Malcom Turnbull were ‘moderates’, who both were supposed to represent ‘generational change’. To this game, the Coalition has now said basta, electing Tony Abbott as leader. He in turn has elected a shadow cabinet comprised of rightist demagogues and old discards from the Howard era. The dust is yet to settle on this one, but I think there are a few things to be considered.
