Category Archives: Political commentary

When will we live as if the truth is true?

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It is not about the Greens, nor even about the teals, it is about the science and the planet. Despite the recent electoral shift, another parliament will desperately evade the truth, that we are destroying our bountiful, beautiful and only life support system.

In a music album by the Canadian group The Weather Station, songwriter Tamara Lindeman sings “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” The line is in the song Loss and, like the entire album, the reference is both to the loss of a relationship with another person and to our civilisation’s loss of its relationship with the natural world.

As parliament reconvenes with Labor in charge, our society’s relationship with the natural world is front and centre.

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What if we had a government that got serious?

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There is so much more we can do, and must do, if we are to survive, let alone thrive.

Instead of drifting for another thirty years, or two hundred, we could go and ask the First People how we can help. Perhaps we could talk to them about negotiating joint sovereignty over this amazing, ancient land.

We could do what the IPCC says we must, based on the science: no new carbon extraction projects, abolish carbon subsidies ($10 billion or more per year) and phase out carbon burning as fast as possible, with net zero by 2035 if not sooner.

We could stop getting tangled up in other people’s disastrous and highly counter-productive wars. China would be far less of a threat to us if we just deal squarely with it instead of pulling the tiger’s tail on behalf of someone else.

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A Parliament of Subversives and Traitors

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[Published at Independent Australia 6 Oct as ‘AUKUS nothing more than a re-election stunt’. A more petty and partisan headline than mine. Oh well.]

Only once has Australia been actually threatened with military invasion, and the bellicosity of an Australian Prime Minister played a significant part in bringing on that threat. Now another Prime Minister’s provocations will put us in harm’s way again. Whose interests are served by such blind animosities?

At the 1919 Paris peace conference Australian PM Billy Hughes argued loudly against a Japanese proposal to insert an anti-racism clause into the charter of the League of Nations. Its rejection ensured the League would be a white man’s club, which suited the European powers whose dirty work Hughes was unwittingly doing. Humiliated, the Japanese declined membership of the League and began to prepare for war.

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You can’t argue with deniers, just throw them out

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[Published by Canberra Times 24 Aug.]

Zali Steggal OAM, Independent MP for Warringah

You can’t argue with climate deniers, they have a never-ending supply of excuses. You won’t persuade the Coalition, the mining industry has hijacked it. Labor is too scared and too compromised to do what is needed. That is why your greatest power is your vote.

If you usually vote for one of the old parties, you need to change your vote. Find a candidate who rates global warming a top priority, who will stop the huge annual fossil fuel subsidies and switch them to renewables, who will disallow any new carbon extraction projects, and who will release the brakes on a rapid phase out of fossil fuels, supporting the workers as we go.

That candidate might be an Independent or with a minor party. If your response is ‘Oh I could never vote for them’, think about that.

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Is Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ dead?

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[Just published in the Canberra Times($), with a few editorial liberties.]

Bruce Pascoe’s popular book Dark Emu argues that First Australians lived complex lifestyles that included durable dwellings and cultivation of food and that they were far from the old ‘primitive nomad’ label.

However a new book, Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, is severely critical of Dark Emu, claiming it is riddled with errors, is derogatory towards hunter-gatherers, neglects the spiritual side of First Australians’ lives and pushes antiquated ideas of ‘progress’. Several historian reviewers seem to agree the new book ‘demolishes’ Dark Emu.

Paul Barry, of the ABC’s Media Watch, lamented that he and many people accepted Pascoe’s claims too uncritically, yet now they seem to be accepting the new book’s claims just as uncritically.

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It’s time – for another Labor split

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[Published yesterday at Independent Australia. Meant to be provocative, and it seems to have worked on that site. Don’t know if it will get any wider circulation.]

Andrew Fisher, three times PM, and a proper Labor leader.

This time the split would be for the benefit of workers and progressives, rather than betraying them. Labor’s long-standing small-target, Coalition-lite strategy is a clear failure, and fails the country. As Labor shows no sign of changing, any members with a shred of integrity should quit.

The previous three Labor splits featured desertions to the conservative side of politics: Billy Hughes, Joe Lyons and the Democratic Labor Party. That can’t happen now because Federal Labor as a whole deserted to the neoliberal side in 1983.

The result has been accumulating disasters, but neoliberalism still promises to deliver worse: an ever-feebler economy along with the full-on police state and climate catastrophe, unless and until neoliberalism is fully repudiated. There is no prospect of that repudiation without a fundamental re-alignment of power, and votes. Continue reading →

What does Gallipoli mean to us, and who says?

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[First published in BWD magazine, autumn 2021, Braidwood NSW.]

The word Gallipoli evokes one of our most potent cultural stories, but in truth it is not one story but many. There are stories of sacrifice and national identity, but there are also stories of folly and destruction, and stories overlooked. We all, presumably, want to honour the fallen but there are those who, wittingly or otherwise, exploit the stories for other purposes. Can we have a conversation about these stories? Can we talk about which stories to keep, whether some might be corrected or discarded and others picked up? Continue reading →

Do the mainstream media have much influence?

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[Published today 8th Nov at Pearls and Irritations.]

The other day political commentator Mungo McCallum remarked in passing that ‘the influence of the media on public opinion has always been greatly overrated’. I beg to differ, along with quite a few other commenters on his article. Here is a longer case for profound media influence.

It seems journalists in the mainstream political bubble tend to share the disconnection  of the politicians from the rest of us, which is understandable if their perception of the world is mostly the bubble. And if your measure of the problem is the distance between the mainstream media and ‘public opinion’ you might miss something important. After all, the perceptions of most punters include the highly selected pap the media choose to serve up to them, so there’s not usually going to be a big difference.

But what would a well-informed polity, or just a polity sketchily informed with a rough balance, think? What would ‘public opinion’ be then?

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Dear Labor

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[Just out at Pearls & Irritations. Lately I’ve been avoiding politics, it’s bad for my health. Especially after the Eden-Monaro by-election, in which almost everyone retreated to their usual tribal habits. Never mind drought, six megafires, floods, virus … Hard to fathom.]

Andrew Fisher, three times PM

Dear Labor. Has anyone among your parliamentary cohort noticed that neoliberalism is a failure? Has it occurred to anyone that promoting selfishness and making people insecure is a recipe for people to turn on each other and shred the social fabric? Does anyone think it might be time to stop being Liberal-lite? Time to champion the battlers and stop pandering to the fat cats? Time for a Labor party to remember why it was founded?

The current lesson is stark. Private aged care facilities that are under-staffed, under-resourced and disgustingly incompetent at care. Insecure, untrained ‘security’ guards fail to maintain hotel quarantine, and become virus spreaders instead. That is where outsourcing and privatising has got us.

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A chance in Eden-Monaro to reject third-rate governance

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[Published at Independent Australia 14, June, but with the headline seriously neutered. See note at end*. May be the end of the line with IA, sad to say.]

The political class keeps acting as though the Government deserves to be taken seriously, but the Government is grossly incompetent, corrupt, deluded and, by any reasonable standard of truth, illegitimate. That the Opposition can’t beat them constitutes its own calamitous failure. Voters in the coming Eden-Monaro by-election have the choice of people who could actually represent, and govern.

There are some things the federal Government could be doing in response to the rapid-fire series of disasters still unfolding in Australia.

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