Tag: bleeding heart lefty

It’s been very hard to concentrate on cars the last week, so it’s time to blow out a few of the week’s cobwebs….

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From 2007 to 2013, Australia was governed by a leftist government – the Labor Party. The leader for much of this time, Kevin Rudd, was very popular with the electorate but his leadership style was loathed within his own party. The solution: they ousted him in his first term of government and replaced him with Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

An election followed that delivered a hung parliament but Gillard won the day by successfully negotiating with the cross benches. The cost was a deal with the Green party that saw a carbon tax introduced in stark contrast with Gillard’s pre-election statement that “there would be no carbon tax under a government that I lead”.

The hung parliament, while remarkably successful in passing legislation, was a public relations disaster and the carbon tax was a giant albatross around Gillard’s neck. So the party decided to kick her out, replacing her with her predecessor – Kevin Rudd.

In September 2013, the Australian people were sick to death of the in-fighting and more than sick to death of the hung parliament, so they voted in quite possibly the man considered the most unelectable candidate of them all, a guy named Tony Abbott.

Abbott had two great strengths working for him in the election campaign (aside from his relentless negativity, which some saw as a strength when his primary job as opposition leader was, of course, to oppose).

The first strength was his chief of staff and her political strategist husband, who instilled a clever set of three-word-slogans – stop the boats, axe the tax, fix the budget, verb the noun ad inifinitum – as well as iron-fisted discipline that provided a stable contrast to the instability of the Labor party.

His second great strength was that regardless of his own considerable personal stench, he wasn’t the other mob. It didn’t really matter what the alternative was, the other mob HAD to go.

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Last week, the government’s Commission of Audit report was made public. The government has made sure that the line “this is not a report of government, but a report to government” was repeated quite a lot. Repetitive catchphrases are a sure sign that they’ve got something to sell. That something is that they want to distance themselves from the ideology behind the report.

Of course, that’s a load of crap.

The panel behind Commission of Audit was stacked with people that were specifically selected for their big business background and/or small government philosophy. The panel were given specific guidelines by the government as to what they could and couldn’t look at. They were specifically told not to look at the biggest fiscal problem Australia faces – falling government receipts. Their job was to look only at expenditure and see what could be reduced, cut completely, or privatised.

The result? I think Ben Eltham from the Guardian summed it up best:

The prescriptions advocated by the Audit are stock-standard 1980s-era neoliberalism. Privatise government assets. Cut red tape. Abolish or amalgamate government agencies. Charge citizens more for government services, like visits to the doctor. Slash government benefits, especially for the most vulnerable. Make students pay more for their education. Reduce foreign aid. Abolish national protections, like a national minimum wage. Halt Commonwealth support for the homeless.

This is a recipe for a poorer, nastier and more brutish Australia. If implemented, it would mark the beginning of the end of the Australian fair go.

Yes, some people do abuse the offerings of government and some of the conditions for those offerings should be tightened. Yes, there is some red tape that needs to be cut.

Ben Eltham’s analysis and conclusion are generally fair, however; this Commission of Audit report, framed deliberately by the terms of reference dictated by the government, is their ideological dream. It’s a dream that would sacrifice the Australian notion of “a fair go” and even the general social idea of mateship on the conservative high-altar of economic rationalism – and the use of that very 1990’s term is quite deliberate. The financial rot was set in motion by decisions made by the Australian Prime Minister whose shadow began it’s lurk in the back half of that decade: John Howard.

The Green’s Richard De Natale correctly stated in response to the Commission of Audit that the government seems hell bent on turning Australia into a Little America, into a dog-eat-dog society that removes our traditional safety net and exposes the most vulnerable in our community to greater social and financial isolation. Australia has a proud tradition of mateship, of figuring out what we can do for one another in times of need, which is a stark contrast to figuring out how we can screw one another in times of need.

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I wonder how long it will be before Marketing degrees and Political Science degrees will be taught together as part of one course?

As mentioned earlier, the government was elected primarily because it wasn’t the other mob. But the government also made a big point of telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, which is Marketing 101 (unity ticket on Gonski funding, anyone?). Tony Abbott has already confessed that “it’s sometimes better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission”. He duped his own colleagues that way when he announced his overly-generous Paid Parental Leave policy without consulting them first.

During the election campaign, Abbott made all sorts of promises that he will inevitably have to break. Of course, the objective was to get into power. The cost didn’t matter because he can always break his promises, blame the previous government and seek the forgiveness of the electorate prior to the next election.

During his four years as opposition leader, Abbott made a great deal of mileage on his criticism of Australia’s budget deficits. If the government of the day had proposed a post-GFC tax levy to reduce those deficits – even a temporary tax levy – the Abbott-led opposition would have torn the roof off Parliament House.

And yet, along with the Commission of Audit report last week, we also got news of a proposed ‘deficit reduction levy’ that would be applied to middle- and high-income earners. As you would expect, the opposition is opposing this measure.

Such is the farce of Australian politics in 2014 – you have a deeply conservative government proposing a tax on the wealthy and you have a leftist opposition saying it’s not a good idea!

Personally speaking, I don’t mind the idea, although I strongly object to the lying manner in which it’s being proposed. I’m not opposed to tax as long as it’s used responsibly. I don’t trust this government to use it responsibly, but that’s another issue all together.

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What interests me is whether or not people are willing to give the Abbott government a pass on this. There are plenty of people – I’m quite convinced – who did not vote FOR an Abbott-led Coalition government. They voted AGAINST Labor as punishment for their leadership troubles and as a reaction to the hung parliament. Abbott was merely the result.

I don’t think they voted for this new tax. I don’t think they voted for austerity measures as a response to a fabricated “budget crisis” (a crisis that even the defacto Coalition newsletter – The Australian – admitted last week does not exist). I don’t think they voted for the idea of ripping the guts out of the Medicare system or making higher education less accessible or less affordable. I don’t think they voted to have the Science ministry in the government abolished. I don’t think they voted for the mass cutting of government agency or had any remote idea that the government might consider changes to our model of federalism. I don’t think they agree with the government’s proposition that “people have the right to be bigots”. I don’t think they voted to have Knights and Dames reintroduced.

A very small proportion of them voted for up to $75,000 in paid parental leave, I guess. Money talks.

I don’t think too many of those swinging voters realised the potential change that could happen to the fabric of this country if Abbott and his mob have their way.

Hopefully Clive Palmer will pardon the pun, but I think Australian voters were sold a pup at the last election. The former independent MP, Tony Windsor, spoke in the last parliament of Tony Abbott’s willingness to sell everything except his arse to get into power when the 2010 election ended with a hung parliament. The speech is worth watching if you haven’t seen it. Tony Windsor wasn’t convinced in 2010, but the Australian people were in 2013.

Tony Abbott will seek forgiveness for the damage he does in the next few years, but hopefully the Australian people will realise what they did in 2010 and maybe they’ll resolve to do it again – kick this mob out.

And hopefully there’ll be an alternative government that’s actually ready to govern and initiate the national conversation we need to have about the role of government in this country, but in an honest, up-front and compassionate way.