Category Archives: Political commentary

The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right

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[For some time I have been frustrated by the very limited perspective of mainstream political commentary in Australia, and by the difficulty of establishing a longer perspective in the standard 800-word commentary piece.  So I decided just to write until the case was made.  Hence this 6000-word essay.  It refers to the Australian context, but there are parallel stories in other countries.]

The political spectrum is traditionally characterised in terms of Left and Right, but the way these terms are used has changed so much they have become quite misleading.  Today they are more about tribal identification, and their use is more of an epithet than a description.

The main reason for these changes is that the Right has shifted to quite extreme positions, compared with a generation or two ago.  The modern Right not only espouses free-market fundamentalism, it promotes an extreme individualism that overlooks or dismisses the importance of social relationships and even denies the existence of society.  There seems to be no standard of factual basis, sense or consistency required for its claims, so any opinion, however uninformed or misinformed, apparently is to be accorded as much validity in the public domain as any other.

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Precious Media

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Bob Brown has named it, the media are being precious.  First, they whine, people complained about Gina Rinehart buying a few media shares, then Treasurer Wayne Swan got stuck into the gang of three miners for using media as their personal megaphones, then the Finkelstein media review recommended some actual, semi-government enforcement of abuse rectification.  Oh, the outraged howls of injured innocence!

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Labor and the Media: Obstacles to a Decent Society

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Two major Australian institutions are in the spotlight at the moment, the Labor Party at its annual national conference, and the media in an enquiry prompted by the Murdoch press’s excesses in Britain.  However the deepest problems with them are rarely acknowledged.  The Labor Party has become an obstacle to good governance and to a tolerable future for Australia.  The media have become more superficial, divisive, and regressive, and they are eroding our open and democratic society.

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Asleep at the Wheel, Accelerating Towards the Precipice

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[This was published at On Line Opinion 29 Nov 2011.]

It is characteristic of some past societies that their highest accomplishments occurred just before a precipitous decline in their fortunes, according to Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.  It is less common that a society’s trajectory comprises a slow rise, a plateau and a slow decline.  Diamond does cite some societies that were able to shift their strategy and successfully negotiate a crisis, so a crash is not inevitable.

The former pattern, accelerating into a crash, is a signature of a society oblivious to imminent peril.  At least, the leadership of the society is oblivious to warning signs of a crisis, and they just keep on doing what they have always done.  Or perhaps they become more and more dissolute, like the later rulers of ancient Rome.

There is an eerie sense of unreality in Australian public life.  The things our leaders argue about, and the evidence they pay attention to, are largely irrelevant to our real situation, which is one of rising multiple crises.  The longer the crises continue unattended, the worse will be the consequences.

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Exports – Coal, Uranium or Harm Minimisation?

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The Modern Labor approach to serving the workers is, it seems, to allow private enterprises, any enterprises, to create jobs, any jobs.  If the enterprises bring in export earnings that is even better.  The quality of the employment, the usefulness or otherwise of the product, the pay and conditions, or even if the work occupies more than one hour a fortnight, all of those issues are secondary.  The important things are that the unemployment statistic is kept down and that the Government can say money is flooding into the country.  Oh, and that the employers are not threatening an advertising campaign criticising the Government.

It is in this spirit that we export vast amounts of coal, though it is by far our largest contribution to global warming and our grandchildren will suffer mightily for it.

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Reclaiming Democracy

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[Extract from the closing chapter of The Nature of the Beast.]

We in the Western democracies smugly act as if we are the culmination of political evolution.  Yes, history is dominated by authoritarian rule, many despotic and a few wiser and more benevolent.  However, since “we” invented modern representative democracy none of that applies.  The people rule, we assure each other, and democracy is spreading around the world.

Except of course that every advance in democracy has been resisted, sidestepped and undermined by those who want the world to be their servant.

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Hypocrisy and self-interest of the media

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For all the fuss over the Murdoch crimes in Britain, there has been very little discussion of media ownership, and how it might be reformed to take the power away from a few rich egotists.  So here’s another from my archive, from 30 Oct 2002, soon after the Bali bombing.  Gee, the CT didn’t publish it.

“America, like Australia, needs informed and critical citizens rather more than it needs unthinking flag-wavers” editorialised The Canberra Times recently, and I thoroughly agree.  Further along, it opined that “ . . . many [politicians] are in the process of tearing down many of the established institutions and conventions”, and I applaud.

Yes indeed, these are tough and welcome words.  However I think we would be hearing both sentiments a lot more often if our media better reflected the current spectrum of public opinion. I think also that the editorial’s words carry some even tougher implications that perhaps The Canberra Times, and all Australians, could reflect more upon.

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Lost Labor – from 2003

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I have been well ahead of the pack on a number of important issues, political leadership among them.

Here is the opening sentence from a comment by Don Watson on political leadership, from the current issue of The Monthly.

“It is now all but universally agreed that the Australian Labor party is a near-ruin, ruled body and soul by factional bosses and opinion pollsters.”

Below is a post from my old website www.geoffdavies.com, dated 7 June 1993.  You can also find more recent comments of mine here in the category “Political commentary”.

After two months abroad I find little has changed on the Australian political scene.  John Howard has finally confirmed he will stay on, the obsessively one-eyed Government is still attacking the ABC for alleged bias, and the Labor Party is still clueless.

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Surrogates of Empire

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It has long been obvious, to anyone who would look, that US foreign policy is not about democracy and freedom, it is about power.  The conjunction of the Middle Eastern uprisings and Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables has laid bare the fact and means of US “influence” over its de facto empire.  That influence is exercised through loyal “subordinate elites” who are, in the words of Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly, “a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs”.

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