Oh, the Dumb Things
Michael Connors
An edited version of this now appears on newmatilda.com October 16, 2007
In October’s edition of The Australian Literary Review (2, 9, pp. 3, 14-16) journalist Paul Kelly offers an intellectual road trip, riffing on the theme of “The Lucky Country”. Kelly devotes two thousand words too many to an exploration of “second rate” Australian public intellectuals’ incapacity to appreciate the Australian electorate’s genius in electing a first rate political leadership. This is such a hackneyed theme (elitism of the intellectual class, not the genius of the Australian electorate) that it would be surprising if Kelly had anything fresh to say. As it turns out, he doesn’t, unless the spectacle of a journalistic “national treasure” delivering a home-song eulogy to prime ministers Hawke, Keating and Howard counts as such.
In his version of the “The Lucky Country” Kelly argues that current Australian prosperity (that is the emerging American style wealth-divide) is the fruit of successive Labor and Liberal party political acumen, epitomised by their respective management of the US alliance and their differential, but consonant, agenda of working with Asia, particularly China.
I would say that apart from the brazen act of currency deregulation under Hawke in 1983 and that act's related consequences, Australian prosperity has been delivered in spite of government policy, in the same manner as a randomly thrown dart at an inventory of stock exchange listed companies is better at picking winners than the Mercedes-chasing stockbroker selling his expertise. Truly a nation of gamblers. The rest of the Australian Story has been about management, packaging, marketing and keeping the game on the road.
In Kelly's Eastern Suburbs – detour via Canberra road trip, the vantage point is not the slum, the junkie’s needle point exchange, or the sweat of an AWA, rather it is the six-lane highway of national achievement; a vantage point, he claims, that the precocious “second- raters” of the aristocratic left have ignored in their supposed rush to condemn the Australian electorate as inane and immoral.
Kelly’s derivative self-denying ironic title,“The Lucky Country" - following the title of Donald Horne's famous 1960s book - should have been a warning to the literary editor that this was going to be an article of imprecise hackdom. Kelly lives up to the dull title. In what counts as the intellectual equivalent of grievous bodily harm, he takes a handful of thinkers as representative of the total sum of anti-Howard intellectuals, and then narrows the field further by concentrating on an easily beratable, shrill and fanciful David Marr. Marr's over the top statements about Howard’s Australia in his Quarterly Essay "His Master's Voice: the Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard", are easy enough to dismiss. Kelly paints Marr as a kind of Jeremiahic Bertrand Russell in the antipodes, minus the math. All this leads Kelly to a lamely ironic twist: that Horne's supposed depiction of a country with second rate politicians and first class intellectuals has been reversed.
Kelly is right to point out that some ridiculous analogies have been doing the rounds among the intelligentsia (that there are homologies between pre-Nazi Germany and contemporary Australia), but he fails to then offer a single word about the Right’s own disingenuous mob of time-servers, Kelly’s News Limited colleague Janet Albrechtsen or the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt. Is there some unwitting aesthetic judgement on Kelly’s part that these people should not be taken seriously as intellectuals? They have been singing the praises of first rate political leadership for a decade. Is he jealous of their foresight?
What Kelly’s atrociously selective piece does is to suggest that public intellectuals (meaning "Howard-haters") are so far removed from the ordinary concerns of life that the necessarily pragmatic and compromised nature of politics that supposedly delivers national prosperity and relative domestic and regional cohesion are seen by them to be contemptible.
There is certain hubris in Kelly’s rant about second-rate public intellectuals: he should have declared his own interest as a fellow traveller. “The Lucky Country” marks a low point in his political journalism, an altogether too confident declaration of his undiluted national-interest account of the sublime art of Australian compromise.
While Kelly’s decades of access to the corridors of power may have led to the production of a certain banal commentary, he is not completely incapable of the lyrical insight of his namesake troubadour. Just as clichés capture certain truisms, Kelly’s journalistic writing, as do all journalistic writings, reflect some wilful zeitgeist - the first draft of history. In this instance that zeitgeist now has it that Australia has enjoyed national prosperity and relatively moral and sincere leadership. Kelly’s imaginative leap is to turn Donald Horne’s devious title into a homily. Australia is lucky because Howard is incapable of duplicity and mendacity on the big questions – so Kelly believes. Rarely has the first draft of history looked so needy of revision.
Showing posts with label Howard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Howard. Show all posts
October 7, 2007
September 15, 2007
Juvenelia: Australia and the United States
The Imperative Grammar: Australia and the United States
Michael Connors
During the Sydney APEC Summit in early September the Howard administration and Bush administrations inked the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, deepening Australia’s access to US military technology and contractual rights. The agreement underscores the intensifying nature of the US-Australia alliance. For some Australian nationalists the agreement is further evidence of Australia’s lapdog approach to foreign policy; a sign of dependence and its prolonged adolescence on the world stage.
Don Watson’s 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America captures this mood in its suggestion that Australia should petition the United States to become the 51st state of the Union; “The United States will get a state instead of a colony and Australians wouldn’t have to go on pretending our souls are our own.” Watson falls into the camp that laments, for having laid to rest the pursuit of Australia’s own ends, Australia’s endless quest for great and powerful friends.
The key instrument in Australia’s permanent infantilisation is held to be the 1951 ANZUS treaty. As New Zealand’s role in ANZUS treaty is currently redundant, the treaty effectively defines the terms of the US-Australia bilateral alliance. Until its invocation after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, the treaty was an umbrella under which hundreds of more concrete agreements worked, including intelligence sharing and the terms of military exercises.
Approaching the question from a different angle, assuming that Australian foreign policy elites are ruthlessly pragmatic and far-thinking, is it not possible to think of the alliance as indeed serving particular state-defined national interests? Furthermore, is it not possible to reverse the typical image of dependency and move to an image of the tail wagging the dog – at least on occasion: sometimes Australia’s aspired benefit comes at a cost to the United States.
Ambrose Bierce in his 19th century Devil’s Dictionary defined an alliance as: “In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”
Bierce’s wit is a suggestive starting point to undo the dependency thesis and begin to unravel what interests are served through the alliance. What does Australia get from the alliance?
In its important foreign policy statement Advancing the National Interest (2003) the Howard government states:
The depth of security, economic and political ties that we have with the United States makes this a vital relationship. No other country can match the United States' global reach in international affairs…Further strengthening Australia's ability to influence and work with the United States is essential for advancing our national interests.
(Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2003)
And speaking in 2001 Howard claims that
The ANZUS pact between Australia and the United States has done more to deliver the security of the Australian nation in the years that have gone by since World War II than any other international arrangement.
The first quotation is unremarkable: Australia’s government seeks to align itself with the hegemonic superpower. Access to that power, by support of that power, is seen as advancing the wellbeing of Australian security. The second quotation is remarkable, indicating that the government’s skepticism of the collective security arrangements and an emerging international order based on the efforts of the United Nations goes so far as to discount anything but the US as the key to global order.
Despite the brief dalliance of the Labor years (1983-1996) with middle-power diplomacy – the idea that middle powers require the comforting structure of international rules and regulations as a safeguard against the capricious nature of an international system dominated by great powers – Australian governments have largely responded to security questions using the grammar of the US alliance, often intuitively.
Policy and intellectual communities surrounding the government are keyed into the grammar. In a 2003 Melbourne Asia Policy Paper Paul Dibbs, one time architect of Australia’s security policy, declares that any dispassionate analysis would confirm the indispensability of the alliance, which he holds to be self evident. In 2004 ANU Professor Hugh White, agonizing over the Iraq war, and thinking with the grammar of the alliance, ludicrously confirmed the unprincipled nature of alliance logic when he admitted the possibility that sometimes going to war for the sake of maintaining an alliance can be a wise decision:
…And what of the first policy judgment: that we needed to support the invasion to protect our alliance with the US? This is a respectable argument. It sometimes makes sense to go to war to support an ally if you expect them to support you when your turn comes. It would have been unwise to say no to Washington about Iraq. But we did not need to rush to say yes either.
For some leading academics of international relations, Mr Howard is a "prescient political seer, (in) position to extract substantial and enduring benefits from the ANZUS affiliation including the culmination of a wide-ranging bilateral Australia US free trade agreement."
None of these views, including those of the government, indicate servile and wretched lapdoggery in the face of a great and powerful friend. All of them indicate a rather calculated approach to the alliance, even going so far as to speak of extracting benefits that might well be seen as costly to the superior partner in the alliance.
The Australian state and its ruling elites are not victims of dependency, but beneficiaries of an alliance system that secures a global hierarchy of states and economies in which Australia sits comfortably. Australia is a partner in what has been described as a system of global apartheid, where access to the goods that deliver wellbeing are skewed heavily in favour of advanced capitalist economies.
The alliance does not tie Australia into slavish dependence: in fact Australia has significant strategic independence. That the Australian government may appear to lack this simply reflects a convergence of interest. It is arguable that the Howard Government’s 1997 foreign policy paper, In the National Interest actually anticipates the hard-nosed disavowal of the United Nations by the Bush administration.
Rather than following the US into Iraq, the Howard government saw such action as the consummation of its own security outlook, or more specifically as a means to advance that outlook. This is to suggest that the alliance is not just about poor choices or misguided policy; there are structural features of Australia’s place in the world that compel it to bandwagon with the US, and sometimes to be a step ahead.
If there is to be substantive and enduring change in foreign policy, there needs to be a fundamental and substantive change in the grammar of Australian society, economics and politics. Without such changes Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States will always be an active/reactive one within a space that takes as given the global hierarchy and Australia’s rightful place in it.
Slightly different version of the piece appears on New Matilda. (newmatilda.com) 14th
November, 2007.
Michael Connors
During the Sydney APEC Summit in early September the Howard administration and Bush administrations inked the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, deepening Australia’s access to US military technology and contractual rights. The agreement underscores the intensifying nature of the US-Australia alliance. For some Australian nationalists the agreement is further evidence of Australia’s lapdog approach to foreign policy; a sign of dependence and its prolonged adolescence on the world stage.
Don Watson’s 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America captures this mood in its suggestion that Australia should petition the United States to become the 51st state of the Union; “The United States will get a state instead of a colony and Australians wouldn’t have to go on pretending our souls are our own.” Watson falls into the camp that laments, for having laid to rest the pursuit of Australia’s own ends, Australia’s endless quest for great and powerful friends.
The key instrument in Australia’s permanent infantilisation is held to be the 1951 ANZUS treaty. As New Zealand’s role in ANZUS treaty is currently redundant, the treaty effectively defines the terms of the US-Australia bilateral alliance. Until its invocation after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, the treaty was an umbrella under which hundreds of more concrete agreements worked, including intelligence sharing and the terms of military exercises.
Approaching the question from a different angle, assuming that Australian foreign policy elites are ruthlessly pragmatic and far-thinking, is it not possible to think of the alliance as indeed serving particular state-defined national interests? Furthermore, is it not possible to reverse the typical image of dependency and move to an image of the tail wagging the dog – at least on occasion: sometimes Australia’s aspired benefit comes at a cost to the United States.
Ambrose Bierce in his 19th century Devil’s Dictionary defined an alliance as: “In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”
Bierce’s wit is a suggestive starting point to undo the dependency thesis and begin to unravel what interests are served through the alliance. What does Australia get from the alliance?
In its important foreign policy statement Advancing the National Interest (2003) the Howard government states:
The depth of security, economic and political ties that we have with the United States makes this a vital relationship. No other country can match the United States' global reach in international affairs…Further strengthening Australia's ability to influence and work with the United States is essential for advancing our national interests.
(Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2003)
And speaking in 2001 Howard claims that
The ANZUS pact between Australia and the United States has done more to deliver the security of the Australian nation in the years that have gone by since World War II than any other international arrangement.
The first quotation is unremarkable: Australia’s government seeks to align itself with the hegemonic superpower. Access to that power, by support of that power, is seen as advancing the wellbeing of Australian security. The second quotation is remarkable, indicating that the government’s skepticism of the collective security arrangements and an emerging international order based on the efforts of the United Nations goes so far as to discount anything but the US as the key to global order.
Despite the brief dalliance of the Labor years (1983-1996) with middle-power diplomacy – the idea that middle powers require the comforting structure of international rules and regulations as a safeguard against the capricious nature of an international system dominated by great powers – Australian governments have largely responded to security questions using the grammar of the US alliance, often intuitively.
Policy and intellectual communities surrounding the government are keyed into the grammar. In a 2003 Melbourne Asia Policy Paper Paul Dibbs, one time architect of Australia’s security policy, declares that any dispassionate analysis would confirm the indispensability of the alliance, which he holds to be self evident. In 2004 ANU Professor Hugh White, agonizing over the Iraq war, and thinking with the grammar of the alliance, ludicrously confirmed the unprincipled nature of alliance logic when he admitted the possibility that sometimes going to war for the sake of maintaining an alliance can be a wise decision:
…And what of the first policy judgment: that we needed to support the invasion to protect our alliance with the US? This is a respectable argument. It sometimes makes sense to go to war to support an ally if you expect them to support you when your turn comes. It would have been unwise to say no to Washington about Iraq. But we did not need to rush to say yes either.
For some leading academics of international relations, Mr Howard is a "prescient political seer, (in) position to extract substantial and enduring benefits from the ANZUS affiliation including the culmination of a wide-ranging bilateral Australia US free trade agreement."
None of these views, including those of the government, indicate servile and wretched lapdoggery in the face of a great and powerful friend. All of them indicate a rather calculated approach to the alliance, even going so far as to speak of extracting benefits that might well be seen as costly to the superior partner in the alliance.
The Australian state and its ruling elites are not victims of dependency, but beneficiaries of an alliance system that secures a global hierarchy of states and economies in which Australia sits comfortably. Australia is a partner in what has been described as a system of global apartheid, where access to the goods that deliver wellbeing are skewed heavily in favour of advanced capitalist economies.
The alliance does not tie Australia into slavish dependence: in fact Australia has significant strategic independence. That the Australian government may appear to lack this simply reflects a convergence of interest. It is arguable that the Howard Government’s 1997 foreign policy paper, In the National Interest actually anticipates the hard-nosed disavowal of the United Nations by the Bush administration.
Rather than following the US into Iraq, the Howard government saw such action as the consummation of its own security outlook, or more specifically as a means to advance that outlook. This is to suggest that the alliance is not just about poor choices or misguided policy; there are structural features of Australia’s place in the world that compel it to bandwagon with the US, and sometimes to be a step ahead.
If there is to be substantive and enduring change in foreign policy, there needs to be a fundamental and substantive change in the grammar of Australian society, economics and politics. Without such changes Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States will always be an active/reactive one within a space that takes as given the global hierarchy and Australia’s rightful place in it.
Slightly different version of the piece appears on New Matilda. (newmatilda.com) 14th
November, 2007.
September 13, 2007
Howard, a retiring man
Howard, a retiring man; Rudd, the class A jerk
Having done his utmost best, with his party’s backing, to turn the electoral cycle of Australian politics into a presidential-style circus of idiocy focused on the populist imagery of ‘everyman’ (for it remains everyman), John Howard’s latest spin (12th September on the 7.30 Report) that leadership is a team thing and ‘that’s a good thing’ marks the end of the politician as we know him.
It appears Howard has been trumped by all-style no-substance Ruddy-good two shoes. Rudd has mastered the presidential game with fervour. Even Rudd’s naughty escapades at a US strip club played in his favour; recasting him as the favoured son of the church to be redeemed. Cast a vote so he can still go to heaven.
Rudd, the man who believes he can smile with his faith, played class jerk at APEC and won them over with his impressive Mandarin. There is much to be said about this; for Rudd stands at the historical conjunction of Australia’s two-timing poise between the US and its client, the Japanese state, and the mightily rising Chinese behemoth.
When Rudd visited La Trobe University in 2005, as then shadow spokesperson on foreign affairs, I asked him at a public lecture what his stance would be regarding Chinese human rights if Labor won office. His response surprised me; he was upset by my criticism that Labor has always been willing to put national interest well above human rights considerations. His response reflected the luxury of the opposition benches, and also the presence of a dim part of the brain that represses memory of East Timor.
Yet, it’s hard to see how a Labor government under Rudd will deviate from the Howard government’s closed door private dialogues on human rights with China.
When the feudalistic and beatific Dalai Lama visited Australia in June, Rudd showed great sensitivity only agreeing to meet with the eminent Presence of the Buddha in Compassion, after Howard intimated he might do so. Presidentialism is also followerism.
Howard’s presidentialism stumped the Labor Party’s committee people: they could not contemplate as leader the articulate Julia Gillard, so they went through a range of potentials such as Crean-Latham-Beazley, succeeding only in proving the law of diminishing returns. Rudd rode to the leadership on a wave of desperation. He is desperation’s destiny.
Howard’s recent declaration of playing with the team holds promise for a more substantive politics, one focused on big questions as opposed to hair-style and grandfatherly comforting and giving succour to religious congregations. At last, I have found something on which I can agree with Howard. Yeah, sure.
Having done his utmost best, with his party’s backing, to turn the electoral cycle of Australian politics into a presidential-style circus of idiocy focused on the populist imagery of ‘everyman’ (for it remains everyman), John Howard’s latest spin (12th September on the 7.30 Report) that leadership is a team thing and ‘that’s a good thing’ marks the end of the politician as we know him.
It appears Howard has been trumped by all-style no-substance Ruddy-good two shoes. Rudd has mastered the presidential game with fervour. Even Rudd’s naughty escapades at a US strip club played in his favour; recasting him as the favoured son of the church to be redeemed. Cast a vote so he can still go to heaven.
Rudd, the man who believes he can smile with his faith, played class jerk at APEC and won them over with his impressive Mandarin. There is much to be said about this; for Rudd stands at the historical conjunction of Australia’s two-timing poise between the US and its client, the Japanese state, and the mightily rising Chinese behemoth.
When Rudd visited La Trobe University in 2005, as then shadow spokesperson on foreign affairs, I asked him at a public lecture what his stance would be regarding Chinese human rights if Labor won office. His response surprised me; he was upset by my criticism that Labor has always been willing to put national interest well above human rights considerations. His response reflected the luxury of the opposition benches, and also the presence of a dim part of the brain that represses memory of East Timor.
Yet, it’s hard to see how a Labor government under Rudd will deviate from the Howard government’s closed door private dialogues on human rights with China.
When the feudalistic and beatific Dalai Lama visited Australia in June, Rudd showed great sensitivity only agreeing to meet with the eminent Presence of the Buddha in Compassion, after Howard intimated he might do so. Presidentialism is also followerism.
Howard’s presidentialism stumped the Labor Party’s committee people: they could not contemplate as leader the articulate Julia Gillard, so they went through a range of potentials such as Crean-Latham-Beazley, succeeding only in proving the law of diminishing returns. Rudd rode to the leadership on a wave of desperation. He is desperation’s destiny.
Howard’s recent declaration of playing with the team holds promise for a more substantive politics, one focused on big questions as opposed to hair-style and grandfatherly comforting and giving succour to religious congregations. At last, I have found something on which I can agree with Howard. Yeah, sure.
September 8, 2007
A Post-Moral Prime Minister: the blank armband of amnesia
Federal Politics: A Post-Moral PM
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 11 October 2006
New Matilda
In a recent address to celebrate conservative Quadrant Magazine’s 50 years in vituperative print, Prime Minister John Howard said, ‘Of the causes that Quadrant has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important than the role it has played as counterforce to the black armband view of Australian history.’
Let Quadrant’s motto, following Howard, now shamelessly read, ‘Hail the blank armband of amnesia.’
In the same speech, the Prime Minister purported to have heroes. It will be a relief to some that the most unheroic of political figures has inspirational sustenance. Howard praised the ‘moral clarity’ of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
Now, rather than express outrage at Thatcher’s support for apartheid, Reagan’s dance with Latin American death squads and the good father’s sneer at liberation theology and contraception, I will pause a moment and not take the bait.
I don’t believe these are John Howard’s heroes. I think he was pandering to his audience. There are no greater heroes than these three for the Quadrant lot.
In fact, I don’t think John Howard believes anything at all. If not quite our first post-modern prime minister, he is at least our first post-moral prime minister. In the words of philosopher Slavoj Zizek, our times are marked by an ability to keep on doing that which we know to be wrong: ‘They know what they are doing, but still they do it.’
John Howard lives by this post-modern cynicism, even as he critiques it. He can’t fail to notice how the press gallery recasts his mendacity as political sagacity, and he revels in this good fortune.
Those who write history seek meaning, so they invest Howard with intention, purpose and vision, all of which he lacks. The result is that recent Australian political history may well be written as nothing more than a scoresheet of interest rates, export earnings and ad hoc payoffs to the electorate. This does not befit the story of the fall of the social-democratic Australian settlement experienced by many Australians.
John Howard’s own story is a simple one. He saw which way the wind was blowing and set his sails accordingly. He is the clown who saw Australian politics for the circus it was and played to the crowd. There is no grand tale to tell. John Howard sees no nuances. He sees balance sheets and numbers. Those are his ‘values’. He plays the political game on the ‘Right’ simply because that’s where it’s best to be.
Howard’s foreign policy reveals all. He plays Dixie capitalism with the United States and digs our mines for the Chinese Communist Party. He diverts human rights dialogue into secret encounters with the Chinese, and to advance the War on Terror he suspends Western judicial tradition for the US.
He says publicly that he believes there is no inevitable calamity between the US and China, knowing that US foreign policy is predicated on that very thing.
Howard is no Machiavellian statesman. Rather, like any milk-and-bread corner-shop owner, he knows there are rival gangs on the street. Open gang-warfare is bad for business. So he fawns, and placates both sides, wishing for an empire of perpetual peace in which the cash register rings eternal. He knows one day this will not be so — and hopes that money can be banked in any case. Amnesia serves him not only in domestic politics.
The Americans made a president out of a B-grade actor. His wooden words — ‘the evil empire’ — were those of a puppet on a string. Those words became meaningless and irrelevant as the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union brought about its own demise. Like Forest Gump, Reagan will forever be fortuitously associated with historic events not of his making.
The British took an elocution-conscious petit bourgeois as prime minister and reinvented French bread riots. ‘Let them eat the poll tax,’ she said.
We made a prime minister out of a nondescript man who leaves not a single phrase worthy of memory. Instead, Howard will be remembered for what he could not say: sorry.
What Howard lacks above all is sincerity. This is the man of over-board hyperbole; the man who will not sack a single minister involved in the AWB scandal.
I am not shocked by his apparent choice of heroes. Instead I will praise the political genius of John Howard’s amoral clarity: he looked into the dirty little soul of Australian insecurity and has made of it his own political credo.
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 11 October 2006
New Matilda
In a recent address to celebrate conservative Quadrant Magazine’s 50 years in vituperative print, Prime Minister John Howard said, ‘Of the causes that Quadrant has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important than the role it has played as counterforce to the black armband view of Australian history.’
Let Quadrant’s motto, following Howard, now shamelessly read, ‘Hail the blank armband of amnesia.’
In the same speech, the Prime Minister purported to have heroes. It will be a relief to some that the most unheroic of political figures has inspirational sustenance. Howard praised the ‘moral clarity’ of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
Now, rather than express outrage at Thatcher’s support for apartheid, Reagan’s dance with Latin American death squads and the good father’s sneer at liberation theology and contraception, I will pause a moment and not take the bait.
I don’t believe these are John Howard’s heroes. I think he was pandering to his audience. There are no greater heroes than these three for the Quadrant lot.
In fact, I don’t think John Howard believes anything at all. If not quite our first post-modern prime minister, he is at least our first post-moral prime minister. In the words of philosopher Slavoj Zizek, our times are marked by an ability to keep on doing that which we know to be wrong: ‘They know what they are doing, but still they do it.’
John Howard lives by this post-modern cynicism, even as he critiques it. He can’t fail to notice how the press gallery recasts his mendacity as political sagacity, and he revels in this good fortune.
Those who write history seek meaning, so they invest Howard with intention, purpose and vision, all of which he lacks. The result is that recent Australian political history may well be written as nothing more than a scoresheet of interest rates, export earnings and ad hoc payoffs to the electorate. This does not befit the story of the fall of the social-democratic Australian settlement experienced by many Australians.
John Howard’s own story is a simple one. He saw which way the wind was blowing and set his sails accordingly. He is the clown who saw Australian politics for the circus it was and played to the crowd. There is no grand tale to tell. John Howard sees no nuances. He sees balance sheets and numbers. Those are his ‘values’. He plays the political game on the ‘Right’ simply because that’s where it’s best to be.
Howard’s foreign policy reveals all. He plays Dixie capitalism with the United States and digs our mines for the Chinese Communist Party. He diverts human rights dialogue into secret encounters with the Chinese, and to advance the War on Terror he suspends Western judicial tradition for the US.
He says publicly that he believes there is no inevitable calamity between the US and China, knowing that US foreign policy is predicated on that very thing.
Howard is no Machiavellian statesman. Rather, like any milk-and-bread corner-shop owner, he knows there are rival gangs on the street. Open gang-warfare is bad for business. So he fawns, and placates both sides, wishing for an empire of perpetual peace in which the cash register rings eternal. He knows one day this will not be so — and hopes that money can be banked in any case. Amnesia serves him not only in domestic politics.
The Americans made a president out of a B-grade actor. His wooden words — ‘the evil empire’ — were those of a puppet on a string. Those words became meaningless and irrelevant as the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union brought about its own demise. Like Forest Gump, Reagan will forever be fortuitously associated with historic events not of his making.
The British took an elocution-conscious petit bourgeois as prime minister and reinvented French bread riots. ‘Let them eat the poll tax,’ she said.
We made a prime minister out of a nondescript man who leaves not a single phrase worthy of memory. Instead, Howard will be remembered for what he could not say: sorry.
What Howard lacks above all is sincerity. This is the man of over-board hyperbole; the man who will not sack a single minister involved in the AWB scandal.
I am not shocked by his apparent choice of heroes. Instead I will praise the political genius of John Howard’s amoral clarity: he looked into the dirty little soul of Australian insecurity and has made of it his own political credo.
Howard's Grave Diggers
Industrial Relations: Howard’s Grave-Diggers
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 21 June 2006
New Matilda
In one of the greatest modern works of insightful polemic, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers ...’
In this age of reduced expectations we might now read that prophetic announcement as meaning that capitalist assault will, in time, produce its own working-class response. Courtesy of the reactionary assault on working-class employment conditions occasioned by the Coalition’s capture of the Senate, we see, at present, a process of class politics re-emerging.
Not yet the grave-diggers of capitalism, frightened and angry workers may yet halt the Howard Government’s neo-liberal assault that aims to bring globalisation of the labour market closer to home.
In the world envisaged by Howard, Australia will soon have a working poor. This will dilute the power of organised or regulated labour. Instead of the dole acting as the benchmark of whether one will accept employment or not, it will now be the worker next to you, brow-beaten into reduced conditions, who will serve as the measure of what is acceptable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, stonemasons and building workers won the right to an eight-hour day. The ‘8 Hour Day Monument’, which celebrates that achievement, stands adjacent to Victorian Trades Hall Council in Melbourne. It now looks like a futuristic piece of art.
As wages are driven down among unskilled labour and those pockets of white-collar labour that are in long supply, we must expect further assaults on unemployment benefits. The logic is inexorable. If anything gets Howard’s heart beating faster than a regulated labour force, it is the socially secured unemployed.
The sad thing is that Labor paved the way for the present situation.
Beginning with the Hawke Labor Government’s close relationship with business and trade union leadership, the 1980s witnessed the weakening of working-class organisation. As union leaders demobilised militants in the union movement — moving instead to the provision of discount cards and cheaper dental services — a new form of politics emerged in Australia that eschewed collective commitment.
It was the Labor Government that attacked compulsory unionism and it was under Labor that historically high levels of union membership — up to 50 per cent in the 1970s — began their downward slide to 40 per cent in the mid 1990s and around 25 per cent today.
The 1980s were marked by an ideological assault that used the spectre of global competition as the sledgehammer to nail unions to self restraint. Threats of capital flight if Australia didn’t ‘deregulate’ were used to cajole workers to accept a weaker bargaining position and to accept centralised negotiations.
The social wage promised by Labor’s tripartite Accords between government, employers and workers produced a 15 per cent decline in wages over the decade it was in office. The Hawke and Keating Governments’ historic achievement was to weaken working-class organisation, not by malicious intent, but by being carried away with notions of global competition and capitalist nation building.
When workers broke from the straightjacket of fiscal discipline and arbitrated wage rises they were demonised — such was the fate, for instance, of the Victorian nurses whose 50-day strike in 1985–6 sent Laborites into a blue-blooded rage worthy of Thatcher.
However, no comment on Labor presiding over the decline in working-class living standards can proceed without recourse to irony.
The first irony of Labor’s first years in office is that Australia in the mid-1980s was not so much reacting to global conditions as acting as a pioneer for the neo-liberalism that was soon to be ascendant globally. That Australia had its own nomenclature for this is indicative — we called it ‘economic rationalism.’
The second irony is that Labor, in pioneering a new way of seeing the world, would give rise to ideologies of new individualism that would undermine its own electoral position. Stock market postings became as avidly read in some quarters as AFL results. Later it would be property prices.
Labor delivered the aspirational voter to the Liberal Party. It turned unionism into a defensive position for workers, and it released hundreds of thousands of overly confident workers into the clutches of financial advisors.
Now, as the screw turns, for many the question of unionism is a matter of calculus of what they can personally gain. There is now an army of workers who will only be recruited to the union if a gimmick is offered or the threat of dismissal is looming.
Union delegates the country over are now telling prospective members that surely the cost of union membership is not prohibitive, especially given the gains in wages that have been secured by various Enterprise Bargaining Rounds. The response is sometimes telling. ‘Sorry, got to pay off the investment property,’ ‘sorry, my finances are so poor,’ ‘sorry, but I think I’ll look after myself.’
The greatest challenge facing Australian unions is not recruitment but the re-creation of the notion of solidarity. While unions will grow in the short term — based on the fear of Howard’s IR agenda — recruitment will mean nothing unless that ethic of solidarity re-emerges.
Howard might not like it, but he will be the very source that will drive this new ethic.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 21 June 2006
New Matilda
In one of the greatest modern works of insightful polemic, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers ...’
In this age of reduced expectations we might now read that prophetic announcement as meaning that capitalist assault will, in time, produce its own working-class response. Courtesy of the reactionary assault on working-class employment conditions occasioned by the Coalition’s capture of the Senate, we see, at present, a process of class politics re-emerging.
Not yet the grave-diggers of capitalism, frightened and angry workers may yet halt the Howard Government’s neo-liberal assault that aims to bring globalisation of the labour market closer to home.
In the world envisaged by Howard, Australia will soon have a working poor. This will dilute the power of organised or regulated labour. Instead of the dole acting as the benchmark of whether one will accept employment or not, it will now be the worker next to you, brow-beaten into reduced conditions, who will serve as the measure of what is acceptable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, stonemasons and building workers won the right to an eight-hour day. The ‘8 Hour Day Monument’, which celebrates that achievement, stands adjacent to Victorian Trades Hall Council in Melbourne. It now looks like a futuristic piece of art.
As wages are driven down among unskilled labour and those pockets of white-collar labour that are in long supply, we must expect further assaults on unemployment benefits. The logic is inexorable. If anything gets Howard’s heart beating faster than a regulated labour force, it is the socially secured unemployed.
The sad thing is that Labor paved the way for the present situation.
Beginning with the Hawke Labor Government’s close relationship with business and trade union leadership, the 1980s witnessed the weakening of working-class organisation. As union leaders demobilised militants in the union movement — moving instead to the provision of discount cards and cheaper dental services — a new form of politics emerged in Australia that eschewed collective commitment.
It was the Labor Government that attacked compulsory unionism and it was under Labor that historically high levels of union membership — up to 50 per cent in the 1970s — began their downward slide to 40 per cent in the mid 1990s and around 25 per cent today.
The 1980s were marked by an ideological assault that used the spectre of global competition as the sledgehammer to nail unions to self restraint. Threats of capital flight if Australia didn’t ‘deregulate’ were used to cajole workers to accept a weaker bargaining position and to accept centralised negotiations.
The social wage promised by Labor’s tripartite Accords between government, employers and workers produced a 15 per cent decline in wages over the decade it was in office. The Hawke and Keating Governments’ historic achievement was to weaken working-class organisation, not by malicious intent, but by being carried away with notions of global competition and capitalist nation building.
When workers broke from the straightjacket of fiscal discipline and arbitrated wage rises they were demonised — such was the fate, for instance, of the Victorian nurses whose 50-day strike in 1985–6 sent Laborites into a blue-blooded rage worthy of Thatcher.
However, no comment on Labor presiding over the decline in working-class living standards can proceed without recourse to irony.
The first irony of Labor’s first years in office is that Australia in the mid-1980s was not so much reacting to global conditions as acting as a pioneer for the neo-liberalism that was soon to be ascendant globally. That Australia had its own nomenclature for this is indicative — we called it ‘economic rationalism.’
The second irony is that Labor, in pioneering a new way of seeing the world, would give rise to ideologies of new individualism that would undermine its own electoral position. Stock market postings became as avidly read in some quarters as AFL results. Later it would be property prices.
Labor delivered the aspirational voter to the Liberal Party. It turned unionism into a defensive position for workers, and it released hundreds of thousands of overly confident workers into the clutches of financial advisors.
Now, as the screw turns, for many the question of unionism is a matter of calculus of what they can personally gain. There is now an army of workers who will only be recruited to the union if a gimmick is offered or the threat of dismissal is looming.
Union delegates the country over are now telling prospective members that surely the cost of union membership is not prohibitive, especially given the gains in wages that have been secured by various Enterprise Bargaining Rounds. The response is sometimes telling. ‘Sorry, got to pay off the investment property,’ ‘sorry, my finances are so poor,’ ‘sorry, but I think I’ll look after myself.’
The greatest challenge facing Australian unions is not recruitment but the re-creation of the notion of solidarity. While unions will grow in the short term — based on the fear of Howard’s IR agenda — recruitment will mean nothing unless that ethic of solidarity re-emerges.
Howard might not like it, but he will be the very source that will drive this new ethic.
The Democratic Paradox, not liberal and not democratic
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com/New Matilda
Prime Minister John Howard is history incarnate, but not in the sense of being the underwhelming expression of ordinary Australia. Howard has shifted the permanently unsettled but delicate balance of liberalism and democracy in Australia towards a system of majoritarian illiberalism. This will be his legacy.
The marks of this shift are evident in the treatment of refugees, the incredulous denial of knowledge about AWB kickbacks to the Saddam regime, the introduction of an industrial relations system designed to produce a working poor, and in the decline of ministerial accountability.
The op-ed pages of Australian newspapers are full of dismay for this democratic malaise. Comparisons with early Nazi Germany are flippantly thrown around. John Hooker, regular columnist for New Matilda is one such example.
Hooker is notoriously angry, but righteous anger is not a good conduit for analysis. Through Hooker’s trembling pen the ‘people’ and their ‘suburbs’ have become an object of derision by a seemingly progressive commentariat. It is as if the ‘people’ are to be blamed for Howard’s political crimes. Hooker’s own elitism is symptomatic of many in the commentariat who bemoan the loss of Australian democracy.
I want to suggest that illiberal shifts in Australian politics and elsewhere are not representative of a politics of indifference in ‘the suburbs,’ rather they signify the historical emergence of a new elite ethos of management and control that is taking shape globally.
That few ministers have been forced to resign in the (later) Howard years has nothing to do with the fact that the electorate is now less demanding. It has to do with the fact that segments of the Australian elite are less demanding of themselves and their milieu. In this new climate, ministerial accountability strikes them as quaint and old-fashioned. And to push the point home, they go on about having a democratic mandate.
The emergence of illiberalism in Australia is part of a systemic global trend most recognisable in a number of established semi-authoritarian countries and newly democratising countries, where the rhetoric of popular sovereignty is used to justify any number of venal and elite-defined security interests.
Every system has an exception that proves the rule, and in this case it is the USA. President Bush’s first term was initially based on a minoritarian illiberalism involving the disenfranchisement of segments of the Black vote, a supportive Supreme Court and the cowered, defeatist Al Gore. Then possessing the levers of power, the Bush cabal was able to win a second term.
Bush’s greatest regret will not be birthing the Iraqi civil war — that is his prized baby — but coming to power in a period when the possibility of removing the two-term limit on the presidency is not yet feasible. Illiberal trends may make that a possibility in the future. That will perhaps properly mark the end of the great Jeffersonian compromise.
The bombing of the Middle East into democratic submission illuminates something about the state of democracy elsewhere. It brings into relief the blackhole that lies behind most democratic rhetoric, both of the exported and home-grown variety.
US attempts to export democracy are premised on a notion of popular sovereignty that is already blue-printed. The blueprint reads: ‘You will be like us.’ As Rousseau noted, people have to be forced to be free. And to update the old French philosopher, people have to be forced to be like us.
In this era of democratic imperialism, the US State can’t have people choosing to be free unless that freedom is institutionally defined by enlightened despots who know the people’s will. And just in case the people don’t agree with that ‘will,’ democratic despots are willing to lead people to it. Are established democracies much different?
Contra the position that argues democracy has been felled by an alliance of cynical consumers and reactionary rulers, it is clear that the illiberal shift is taking place among elites, and relates to questions of desired regime form in a new era. Majority mandates may be invoked to justify the shift, but this raises the question of how a mandate is secured.
When democratic autocrats speak of ‘the people’ they are gesturing in the direction of an abstraction: ‘a people’ historically mobilised around fear and driven to surrender their deliberative capacities in the face of elite-led democratic disempowerment. This is the shape that the autocrat’s popular mandate assumes.
When people such as John Hooker blame the electorate for Howard’s excesses, he is taking as self-evident Howard’s claims to a popular mandate. This assumes that democracy really is democratic.
Democracy, as it is presently constituted, is a system of electoralism and a diminution of the liberal desire for checks and balances. It can not offer a genuine mandate. Nor can it cope with a genuinely active citizenry. Just as the broader structures surrounding education ensure that schools are programmed for failure so as to deliver most people to a job requiring submission to mundane labour and the petty tyranny of a boss, democracy is contrived to deliver people to a political system that disempowers them and that now deadens the historical gains contributed by the liberal system of checks and balances.
Democracy’s failure to live up to its rhetorical promise is its most enduring success. No one understood this better than Joseph Schumpeter whose 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remains one of the most insightful studies on the functioning of elite democracy.
Schumpeter eschewed classical rhetoric about democracy being a noble project of self-realisation and civic good; he saw it as an institutional arrangement for elites to acquire power ‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ Unlike homicidal struggles for power in the past, when defeat meant death, democracy gave elites a chance of comeback in the next election. Schumpeter famously went on to declare that, ‘Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.’ His was not a critique but an endorsement.
It may be said that if Howard has played a historical role in giving concrete shape to the reassertion of illiberal democracy, then history itself is quite undemanding of the kind of people it selects. This would be a mistake. It is no mean feat to attack the fundamental principles that have defined the liberal tradition.
Historically, it was liberals who feared the tyranny of the majority — the great unwashed — and hence their desire for all sorts of checks and balances under the guise of protecting the minority. This was their condition for accepting mass democracy.
Is it not a pitiful irony that a man who leads a party of liberalism now deploys the rhetoric of majoritarianism to attack that very liberalism? What paradoxes the new global climate does throw up! In all of this, one thing is certain: any real democratic expression by the masses will be met with all the disdain liberals have for the unwashed. When governing liberals start talking about the tyranny of the majority again, we will know we have turned a good corner.
The Howard Generation?
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com/
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
New Matilda
They get called the ‘Howard generation,’ not yet the Howard Youth. They are supposed to be materialistic, manic 20-somethings who grew up when globalisation was background muzak and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was cultural comment. They didn’t so much discuss postmodernism as live it, ironically under Howard’s modern gaze.
The generation is fictitious, of course. But generational fictions hint at the spirit of the age.
In a recently published book Please Just F* Off It’s Our Turn Now, Ryan Heath, a self-appointed Howard-generational spokesperson with a propensity to bombast and offence, gives us reason to reflect on this spirit, and on Howard’s success in shaping today’s youth.
I don’t know Heath’s age; he might be 16, he might be 34. Let’s say he belongs to the long-20s generation — which ranges from the fake ID-card set to the soon-to-use BOTOX set. Heath writes in New Matilda 77 (link here):
So, about us. We’re global, responsible and live 24/7 lives. We’re pro-capitalist because capitalism supports the opportunity and the lifestyle we are used to. We support social solidarity because we want a market economy without a market society. We are libertarian about personal behaviour because we believe everyone has the right to be happy. That makes us individual, not selfish. As Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, argues: ‘The self is absolutely at the centre of the iGeneration [a reference to iPods] ... I like me. I just happen to like you too.’
This is nothing less than a testament to Howard’s failure, his missed opportunity to mould a generation in his image. Instead of polite conservatives we have brazen capitalist libertarians who read quarter-life crisis manuals. They go to IKEA more than they go to church, as Heath points out.
Assuming that Heath has identified a real sociological entity, let’s explicate it (if you are under 30 you may delete ‘explicate’ and insert ‘pontificate’).
Being politically correct is now a form of satire. This generation says ‘chick’ and ‘hunk’ with no self-consciousness, and with some lust. Their chat on radio consists of uninhibited sexual innuendo and fart and dildo gags. Instead of the arts, the Howard generation holds up the narcissist’s mirror and watches reality TV.
Howard has not reversed the sexual revolution. In the last decade there has been a generalised liberalisation of sexual attitudes such that holding to 1970s identity politics is as revealing about your age as a Starsky jacket or a foxy scarf: gay has morphed into queer, and young queers and straights (who have yet to redefine themselves) mix in post-metrosexual venues. Such frenetic, consumption-identity driven change is enough to leave the ‘oldies’ out of breath.
Even ‘metrosexual’ is so yesterday. The He-Man and Barbie doll — played ironically of course — are back, intercoursing on/in all sorts of positions. They have sex before marriage, before they know their partner’s real name, and even before they realise they have had sex. Often, after a property investors’ seminar. Howard is not pleased.
That sex has not gone away is a mark of the limits of the Howard Decade.
Ditto, the erosion of good manners. Howard’s generation do not apologise when, with eyes on the mobile phone and fingers texting hieroglyphic expletives about last night’s bunking gymnastics, they bump into elderly folk.
However, despite its libertarian strand, this generation, seeded from Howard’s political loins, does offer some hope for conservatives. Many of today’s youth value the fact that Howard has apparently looked after the economy and the country.
With Mummy and Daddy’s support, they can still enter the property market. And the IR laws are perfect for those who have no plan to be in the same company in six months time and who believe they can rise above the rest. Who, they ask, wants to carry lazy losers through collective agreements? Howard is delighted.
Some have found their way to singing songs on a hilltop. Some travel overseas in pilgrimage to those who died for empire and liberty, instead of rising up and setting up a soldier’s committee that might have turned its guns on the officer-class. They then get drunk. But Howard won’t have a word said against them.
They value Howard’s ability to get away with things so that the greater good of Australia is protected. They’ve watched with amazement at his aplomb: he’s got us in with the US; taken us through the self-serving redemptive process of ‘liberating’ East Timor after abandoning it; he’s created a modern day ritualistic place for national identity in Bali; and he took us to war, and paid-off the enemy too. He is not so much self-centred as a centred-self of control and manipulation — the kind of person MBA students credit with ‘knowledge management.’ They think he is one funky nerd.
This is all to Howard’s credit — the shift from collective notions of good to individual ladders of opportunism, shaded by thin nationalism and religiosity. He has spawned a generation that missed the merry-go-round of the pointless 20s. Instead, they are on the I-can-do roller coaster. Risk is in.
But these value shifts, and the quasi-nationalism of self-centred Aussiedom, are not embedded, nor are they likely to be enduring. They’ve been built upon a more fundamental restructuring of Australia around self-consuming identity, where nation comes a distant second. Howard’s success lies not in furthering his own desire to refurbish Australianness, but in cutting the market loose, and in increasing that circle of self-regarding individuals driven by asset accumulation.
He has done little to foster the conservative social values that fit his vision, unless we are to regard racism, materialism, paranoia, the uttering of falsehoods, and the shrinking of the public sphere as germane to the conservative project. Howard’s Australia is a society of the centred self-centreds — and those who resist. And there are plenty who do the latter.
Howard has not won any culture war, despite the opining of columnists. The culture wars have slipped out of the clutches of the Left and the Right and gone down the road of capitalist gratification. This road sacrifices conservatism at the altar of a narrowly economist vision of the world. Howard’s failure is to have believed that economics, and a few sermons, would lead us back to white picket fences.
For desperate cynics, it would seem that the only way to get the Howard generation to read Australian history, as a form of civics, would be to restage it as reality TV show. They picture the youth of Australia through the caricatures that appear above, and they despair. For the hopeful, Howard’s failure makes the regeneration of progressive social values that much more possible, because there are many more people disillusioned than are enamoured with the marketing-self that neo-liberalism has conjured into being.
About the Author
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He does not believe that there are any meaningful generational categories in Howard's Australia. He uses them for purely heuristic purposes, just as the Government uses terms such as 'truth,' 'Australianness,' and 'achievement.'
John Howard's pendulum
Howard's New Year's (Core) Resolutions
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 11 January 2006
New Matilda
It's 11:55 pm on New Year's Eve.
Janette is looking every bit as radiant as a good nuclear power station might, if only we could get one going. In a moment we will embrace. In that embrace will be everything that's passed between us — it's lucky ASIO did the check and cleared her.
Still, in this state of heightened terrorist threat and face transplants, one has to be fearful. I'll not mistake any bomb wiring for a bra strap. I've done the training.
What a year! Terrorism, Latham, Windbag's return, IR, and Costello wetting the bed again. Beazley's such a winner for me - if a soufflé doesn't rise twice, what about a pork pie?
It's Latham I most regret. Nice lad, eager to do well - but no constitution for it.
Staffers have told me about the Costello diaries -it's something we'll need to monitor. Apparently, he's obsessed with me - counts the number of dandruff flakes on my suit collar; catalogues how many times I inadvertently spit on him (he shouldn't stand so close). There is even an entry on eyebrow clippings. He's done a tally and correctly estimates I get it done once a month. I might note that the beauticians use plastic tweezers - on the advice of Security.
Costello will come to nothing. That is my first core resolution. It's the half-grin I don't like. It writes smugness all over his face, as if he's behind all we've done. With Hawke and Keating, the Treasurer had a right to the big chair - but Costello? Well, I've not demanded much, just bring in the tax, quarry the mines, let the invisible hand of the market (our friends at the gentleman's clubs) get on with its business.
Costello had Labor's economic reforms to surf home on - all I had was a big pile of cow turd called 'political correctness.' I moved a self-righteous country that was scared of offending an ant's sensibilities to a State of shock-jockeydom. That's what I call a historic achievement. May a hundred prejudices blossom on the cow turd of the pink-Left!
The clock is ticking, it's close to midnight.
Dubya will back slap me again in public. That is my second core resolution. Not sure how I am going to get this one going. If we could get out of Iraq, I would. But the US will probably want to do a massive offensive before they go, so they can get rid of their excess munitions that will be too costly to return home. Dubya will want us in on it, but the body count might be high.
I've got Amanda working on conditional bridging visas that require compulsory service in war zones. I must admit, there's beauty in the irony of Iraqi refugees fighting Iraqi insurgents on their own home turf - something about crafty accounting I recall from those long-gone days of ledger sheets. There is the slight question of the Convention on Refugees, but hell, Dubya's made it clear where Conventions belong: in Pansy Alley with the lawyers.
The clock is clicking, and Janette moves closer to me.
I will end the culture wars. That is my third core resolution. I've been briefed that some academics who write for obscure journals, and who work in tax-funded (not for long) universities, have been talking about culture wars. They also think I have it in for them, but I don't even know their names - I prefer to court the journos.
Anyway, it's all a bit vague to me. Not sure why arts professors are going on about culture wars, shouldn't that be left to the medicos working on various strains of bacteria? It must be something to do with that horrendous trend towards inter-disciplinarity at universities. Little Nellie Brendan was complaining about it the other day when he was telling me which research grants he'd rejected, despite their getting the green light from the Australian Research Council.
Apparently, some bugger, literally, wanted to look at the constructed meaning (socially and medically) of 'transgendered lesbian relationships.' Funny how I should remember the details so well.
Anyway, back to the culture wars, I'll instruct the Health Department to contract a private company to see what lies behind these raging bacteria - I know that golden staf is taking over the hospitals, so it's getting serious. Whoever is behind this proliferation of colonising bacteria will be dealt with severely. Funny name for it though, 'culture wars' ...
It's midnight, the fireworks begin. Janette embraces me. No wires. 'God you've been a naughty boy this year,' she whispers in my ear. The clock's pendulum is vertical, and all is good in the world.
I am the iron man.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 11 January 2006
New Matilda
It's 11:55 pm on New Year's Eve.
Janette is looking every bit as radiant as a good nuclear power station might, if only we could get one going. In a moment we will embrace. In that embrace will be everything that's passed between us — it's lucky ASIO did the check and cleared her.
Still, in this state of heightened terrorist threat and face transplants, one has to be fearful. I'll not mistake any bomb wiring for a bra strap. I've done the training.
What a year! Terrorism, Latham, Windbag's return, IR, and Costello wetting the bed again. Beazley's such a winner for me - if a soufflé doesn't rise twice, what about a pork pie?
It's Latham I most regret. Nice lad, eager to do well - but no constitution for it.
Staffers have told me about the Costello diaries -it's something we'll need to monitor. Apparently, he's obsessed with me - counts the number of dandruff flakes on my suit collar; catalogues how many times I inadvertently spit on him (he shouldn't stand so close). There is even an entry on eyebrow clippings. He's done a tally and correctly estimates I get it done once a month. I might note that the beauticians use plastic tweezers - on the advice of Security.
Costello will come to nothing. That is my first core resolution. It's the half-grin I don't like. It writes smugness all over his face, as if he's behind all we've done. With Hawke and Keating, the Treasurer had a right to the big chair - but Costello? Well, I've not demanded much, just bring in the tax, quarry the mines, let the invisible hand of the market (our friends at the gentleman's clubs) get on with its business.
Costello had Labor's economic reforms to surf home on - all I had was a big pile of cow turd called 'political correctness.' I moved a self-righteous country that was scared of offending an ant's sensibilities to a State of shock-jockeydom. That's what I call a historic achievement. May a hundred prejudices blossom on the cow turd of the pink-Left!
The clock is ticking, it's close to midnight.
Dubya will back slap me again in public. That is my second core resolution. Not sure how I am going to get this one going. If we could get out of Iraq, I would. But the US will probably want to do a massive offensive before they go, so they can get rid of their excess munitions that will be too costly to return home. Dubya will want us in on it, but the body count might be high.
I've got Amanda working on conditional bridging visas that require compulsory service in war zones. I must admit, there's beauty in the irony of Iraqi refugees fighting Iraqi insurgents on their own home turf - something about crafty accounting I recall from those long-gone days of ledger sheets. There is the slight question of the Convention on Refugees, but hell, Dubya's made it clear where Conventions belong: in Pansy Alley with the lawyers.
The clock is clicking, and Janette moves closer to me.
I will end the culture wars. That is my third core resolution. I've been briefed that some academics who write for obscure journals, and who work in tax-funded (not for long) universities, have been talking about culture wars. They also think I have it in for them, but I don't even know their names - I prefer to court the journos.
Anyway, it's all a bit vague to me. Not sure why arts professors are going on about culture wars, shouldn't that be left to the medicos working on various strains of bacteria? It must be something to do with that horrendous trend towards inter-disciplinarity at universities. Little Nellie Brendan was complaining about it the other day when he was telling me which research grants he'd rejected, despite their getting the green light from the Australian Research Council.
Apparently, some bugger, literally, wanted to look at the constructed meaning (socially and medically) of 'transgendered lesbian relationships.' Funny how I should remember the details so well.
Anyway, back to the culture wars, I'll instruct the Health Department to contract a private company to see what lies behind these raging bacteria - I know that golden staf is taking over the hospitals, so it's getting serious. Whoever is behind this proliferation of colonising bacteria will be dealt with severely. Funny name for it though, 'culture wars' ...
It's midnight, the fireworks begin. Janette embraces me. No wires. 'God you've been a naughty boy this year,' she whispers in my ear. The clock's pendulum is vertical, and all is good in the world.
I am the iron man.
Not a Love Letter
Dear John (Not A Love Letter)
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 28 September 2005
New Matilda
Dear Prime Minister,
I recently read your thoughts on the 4th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and no doubt your minders will encourage you to publish another piece to commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the Bali bombings.You do not often move me to any kind of response - I've come to expect the worse. But you served something up on September 11 that cannot go unanswered. Even as memories of those attacks are still fresh, you seek to make September 11 part of a global monument to remind us of our righteousness.The monuments we choose say something about us. The crumbling towers of the World Trade Centre were never meant to be a monument to hypocrisy and hubris. The perpetrators of September 11 have in their own nefarious way made them so. You, with all the grace of a PR company, have followed suit. The thousands of lives lost on that day are served up by you to sanctify the strictures you plan to impose on our 'dear way of life'. Terrorists, you tell us, are fundamentally motivated by an antipathy to our way of life. But how long can you keep the truth at bay?
Robert Pape, in his book Dying to Win (extracts from this book were recently published in New Matilda, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2), makes it clear why terrorism occurs. His analysis is the factual battering ram we need to understand why the West is a target. Instead of caricatured Arabs seething with existential rage, Pape demonstrates a strong correlation between foreign occupation and terrorism. His message is that the foreign occupation of Iraq and US base expansion - not fundamentalism - are the prime issues we need to address. Pape is not some adolescent Lefty, but an erudite thinker of American national interest.
As compelling as Pape's analysis is, your Government continues to offer support for American expansion in the name of shared values and interests. It thereby invites us to be the next sacrificial lamb in a war few people understand. One of our values is democracy. The government reports through rosy-coloured glasses on the emergence of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while ignoring warlords, insurgency, human rights abuses and ornamental constitutions horse-traded by foreign-empowered middle men. Is there enough intellect in your Government to realise that what you order is not what you get? You cannot order democracy, upsized, as if at McDonald's.
Self determination is a principle we ought to support, not the lies of 'humanitarian intervention' (we had to save the Iraqi people from the dictator we used to support) serving as a cover for global expansion. As the Bush experiment implodes under the weight of its own contradictions, what will the Coalition of the Willing do next? Apparently, every fledging democracy needs its transitory dictator. Can you, Prime Minister, tell the Australian people if you've been given the list of likely heavyweights by your beloved in Washington? Pakistan already has its own ¬ he was given a statesman's welcome here. What of Afghanistan and Iraq?
I have no doubt that in the halls of realpolitik there are those who think it's a shame that the man most likely to bring the requisite order (and terror) to Iraq is irredeemable.Strongmen lie behind every elitist liberal's fantasy of social order. But such monsters are a dime a dozen, so there's plenty of choice. Kitted out with your instant guide to the politics of the Middle East, you deem it responsible to invade and re-order societies you know nothing about.Can you, understand, the logic of insurgency?
Thought experiment: A prosperous and militarist Islamic society decides its social order befits the 'End of History' and seeks to universalise its political and ethical forms. Australia is seen as recalcitrant, anti-Muslim and deemed ripe for invasion. What do we do? We resist occupation and Islamic imperialism with whatever arms and strategies we have.
Insurgent bombs in Iraq are not aimed at the Australian way of life. They are not a strike against the white picket fences at the heart of your psyche. They have nothing to do with Australian or American suburbs. They tell us that foreign tanks and planes do not a democracy beget, but bloody resistance. How do people elsewhere see you, Prime Minister?
Americans forget your surname, mistake you for John Major, or some American Governor. At least in Washington you've been honoured. Protocol of the highest order, red carpet treatment, iron adjectives and a visit to a ranch in Texas. Please contemplate the cost of these achievements as you spend your last days in a nursing home, surrounded by other savvy super-savers who made big on the investment boom and T3 shares. I agree with you Prime Minister when you write 'September 11 taught us that we cannot take our way of life for granted.' After all, we've seen Western governments whittle away civil liberties as if they were a casual fling. We've seen governments wage wars using evidence that a bought jury would find difficult to merit. Agreed, we can not take our way of life for granted.Perhaps I would respect you if you came clean. If you explained that, in these uncertain times, a small nation in a precarious part of the world needs a big brother for insurance's sake. And that we have to put up with big brother's indiscretions (such as violation of international law), and just go with the flow.If you admitted that, like so many Australian commentators on current affairs, you read yesterday's American op-eds and make them today's news for Australia, we might forgive you this lovesickness. We would understand that love is blind and flagrant with the truth.But then we would release you from the enormous responsibility of protecting our well-being.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 28 September 2005
New Matilda
Dear Prime Minister,
I recently read your thoughts on the 4th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and no doubt your minders will encourage you to publish another piece to commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the Bali bombings.You do not often move me to any kind of response - I've come to expect the worse. But you served something up on September 11 that cannot go unanswered. Even as memories of those attacks are still fresh, you seek to make September 11 part of a global monument to remind us of our righteousness.The monuments we choose say something about us. The crumbling towers of the World Trade Centre were never meant to be a monument to hypocrisy and hubris. The perpetrators of September 11 have in their own nefarious way made them so. You, with all the grace of a PR company, have followed suit. The thousands of lives lost on that day are served up by you to sanctify the strictures you plan to impose on our 'dear way of life'. Terrorists, you tell us, are fundamentally motivated by an antipathy to our way of life. But how long can you keep the truth at bay?
Robert Pape, in his book Dying to Win (extracts from this book were recently published in New Matilda, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2), makes it clear why terrorism occurs. His analysis is the factual battering ram we need to understand why the West is a target. Instead of caricatured Arabs seething with existential rage, Pape demonstrates a strong correlation between foreign occupation and terrorism. His message is that the foreign occupation of Iraq and US base expansion - not fundamentalism - are the prime issues we need to address. Pape is not some adolescent Lefty, but an erudite thinker of American national interest.
As compelling as Pape's analysis is, your Government continues to offer support for American expansion in the name of shared values and interests. It thereby invites us to be the next sacrificial lamb in a war few people understand. One of our values is democracy. The government reports through rosy-coloured glasses on the emergence of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while ignoring warlords, insurgency, human rights abuses and ornamental constitutions horse-traded by foreign-empowered middle men. Is there enough intellect in your Government to realise that what you order is not what you get? You cannot order democracy, upsized, as if at McDonald's.
Self determination is a principle we ought to support, not the lies of 'humanitarian intervention' (we had to save the Iraqi people from the dictator we used to support) serving as a cover for global expansion. As the Bush experiment implodes under the weight of its own contradictions, what will the Coalition of the Willing do next? Apparently, every fledging democracy needs its transitory dictator. Can you, Prime Minister, tell the Australian people if you've been given the list of likely heavyweights by your beloved in Washington? Pakistan already has its own ¬ he was given a statesman's welcome here. What of Afghanistan and Iraq?
I have no doubt that in the halls of realpolitik there are those who think it's a shame that the man most likely to bring the requisite order (and terror) to Iraq is irredeemable.Strongmen lie behind every elitist liberal's fantasy of social order. But such monsters are a dime a dozen, so there's plenty of choice. Kitted out with your instant guide to the politics of the Middle East, you deem it responsible to invade and re-order societies you know nothing about.Can you, understand, the logic of insurgency?
Thought experiment: A prosperous and militarist Islamic society decides its social order befits the 'End of History' and seeks to universalise its political and ethical forms. Australia is seen as recalcitrant, anti-Muslim and deemed ripe for invasion. What do we do? We resist occupation and Islamic imperialism with whatever arms and strategies we have.
Insurgent bombs in Iraq are not aimed at the Australian way of life. They are not a strike against the white picket fences at the heart of your psyche. They have nothing to do with Australian or American suburbs. They tell us that foreign tanks and planes do not a democracy beget, but bloody resistance. How do people elsewhere see you, Prime Minister?
Americans forget your surname, mistake you for John Major, or some American Governor. At least in Washington you've been honoured. Protocol of the highest order, red carpet treatment, iron adjectives and a visit to a ranch in Texas. Please contemplate the cost of these achievements as you spend your last days in a nursing home, surrounded by other savvy super-savers who made big on the investment boom and T3 shares. I agree with you Prime Minister when you write 'September 11 taught us that we cannot take our way of life for granted.' After all, we've seen Western governments whittle away civil liberties as if they were a casual fling. We've seen governments wage wars using evidence that a bought jury would find difficult to merit. Agreed, we can not take our way of life for granted.Perhaps I would respect you if you came clean. If you explained that, in these uncertain times, a small nation in a precarious part of the world needs a big brother for insurance's sake. And that we have to put up with big brother's indiscretions (such as violation of international law), and just go with the flow.If you admitted that, like so many Australian commentators on current affairs, you read yesterday's American op-eds and make them today's news for Australia, we might forgive you this lovesickness. We would understand that love is blind and flagrant with the truth.But then we would release you from the enormous responsibility of protecting our well-being.
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