the abolition of ATSIC was outrageous. in Australia we have a tradition of (occasionally) prosecuting political corruption and/or nepotism/cronyism in the federal and criminal law courts where there’s is overwhelming evidence of wrong doing by elected and unelected officials. i’ve never heard anybody call for the abolition of the Australian Federal Parliament in spite of the long standing evidence of grey corruption. The influence of the fossil fuel industries continue using nothing more democratic than money and political lobbying to for example, torpedo the long standing Labor policy ambitions and platforms around the need for a new code of environmental protection in light of the disfunction of the existing EP Act and the curve ball Climate Crisis brings to all ecological issues for just one example. another example of grey corruption everywhere would be developers at the municipale and state levels of government. nobody says let’s dissolve the constitution because developers are out of control.
I think the near-absence of Coalition Lower House MPs from much of Australia's metropolitan areas is as salutary a sign as any of their defeat in the Culture Wars. It is, I think, closely related to their unknowledgeable policy stances in relation to anything relating to the employment and professional aspirations of Australian women.
You're right to point out the absurd asymmetry. For all the noise, the so-called culture war has never had a serious opposition. Just a pack of Murdoch-fuelled reactionaries shouting at clouds while most people are trying to pay rent and get through the week. It’s a fight largely imagined, kept alive by columns and talk shows, not any organised cultural left. You can’t win a war that no one else is fighting.
The bigger issue is that their terrain keeps expanding. While they lose skirmishes over wind farms or drag queens reading to kids, they succeed in dragging the political conversation sideways. While the right fixates on Welcome to Country or the latest imagined outrage, the Government quietly keeps housing in the hands of investors, waters down climate ambition and deepens our dependency on a decaying US empire through AUKUS.
These cultural flare-ups are not really about belief. They are insulation. They create theatre while the real business continues, untouched. A culture war doesn’t need to be won. It just needs to be endless, so it can keep masking the actual war being lost: against inequality, environmental collapse and basic decency.
The right looks unhinged. The so-called left looks increasingly hollowed out. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left standing in the ruins, wondering how we got drafted into a circus we never asked to attend.
Such a great post, John. Lots to chew over. I think it's true that our right wing fringe is smaller, but they're also fringier for another reason and I think that's because of the combination of compulsory and ranked choice voting insulates major parties from the need to move apart in order to placate the extremists and/or get out the base. Or rather, it *would* provide insulation, if certain major parties were not braindead idiots, so let me say that rather it means major parties do not gain anything if they do move their platforms towards the fringe. This cushions the impact that any fringe on either side can expect to have on our politics and society, and forces incrementalism as the order of the day, and cheers to that.
The USA:Australia difference is that we don't have the mass of billionaires and we do have compulsory voting with a modern electoral system. Then the voting breaks down to similar thirds I suspect if the US had compulsory voting.
I wish that Albo was a more effective and clearer communicator, who could have dismissed the culture wars with disdain. I think that would have been highly effective. Still, a) what do I know, I'm not a pollie, and b) it's the least of my many and varied criticisms of the man.
I supported the Voice, even though it was a pig in a poke, but I would have liked to have been shown some examples of recent legislation which would have been improved if indigenous input had been considered. (Perhaps someone did, and I wasn’t paying attention!)
the abolition of ATSIC was outrageous. in Australia we have a tradition of (occasionally) prosecuting political corruption and/or nepotism/cronyism in the federal and criminal law courts where there’s is overwhelming evidence of wrong doing by elected and unelected officials. i’ve never heard anybody call for the abolition of the Australian Federal Parliament in spite of the long standing evidence of grey corruption. The influence of the fossil fuel industries continue using nothing more democratic than money and political lobbying to for example, torpedo the long standing Labor policy ambitions and platforms around the need for a new code of environmental protection in light of the disfunction of the existing EP Act and the curve ball Climate Crisis brings to all ecological issues for just one example. another example of grey corruption everywhere would be developers at the municipale and state levels of government. nobody says let’s dissolve the constitution because developers are out of control.
I think the near-absence of Coalition Lower House MPs from much of Australia's metropolitan areas is as salutary a sign as any of their defeat in the Culture Wars. It is, I think, closely related to their unknowledgeable policy stances in relation to anything relating to the employment and professional aspirations of Australian women.
You're right to point out the absurd asymmetry. For all the noise, the so-called culture war has never had a serious opposition. Just a pack of Murdoch-fuelled reactionaries shouting at clouds while most people are trying to pay rent and get through the week. It’s a fight largely imagined, kept alive by columns and talk shows, not any organised cultural left. You can’t win a war that no one else is fighting.
The bigger issue is that their terrain keeps expanding. While they lose skirmishes over wind farms or drag queens reading to kids, they succeed in dragging the political conversation sideways. While the right fixates on Welcome to Country or the latest imagined outrage, the Government quietly keeps housing in the hands of investors, waters down climate ambition and deepens our dependency on a decaying US empire through AUKUS.
These cultural flare-ups are not really about belief. They are insulation. They create theatre while the real business continues, untouched. A culture war doesn’t need to be won. It just needs to be endless, so it can keep masking the actual war being lost: against inequality, environmental collapse and basic decency.
The right looks unhinged. The so-called left looks increasingly hollowed out. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left standing in the ruins, wondering how we got drafted into a circus we never asked to attend.
Such a great post, John. Lots to chew over. I think it's true that our right wing fringe is smaller, but they're also fringier for another reason and I think that's because of the combination of compulsory and ranked choice voting insulates major parties from the need to move apart in order to placate the extremists and/or get out the base. Or rather, it *would* provide insulation, if certain major parties were not braindead idiots, so let me say that rather it means major parties do not gain anything if they do move their platforms towards the fringe. This cushions the impact that any fringe on either side can expect to have on our politics and society, and forces incrementalism as the order of the day, and cheers to that.
The USA:Australia difference is that we don't have the mass of billionaires and we do have compulsory voting with a modern electoral system. Then the voting breaks down to similar thirds I suspect if the US had compulsory voting.
I wish that Albo was a more effective and clearer communicator, who could have dismissed the culture wars with disdain. I think that would have been highly effective. Still, a) what do I know, I'm not a pollie, and b) it's the least of my many and varied criticisms of the man.
I supported the Voice, even though it was a pig in a poke, but I would have liked to have been shown some examples of recent legislation which would have been improved if indigenous input had been considered. (Perhaps someone did, and I wasn’t paying attention!)